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

Yepp, its what it sounds like, its stevejobsfacts.com.

And with that I’m ending my six months of silence. It’s been a crazy, tiring and exhausting six months. But I’m not gonna go for months again without a word here.

Anyway, to get back on topic. Steve Jobs Facts is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a satirical fact index about Steve Jobs. You vote on your favorite facts, and submit your own. Think of it as the bastard child of Chuck Norris Facts and bash.org with fancy sexiness sprinkled on top like fairy dust.

SJF is a project me and Dave (@sxtxixtxcxh) started last summer. Yes, I did say last summer. But due to circumstances, hiccups, and laziness, we never got the project ready for a launch. But this week we both decided to get SJF live before WWDC even if it killed us (not really, but sounds better than “if we fail, we suck!”, or “you suck” like Dave said it… lol).

The project is still very much beta/alpha though. We didn’t implement user registrations till 2 hours after we launched the site. Right now its very simple, but very usable at the same time.

We’ll be adding more features over the next few days, and some code cleanup behind the scenes to make things runs slightly faster and smoother. Not that anyone will notice the speed improvements though unless we get slashdotted or something *keeps fingers crossed and makes cute puppy eyes*

If you’ve had a chance to check out my 48 hour search project from about 2-3 weeks ago (i don’t really remember, and i’m to lazy to double check, live with it…hehehe), you might have noticed that the results from Google and/or Windows Live Search isn’t always correct. And if you’ve used Internet Explorer to attempt to view the site, well shit, i haven’t even dared doing that cause of the fear! the fear man!

Anyway, jokes aside (or so you are lead to believe), the classes handling the results from the different search engines are far from perfect. The Yahoo class works alright cause of Yahoo’s extremely easy to use search API, but Google and Windows Live’s API’s are far greater pains in the ass to use…… Hence, i didn’t have time to implement them properly (48 hour side project and all, remember? ), but i will be fixing it at some point soon… (hopefully before i mature enough to require reading glasses just to see my own hands)

As for Internet Explorer compatibility, it’s coming, with one or two or all UI elements removed since IE just doesn’t render PNG’s properly even with any and all available fixes (during the limited one page load test i conducted on a PNG heavy page with the fix and IE).

So if you’re lucky, there might be a TITLE tag left for IE users when i’m done removing incompatible elements

And in other news, OMFG i want (need) a MacBook Pro !!! (anybody feel like donating their kidney (i’m seriously joking ))… zee ol’ PowerBook is just not fast enough to run itunes and toast my breakfast at the sametime anymore… darn advances and updates to technology!

over and out, hopefull you haven’t died from brain damage while reading my rant

…so, here i am two days later after i felt like making some uber-combined search thing… lol… its uber-alpha/beta/omega/malaka/whatever, so don’t complain if it doesn’t work… lol

End result, its cool, but i’m far from happy with it, somewhat sloppy code, and the worst browser compatibility of any project i’ve ever done, Safari and Firefox should be alright, IE is outta question with all the png’s and shit i’m using in the design… lol

anyway, botton line, it works, thats the only reason its online, cause i’m a perfectionist at heart, and i’m not happy with it right now… but i don’t have anymore time to throw away on it right now… lol… not to mention, that it became kinda bloated and sluggish cause my design inspiration took a turn for the weird… lol

but but… check it out for yourself and see what you think…

— http://www.searchthethree.com/