48-Hour Days

If you haven’t just crawled out from under a rock, you know about Microsoft’s version-targeting proposal for IE 8. If you have just crawled out from under a rock, welcome back, and go read:

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
• From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey
• Compatibility and IE8
• The Bruhaha of the Meta Declaration
• Standards mode is the new quirks mode
• Version targeting in IE 8, and an alternative path for Microsoft

I am not going to express my opinion on the topic just yet. I have some ideas, but I want to think them through and put together a considered opinion. However, I did have something that I just had to get out.

I think Microsoft really deserves a pat on the back for allowing this to be an open process. It is wonderful that all of this discussion and debate is taking place now, before even a beta of Internet Explorer 8 is available. That gives the web development community an opportunity to influence how it is implemented and, perhaps, even if it is implemented. It gives other browser-makers a chance to implement the same functionality in their browsers, if they choose. It shows us that they are listening and they really are trying. Think what you will about the way they are trying to do it, but it seems to me they are trying to do what is best for developers and users alike.

So, kudos to you, Microsoft. Here’s hoping you are truly listening.

I’ve blogged before about my e-mail client woes. I finally got fed up enough with Thunderbird’s bugginess and non-integration with just about everything else that I decided to give Mail.app a serious try. So far, so good. There are a few things I miss, though.

One of the main things I missed was the ability to hit a keyboard shortcut to hide and show the preview pane (where the body of an e-mail appears). In Thunderbird, this was done by hitting F8. In Mail.app there is no such beast.

However, Mail.app, being an Apple application, is extremely AppleScript-able. I looked at the Library for Mail.app and found that I could access the visibility of the preview pane. Fabulous. I wrote the following little script and saved it in my ~/Library/Scripts directory:

tell application “Mail“
    set currentStatus to preview pane is visible of message viewer 1

    if currentStatus = true then
        set preview pane is visible of message viewer 1 to false
    else
        set preview pane is visible of message viewer 1 to true
    end if
end tell

Now, to add the shortcut key. That’s where Quicksilver comes in. I set up a trigger that will run my AppleScript when I hit F8. Ta-da! Color me happy.

I am a weather junkie. It started out from necessity, as the office I worked in had no windows. Now I plan virtually my entire life around the weather. “Hmmmm. It is going to rain on Wednesday and Thursday, so we’ll wait until Friday to run errands.” My husband frequently works outside, so I am always looking to see what kind of weather he must endure or helping him decide when to switch a particular job to another day. I need to know how to dress the kids, etc. You get the idea.

For a very long time now, I’ve lived by the Cleveland weather forecast from The Weather Channel’s web site. This page has everything: current conditions, suggestions for events, interactive weather maps, the whole schlemiel. But, dang! Is it ever slow! Plus, I keep getting annoying suggestions on what to do for my wedding (which was over 5 years ago, thank you very much).

Then I came upon a post at Web Worker Daily about SimpleWeather. The site does exactly what it promises. You get the current conditions illustrated by a simple graphic, basic forecast for the week, and that is about it. I know, I know, that sounds really bland in comparison to TWC, and at first I dismissed it thinking I couldn’t live with my moving radar picture.

However, its simplicity is its strength. Really. When you get down to it, do you really need the moving radar? Sure, when you’re following a big storm, but otherwise? I don’t miss them. The page loads extremely fast and it has all the information I need.

But the page design isn’t the only place where the site’s functional simplicity shines through. It is extremely easy to get the weather for anywhere. You simply tack the zip code onto the URL. Yeah, that easy. For instance, mine is http://www.simpleweather.com/44135. How sweet is that?

It doesn’t stop there, though. Of course, you aren’t always going to know the zip code. So, you don’t have to! Just add on the country, state, and city and you’re there. The URL for Cleveland looks like this: http://www.simpleweather.com/us/oh/cleveland. You see? Simple. Weather. It takes me two seconds to see what the weather is like for my sister in Columbus, or if it is good softball weather in Cinci, or even see the forecast for my in-laws on their cruise in St. Croix.

The main page does provide a search box, so you can find a weather location in a more conventional way if you want. Search is lightning quick.

I’m extremely busy. I don’t want to have to go to the information, I want the information to come to me. This is where the developers behind SimpleWeather really won me over. They have a service that sends updates to a Twitter feed for selected cities. It wasn’t a huge surprise that Cleveland wasn’t one of them. There was an e-mail address to write to, though, to request another city. I wrote, thinking I’d hear something back someday, if I was lucky.

I got an e-mail within an hour and Cleveland’s SimpleWeather Twitter feed was up in another day. Yup, I follow it and now the current conditions are tweeted to me (and anyone else who is interested) three times a day. Now that’s what I call service!

I’m a bit mobile-challenged myself, but if you aren’t, they also have a mobile site at simpw.com.