innovation initiative

Dave, the co-creator of our Steve Jobs Facts project has just launched IE Death March.

“Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.

It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon… say like, March 2009. That’s roughly a little more than 6 months.”

So, we’ve officially stopped supporting IE6 regarding SJF. From this point on we wont be testing any changes to the site in IE6. Not that it ever worked properly in IE6, but it does (for now) work at least.

Both me and Dave are, like IE Death March states, planning on halting all support for IE6 in our development efforts by March 2009. Hopefully IE Death March catches on and inspires more developers, and front line web-services to also halt supporting IE6, and encouraging more users to update to IE7 or switch to a better more modern browser.

IE6 has for many years a been filter of creativity with web development for me, and many others, here’s me hoping it wont be so in six months time.

Last night I was contacted by one of the developers from a new multi-protocol IM client called Digsby.

If you’re an avid reader of my blog (for reasons that are beyond me… lol), you probably already know why they contacted me. They asked to bundle my Modern Bubbling message style I created for Adium along with a few other of they’re favorites.

Here’s where things start to get interesting. Modern Bubbling wont need to be ported to they’re client, as they’re using the WebKit HTML rendering engine to power their message view.

Incase you’re not an avid geek, WebKit is Apple’s rendering engine developed for Safari a few years back. WebKit was originally based on KDE’s KHTML engine. It’s the rendering engine that powers Safari, Mail, Dashboard, Adium’s message styles, and much more on Mac OS X.

So thanks to the open-source, cross-platform wonder that is WebKit, and some hard work from the development team, Digsby will support all current Adium message styles without any modifications.

Digsby’s goal is to create an intuitive IM client for Windows. They’re seemingly huge fans of Adium, and how well its UI is designed. And not to offend anybody, but personally I have to say no IM client for Windows which I’ve tried so far comes close to being as good and as much of a pleasure to use as Adium is on Mac OS X. And this seems to be the very problem the Digsby team seem determined to fix.

I’m eagerly awaiting to get my hands on the first beta to see if I wont have to be in pain anymore when using an IM client on Windows.

Head over to www.digsby.com and signup for the beta mailing list.

I noticed today that my Modern Bubbling message style for Adium had passed 40,000 downloads (40,419 as of now). To say the least, I’m really happy and excited about how well Modern Bubbling has been received by the Adium community

I’d also like to say that an update for Modern Bubbling is probably overdue *whistles innocently*. I’ve just been really strung on time pretty much the whole year till recently. So I’ve been getting on top of things the last few weeks, and I’ll soon be getting around to seeing what I can do with Modern Bubbling.

Also, I’m at least planning to create an open-source PHP script for testing message styles without having to use Adium itself. If I get that far soon tho, I can’t say.

Last minute bugs which are missed are annoying, to say the least… well v0.9.1 had one, namely Alternative Glass variants all had the blue header, rather than the glass one the normal Glass variants have, but all fixed now

http://adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3629

Small update with an added feature, and the most critical bug fixed

Thanks to Tony Via who created a mod which added a header, i managed to squeeze a few hours aside in the middle of the night to work a bit on Modern Bubbling. I added Tony’s header with modifications, and another header style. I also fixed the custom font bug, or should i say, no-custom font, cause thats basically what it was, you were stuck with 11px Helvetica no matter what you picked in the message style preferences.

Anyway, enough talking, here it is:
http://adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3629

hope you enjoy

So, i’ve finally gotten off my ass, and submitted my first message style for Adium. The plan was to add a few more things to it before i released it, but that was 3 weeks ago, and i haven’t had time to work on it, so i decided to just release it in its current form cause its stable, works well, and looks nice

Check out Modern Bubbling here: http://adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3629
Hope you like it

Digg it here: http://digg.com/design/Modern_Bubbling_a_most_excellent_Adium_message_style