Supporting multiple browsers is too hard. I give up. From now on, I will only support the latest browser. No, not the latest version of each browser, but rather just the most recently released browser. For now, I will support Firefox 3 as it was just recently released. Safari 4 is in the works, so when that comes out I’ll update my apps to that. Also, I’ll be sure to add sniffers and detectors to redirect you to an unsupported browsers page. The next browser I support after that will probably be Internet Explorer 8. Actually, Webkit has nightly builds. I’ll just only support the latest nightly build of Webkit.

Hopefully, by now, you realize that last paragraph should be wrapped in a <sarcasm> tag. It seems like browser support, or rather lack there of, has been a hot topic amongst developers lately. I don’t have much to say but let me present with good and bad examples of handling browser support.

Good Example

Recently, 37Signals announced that they will be discontinuing support of Internet Explorer 6 in their products. The first thing they say in the post is when support is discontinued.

On August 15th, 2008 we will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all 37signals products.

Then they explain the implications of this decision.

If you are using IE 7, Firefox 2 or 3, or Safari, you don’t have to do anything — everything will continue as is for you.

Lastly, they explain why they made the decision.

Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers, and continuing to support IE 6 holds us back.

I don’t know how intentional the order of that information was but it is pretty smart. The first thing people care about is when and what. They get that out of the way to assuage the fears that any may have that a product they pay for can no longer be used. Once they get those immediate needs covered, they discuss the why. People don’t care about the why until they know how it affects them.

IE 6 is an extremely outdated browser. It has performance issues and a newer version has been out since 2006. There is absolutely no reason to support IE6 for web applications anymore. 37Signals made a good decision and properly communicated it to their customers.

Bad Example

With much hype and excitement Apple recently launched MobileMe. Being a fanboy, I fired up my browser and signed up. Once into the app, I quickly became frustrated because nothing I clicked seemed to do anything. I know how the web works but I couldn’t get anything to do anything. Then it hit me. I wasn’t in Safari, I was in a version of Webkit (the engine that powers Safari). I closed Webkit and opened up Safari to find that everything worked. All the problems I had went away. Also, open up the app in IE7 and you get this message.

I can understand not supporting IE6 but IE7? Granted they say you can still use it but that it just doesn’t work as well.

Internet Explorer 7 has known compatibility issues with modern web standards which affect Web 2.0 applications such as MobileMe.

To me that is a total cop out. Maybe IE7 won’t perform as well but it is not so difficult to support that a message needs to be shown and users should be forced to click continue to actually use the app.

On top of the IE7 stuff, there are several little things that bother me about MobileMe. In an effort to make it feel more desktoppy, some normal web expectations were thrown to the wayside such as tab indexes and text selection.

</rant>

Go ahead and drop support for IE6 in your web app. You deserve a break from it, but IE7? IE7 is not that difficult to support. There are several ways to skin a cat (or so I’ve heard) and usually one of them will work in all the major browsers.

Sometimes I have a problem getting into the zone while working. What I’ve found is that music by itself doesn’t really help. I still hear all the distractions and such. Not too long ago, it hit me. Every time I put headphones on, my focus skyrockets. Headphones seem to function as blinders for me. Something about putting them on makes it impossible for me to multi-task, which is a good thing. It makes me want to close my email, avoid my feeds and hammer down.

Headphone Equality

The other thing I noticed is that not all headphones were created equal. Headphones always help me focus but certain pairs (I have several different types) put me into hyperdrive. About six months ago I was walking around target while my wife shopped, most likely for a new purse. I meandered into the headphone isle out of curiosity, with no intentions of purchasing anything (though I had some Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket). I picked up a pair. Tried them on. Ooohh, they felt like pillows on my ears. But what do they sound like I thought? I delicately graced the play button with my majestic pointer finger and floated into inner-ear ecstasy.

Good Things Cost Money

I’ve never spent more than $20 on headphones so the $140 price tag seemed insurmountable, but then I remembered the hole in my pocket. I picked the singed Christmas money up off the floor, grabbed a pair of the headphones and headed to the nearest checkout. As I approached, the gentleman behind the counter greeted me with a cheery, “Good day, Sir! Excellent choice.” Ok, that’s not true, but I’ve never been happier with a pair of headphones and I would now like to recommend them to you.

Bose Around-Ear Headphones

P.S. I Love You

Also note, that these headphones are so good that Oak, one of my friends, went out and purchased a pair. He too enjoys the daily eargasms though often to the beat of a trance track. Am I allowed to say eargasms on this blog? Man, that feels wrong.

That is the tagline of the book I recently finished by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink is all about the decisions we make in the blink of an eye. One of the first studies the author describes is that of gamblers playing a rigged game. The game is simple, red cards bad, blue cards good. The thing that makes it hard is the gamblers were not forewarned as to the nature of the cards. They were hooked up to all kinds of monitoring devices, logging even the sweat activity on their palms. What was the outcome of these games? Well at about fifty cards, the gamblers began to choose the blue cards more often than the red, and around eighty, they consciously realized what was up and began to only pick blue.

