And in other awesome news, Felicia Day has launched her very own and very geeky YouTube channel called “Geek and Sundry”. I can’t decide what I am most excited about, but one of my favorite things is that my online scifi and fantasy book club “Sword & Laser” is getting a video show every other week.
“Geek and Sundry” started with a 12 hour Subscribathon on Sunday using the Google+ Hangout feature. The first shows were uploaded yesterday, including Felicia’s own show Flog, Wil Wheaton’s show TableTop which is all about geeky tabletop games (I squealed inside when one of the players actually called them “German style boardgames”) and Dark Horse a show which features animated indie comics.
And yes, of course I watched all of the shows, even more than that, I tested my TV’s YouTube integration to watch them in HD on a (kind of) big screen.
Basically, I love it. I love the YouTube channel, I love my TV’s YouTube integration, I desperatelywant to try out Smallworld (the boardgame that Wil Wheaton played in the first episode of TableTop, and if it was ever possible, my geek girl crush on Felicia Day has increased.
As a bonus, they released a new music video featuring The Guild cast and it’s pretty much awesome.
So, yeah, it’s great news for geeks like me and if you haven’t already you should head over to the YouTube channel and start watching now.
I have a couple of things I want to write about, but I can’t seem to find the time. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of strange programming language quirks. I couldn’t help to giggle throughout the whole thing:
Today at work a colleague raised the issue of which browsers we were planning to support. Naturally, supporting a browser also means testing on a specific version of a specific browsers, which, quite simply put, means more test effort, probably more coding effort, and therefore more time spent.
After a discussion with our product owner they settled on the latest stable version of four browsers. The product we were working on before supported two browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, with Internet Explorer being the one to optimize for, especially since one of the third party products only supported IE. Now we added Chrome and Safari to the list.
The same colleague also complained that he currently uses three browsers, sometimes simultaneously. I realized, I do too.
On Vista I use Chrome for most things. Now I know that it lacks the tons of add-ons that Firefox offers, but I just love it. I love that the design is very simple and focuses on the actual web pages rather than menu and status bars. Mostly I love typing in anything into the address field. I’ve gotten so used to it that I forget that other browsers use extra fields for Google searches and just typing my search words into IE’s or Firefox’s address bar. If there’s one thing I need other browsers to copy from Chrome, it’s this.
However, I understand that people still prefer Firefox. The fact is that I have never actually been an avid user of add-ons. I’ve had my favorite Firefox add-ons, mostly webdesign stuff like the color picker or the ruler and these were awfully helpful and cool. FireBug as well is an awesome tool for web developers. But I’ve never heavily relied on any add-ons which might have been the reason why switching to Chrome went so smoothly for me.
I still use Firefox occasionally, though, mostly when I need one of the add-ons I have installed or whenever a page doesn’t look quite so right in Chrome (still happens).
I use IE mostly for anything that relies on using IE, which sadly happens often enough. Now, I’m not even sure whether there’s still reason to hate IE (given that we’re two versions away from IE 6 it seems like the grunting phase should be over), I just still prefer Firefox and probably wouldn’t use IE if it wouldn’t rock the whole Outlook webmailing thing and wasn’t necessary to run some of Microsoft’s web applications (yes, MS Project, I’m looking at you). Plus, of course, given that IE is still widely used, it’s the browser I most often use when developing.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s gotten hard to settle for one browser, for three reason. First, sometimes you just can’t. Some pages or web applications just run or look better on a specific browser (and some will only run on a specific browser). Second, browsers seem to have their own personalities. Chrome is awesome for the whole browsing, social, fun, interactive stuff and in my opinion just generally awesome. Firefox is great because of its vast library of add-ons and because it’s really really good. IE still beats other browsers for some of the more conservative sites, probably because a lot of sites are still optimized for IE.
Last of all, the feeling I have is that all major browsers are actually getting pretty good, so there’s not a clear winner anymore. For most people that just means that they can just pick what they like best. For a geek girl like me it means that I can’t even settle on one for good.
In other news I fixed a small thing that was bugging me on iTunes. I like listening to my recently added items, but since I use my iPod for audiobooks and movies as well, these files were always mixed in between, which is especially annoying when you’re on your kickboard on the way to the train and don’t have the time to fiddle with your iPod just to skip that audiobook chapter or that episode of House.
Now, I could have realized that sooner, but of course, „Recently Added“ is just another Smart Playlist and perfectly editable. The only change I had to make was filtering it down to media kind and everything was as I wanted.
