On the left is the normal Google links color and on the right is the version being tested. As you can see, the purple and green link colors are slightly different and more bright. Personally I didn’t like looking at an entire page of links this color but who knows what Google will decide to do.

Google’s Music is similar to Amazon’s Cloud Player which launched a couple of months ago. In fact they’re so similar they’re nearly the same service. Amazon gives you 5GB of free space to upload your music and bumps you up to 20GB if you buy an MP3 album. Google is slightly different in that they allow you to store 20,000 songs in your account. I looked at their help site and didn’t see any news about if you could upgrade that or if they plan to charge in the future. Both services play your music through modern web browsers just fine and aside from some occasional buffer stutter, both seem to do what they promise. Neither service currently has an app for the iPhone but both do for Android users. I have to imagine that this will change in the future and it is possible (although kludgey) to play both Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player via the iPhone web browser.

I have to say I think that could computing is perfect for storing and playing music. I worry about my computer dying and my backup not being recoverable, therefore losing my pictures and music in the process. Having the cloud option is one nice way of not having to worry about losing all my tunes while at the same time being able to use them.

Of course Apple is also rumored to be nearing the debut of their cloud music service but as of this post it’s only a rumor.

So, what are the pros and cons to Google Music?

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Comes with some free music
• Works in most browsers
• Free (for now)
• Good amount of storage space

Cons:

• Can’t share songs
• Occasional network stutter
• Needs separate desktop application installed to transfer your music to the cloud
• No iPhone app

So if you’re into storing and playing music from the cloud, sign up for an invitation to Google Music and in the meantime, use Amazon ;)

Anyway, within the past couple of weeks we’ve seen the release of IE9, Firefox 4, and Chrome 10; the latest and greatest in the web browser arena or se we’re being told. They have more bells and whistles and are more standards compliant than ever before. Here’s my problem. I don’t think we’re any better off today than we were back in the 1990’s. Why is that you ask? Well, I’m happy to tell you.

Anytime a new browser comes out, a few developers are quick to start tinkering and show off some cool demo they’re dreamed up that takes advantage of the changes. I’ll see some blurb in my news reader with a story about something cool they’re doing, fire up my default browser (currently FF4) and then hit the wall. Apparently their cool new demo only works in webkit-based browsers. FML. OK, so I fire up Chrome and hit the wall again. Apparently the cool new demo only works in the latest nightly build of Safari or some stupid shit like that. Anyway you get where I’m going with this. Browser developers are building what they want rather than what we need. I need a browser that is light on memory usage, has a simple interface, and takes advantage of all web standards while taking advantage of emerging or soon-to-be standards (e.g. CSS3, HTML5, etc.). So far what I have is a handful of browsers that kinda sorta do that.

One of the biggest problems are these ‘standards’. The biggest issues I see are 1) who creates these standards and 2) why does it take so friggin long for them to be accepted? We have groups like the W3C and WHATWG that try to make things better but ultimately end up splintering and fragmenting their discussions so that they spin off into web developer hell. Who are these people and why do they get to make the choices that affect billions of people? Occasionally things do get agreed upon and eventually see the light of day, yet this can take years. Then we have the browser developers that are caught in the middle between these standards and the users. The browser developers try to make the best product they can (or so I would think) and constantly compete with one another. Features like tabs are created and copied and improved upon until they become the norm.

This brings me to my point. Fragmentation. We have too many browsers trying to do the same thing but none of them do it perfectly. Sure we all have our preferred browser but ultimately there are things it won’t do. IE is notorious for this. Even IE9, the latest incantation isn’t perfect and I’m already hearing about IE10. That brings me to another point. For years we languished between browser releases yet it seems that recently browser developers have ramped up their production schedules and are cranking out browsers faster than you can shake a stick at. Seems that the Google Chrome folks are responsible for that and have driven the competition to follow. It used to be that a new version brought significant changes that you could look forward to. Nowadays I don’t even notice half the changes that accompany a new browser release. But I digress. What we’re constantly seeing now are new versions of browsers coming out but with the same fragmented support for various features. Take CSS3 for example. Not one single browser supports all of CSS3. Why? I don’t know. Here’s a great chart to illustrate my point http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus/. So now, instead of the Coke and Pepsi we had back in the 1990’s, we have Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and Fanta. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for choices. But the problem is that as a web developer/designer how can we build websites without kludgey hacks and work-arounds for the various shortfalls in the browser market? If this was simply a matter of competition (like Coke versus Pepsi) where you have a product and the consumer then it wouldn’t be as big a problem. But with web browsers we have middlemen – the developers and designers. Perhaps my soda analogy is a bit simplistic. Imagine that that both Coke and Pepsi made their soft drinks but didn’t make the cans.  Once they created their soda, it was out of their hands and they depended on the can manufacturers to package it and get it to the drinker. The cans were created by companies that could do whatever they liked. The cans could be different sizes, maybe have lights on them, and even change the soda before it came out of the can.  Different can manufacturers could serve the same soda company so that a can of Coke from can X would look and taste different than a can of Coke from can Y. Coke and Pepsi would probably do everything they could to make sure their product tasted the same from whatever can their product came in. This is what’s happening to web developers and designers. We’re the soda makers and the browser developers are the can suppliers. As designers and developers we’re forced to try to do everything possible to get our content to display the same way in every browser across every desktop, laptop, notebook, netbook, and mobile device.