The Smart Subconscious

Nothing too earth shattering about that you say? The interesting thing is not when the gamblers consciously recognized the red cards were bad but rather when they subconsciously realized it. That’s right, at about ten cards, the gamblers’ heart rates and palm sweat increased each time they picked a red card, but not when they picked a blue one. Their subconscious was already picking up on the game at ten cards, yet they didn’t consciously realize what was going on until about eighty. The whole book is filled with goodies like that.

The Ending

I was kind of disappointed with the end of the book as I felt like Gladwell did not really give a cut and dry description of how to make better decisions. Thankfully, I stuck around for the afterword, where I found this gem of a quote:

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital mtters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature. Sigmund Freud

Good old Sigmund. This is basically Gladwell’s conclusion. Feel free to sweat and over analyze the small stuff. Big decisions though? Chances are your subconscious will make a better choice because consciously you are not able to process all the information. Having recently made a rather large decision made this book really interesting. I’m glad I didn’t read it until now as I wouldn’t have had as many personal experiences to drop into the various examples that Gladwell brings up.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in human thought process, mind reading or patterns. By mind reading, I don’t mean the day you are going to die kind but more of the what the person across the table is thinking kind.

Just a sidebar, Blink was so good that I read it in about a week. It was the second book I completed in about a month, which probably sets a non-programming book record for me. The cool thing is I already have the next few lined up on my Amazon wish list.

If you follow me on twitter, this might be old news and if you don’t, you should. On May 13th, I resigned from Notre Dame as Senior Web Developer. Don’t worry, it wasn’t without a safety net. I’ve joined cahoots with Steve Smith of Ordered List, a former co-worker at ND. We’ve got a lot of big things up our sleeves and are really looking forward to see what we are capable of with only ourselves to blame.

The reaction from folks when I tell them the news has been mixed thus far. About half say you’ll never go back and you’ll go on to great things, and the other half think I’m crazy to leave a good job in a “recession.”

I explain it like this to the haters. You know the look a lion has in the zoo? Now, contrast that with a lion in the wild. The zoo is me at Notre Dame and the wild is what I’m doing now. There is nothing wrong with the zoo. It’s safe, fun and gives you room to grow. Everything is taken care of for you and all you have to do is show up. Over time, I was afraid this would lead to complacency and I didn’t want to go down that road.

I figured right now is probably the only time I would do this as I’m not getting any younger and the longer you do something the harder it is to leave. I figure if this doesn’t work out, I can always go back to corporate/higher-ed but if I can work for myself, why not?

I spent my first few days at Ordered List in Portland, Oregon for RailsConf 2008. This week is my first actual work week from home and it has been great. I’m amazed at the distractions I had in my office at ND. Take lunch for example. At every job I’ve had, lunch is the centerpiece of the day. It doesn’t matter how productive your morning was or whether or not you are hungry, you always take lunch around noon. I’ve been engrossed in what I was doing the past few days and forgot to eat until like 1 or even 2pm. I wake up around 8 or 9, work hard for 5 or 6 hours and then hit cruise control for the rest of the night, tweaking things I did during the day and prepping for the next.

I know I’ll miss the day to day interactions with my ND co-workers as they were a lot of fun but I guess that is what the weekends are for now. :)

Side note: A few people have wondered if joining OL will affect my blogging here and at RailsTips. The answer is yes, but in a good way. I’m hoping to have more time and energy for blogging. The only change around here is the “Hire Me” ad bug in my sidebar and the only change on RailsTips will be a sexy new design (by Steve) and a more stable web host to serve it from.

If you are interested, you can read the welcome post on the new Ordered List site that features our new services and the fact that it is now a “we” instead of a “me.”

I have a love/hate relationship with the iPhone version of Google Reader. A little over a week ago, Google launched a beta version of the iPhone interface for Google Reader and tears of joy ran down my face as I leapt through fields of clovers with puppies and bunnies.

Ok, maybe there wasn’t that much fanfare in the Nunemaker household, but it is a killer, I repeat, killer update. I love seeing perfect touches of JavaScript that make web applications more usable, for usability’s sake and not to prove that the developer knows how to read the Script.aculo.us wiki.

The new version (pictured above right) shows a list of items with nice bold headers and faded intro lines of text, which is cool, but that is not where the Reader engineers earn free beer. The perfect touch is literally a touch a way. Tap on an item and it expands, right in line, with the full post. There is a nice big star that is easy to hit if you want to favorite the post and you can do the typical share, keep unread and see original goodness. A few glides of your my mouse-click, strengthened, programmer finger later and I’m down to the next article. From there, I can continue to scan until I see something interesting, or I can touch the item and read another interesting post.

Granted, it’s not my job to create an iPhone interface for Google Reader, but I was so unhappy with the previous one, that I started too. I say that to give props where they are due. I don’t know if I could have come up with such a perfect interface interaction but I’m glad the Reader team did. Once again I love reading my feeds on my iPhone. Thanks Google. Also, I’m wondering how long until there are a crap load of iPhone web apps that use the interaction in a similar fashion.