Matt's Blog of Stuff

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Just wanted to let everyone know that my work has been featured on the Widgetbox blog! Quite exciting. I just hope now that GoDaddy doesn’t kill me for bandwidth hoggage.

I hate Firefox 3.

Yes. I don’t care what the rest of you think. I don’t care if you think that Mozilla knows best. I think they have fudged up their interface even worse than… well they haven’t really fudged anything else this badly.

So my first complaint is the back button. Why is it such a big honking button?! And the forward button is like a broken trapezoid. Isn’t there a UI desiner at Mozilla that can slap these developers on the wrist? Blech.

I actually find it kind of insulting that they would put that massive back button in. That just says to me, “Oh, well only Windows users need a huge back button because they’re not smart enough to find it.”

I also don’t like all of the hard rounded corners (i.e.: the left edge of the address bar, the edges of the forward/back module, etc.). They’re just plain ugly and don’t look like they belong in a project with the magnitude of Firefox.

My next gripe is the icon set. It’s just terrible. The refresh button is anorexic. Really. I wouldn’t even see it. The stop button is the same way. Didn’t they try to make it more defined in FF2? Besides the sizing issues, the icons themselves don’t have a consistent color palette. Why is the roof of the house in the Home button yellow? I don’t know anyone with a yellow roof. What about the magnifying glass button in the search box? It doesn’t fit inwith anyof the other icons at all. Not even close.

Beyond all of these complaints with the UI, there’s still pathetic support for Acid 3. Honestly. Mozilla knew about this for months. They can’t sit someone down and start figuring this stuff out? I’ve read that it’s because they don’t want to break anything. I’ll be honest: fix the bugs. I don’t care if stuff breaks. I would rather have a standards compliant browser that breaks my pages than a broken browser that does. And with IE8 creeping up, we wouldn’t want Firefox to get left in the dust, eh?

In conclusion, I just want to say how utterly disgusted I am with the Firefox team’s lack of enthusiasm and passion towards the Windows flavor of the browser. I was once a Firefox fan, but have since switched to Opera for problems like this. I think I might just stay on that side of the fence, now.

Muxtape

I’ve recently become an avid Muxtape user. The primary reason is that it’s so darn convenient. I’m also a Last.fm user, so let’s compare the two:

• Muxtape: Visit homepage > Click a user > Click a song
• Last.fm: Visit homepage > Login > Click Listen > Click a station > Click Play

Clearly, Last.fm is much more inconvient. It has at least five extra clicks and the music isn’t ‘actual’ music, it’s random and unpredictable. You’ll probably never hear the same song more than twice.

On the other hand, Muxtape is actual user-uploaded music. It’s very fast and very clean. You can easily save a muxtape as a favorite and revisit that set of songs as many times as you would like.

One little feature that I like a LOT about Muxtape is that it changes the page title to the artist and song currently playing. That’s SUPER convenient, as I don’t need to flip to the tab, where there’s a tiny ticker scrolling the artist name and song title. It’s right there in my tabs. And if I do visit the tab it see what’s next, the song title and artist are in 48pt font and highlighted in gray. How much more usable could it get? 

Live Mesh

I’ve just finished up testing Windows Live Mesh. It certainly has surpassed my expectations tenfold. In fact, I’ll probably start using it at work to get stuff done when I’m not going to be in.

I’ve also figured out what the difference between the file syncing in Mesh and Foldershare is. Foldershare requires both machines to be on and connected to the net. Mesh uses an intermediary called the Live Desktop. This means that no matter where you are, you can get those files, even if both computers are off. It also means that syncing can occur without any issues.

In conclusion, if you work from work and home, I highly recommend considering a test of Windows Live Mesh. It will make your life SO MUCH EASIER.

Really depressed.

I was just going through, making pages for the school’s website and put in a page for “Girls’ Soccer”. I remembered only one person ever to be on the girls’ soccer team (that I knew of) and that was Erin Hannigan. She was in my kindergarten and first grade (and possibly second grade) classes.

She was a really nice person. Normally, I wouldn’t be so upset, except for the fact that I was really close to her. She sat in front of me and we got to know each other through our entire one/two years together.

Call it a kindergarten crush or whatever you want, but it was what it was.

Anyhow, I did a quick Google search, only to find that she may have only moved to Wyoming Seminary (where whe plays Keeper for their girls’ soccer team). A search on Facebook reveals an Erin Hannigan that’s about my age going to Hanover (not too too far away) and graduating next year (held back?).

The girl in the picture on Facebook reminded me slightly of the girl I knew. She had blonde hair, a crazy-wild smile, and was well-dressed. There was also a guy in the picture which made me a little jealous, but not enough to be upset.

Ok, maybe a little upset. But the kind of upset you get when your kindergarten crush is now dating someone.

I’d be interested to know whatever happened to Erin. She was really nice and I hope she is doing well. I’d love to know whether she went anywhere with soccer; I remember that she really loved it and would frequently wear her uniform to school.

Whatever. Oh well.

Nervous

I’m really starting to get nervous about the outcome of the primary here in PA. Hopefully, it will be a favorable result.

Adobe Air

I’m on an Adobe Air kick right now. It’s pretty cool. The only problem is that I can’t decide which Twitter app I want to use. I’m stuck between Twhirl and Tweetr.

Surprised

I’m really surprised at how much I like Tumblr. It’s fast, simple, and has a great design. After ditching WordPress for my personal blog, I thought I’d never have a blog again. Now, I can see that I was wrong and will be writing here for quite a while. :)