And here we are. 2011 with more browsers on more operating systems on more devices than ever before, and none of them do everything we want them to (How’s that print preview coming Chrome? Hey IE, how ‘bout them CSS gradients?). Make no mistake that IE9 is a long-overdue improvement in IE8, however it still isn’t good enough to be my go to browser. I’m all for having choices but when none of my choices are clear winners then I feel like the loser.

P.S. – Sorry for the delay between posts. Life got a hold of me.

Is there something special about the X or is it just a placeholder for their lack of imagination?

First off wallpaper. I love interesting wallpaper for my computer. Paying for it is our of the question. Actually I used to be a paying member of Webshots since they had a good variety of high res stuff, but since that time I’ve found a few sites with a great selection. And they are:

• National Geographic – National Geographic has been around a long time and one reason is due to their stunning photography. Head over to their site to find loads of high resolution, free images for your pleasure.
• InterfaceLift – With thousands of high resolution images in a wide variety of sizes, InterfaceLift can keep you busy for hours downloading wallpaper.
• Mike Swanson – Back in 2005 Mike (a Microsoft employee) began posting his own high resolution, mostly macro shots of just about anything. Most are worthy of being framed and hung on your wall. 150 and counting.

Apple. Despite problems, Apple seems to be coated in Teflon™ and resistant to anything negative. The new iPhone has major issues (even though I want one I won’t buy one due to AT&T sucking hard) yet sales are stellar. Hell even businesses have been born due to their problems. The iPad has yet to become the magical device Steve Jobs would love you to believe it is and sales are stellar. Looking back a little further does anyone remember the MacBook Air? Beautiful to look at, ridiculous to use. How does a company with so many issues continue to go unscathed? Anyway, getting back to cell phones in general, is it just me or does anyone else think that there are just too damn many models of phone to choose from? And doesn’t it feel like new phones come out and then disappear from the market faster than ever? I can’t keep up anymore. You’ve got the iPhone, Droid variants, HTC, BlackBerry, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia,  and on and on and on. And let’s not forget Microsoft’s recent foray into the cell market with the only-on-the-market-for-seven-weeks Kin fail.

Switching gears. I’ve slowed down my jQuery development a bit and gotten back into more PHP work lately. Until recently, my main server was still running PHP 4 (yes really) however about a week ago it finally got the bump to PHP 5 (yeah, yeah I know, welcome to 2004). What I found funny about making the change from JavaScript work back to PHP was how similar the languages are, as well as the little quirks that make them quite different. The biggest face palm I had was regarding variable scope. In JavaScript, variables outside of functions are scoped globally by default. In PHP that’s not the case. This little difference caused me to lose far more time debugging than I care to share. That aside, I still love PHP and think that it’s the best language to use when developing for the web.

And finally, my favorite image this week:

Moving on, today is the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. Shit I feel old. I grew up on Pac-Man. Google acknowledged this by adding a sweet Pac-Man game to their generic home page so check out google.com (don’t use the personalized version) for an awesome JavaScript version of the game. Here’s a tip, hit “insert coin” twice to add ms. pac-man to the game and have two players clear the board.

Oh and in case you missed it, Google unveiled a sweet step forward in the web fonts arena with a simple way to use non-standard fonts in your site. Check out http://code.google.com/webfonts for the full run down and some examples. If you ask me, while this is cool and could be quite helpful, I still think that this whole web fonts thing is still too open ended. There are far too may way to try and get fonts to render properly in most browsers and all these solutions and workarounds just fee like they’re skirting the real issue which is being able to use any font on the web. The font foundries fear that they’ll lose money from designers and developers using fonts on sites and visitors being able to download them and then publish their own magazines with them without paying for them. The whole thing just feels kludgy and unnatural and that includes Google’s solution.  There’s got to be a better way.