Martin Young - Web Designer

March 30, 2008

Jan Juc from Steps

Jan Juc from Steps, posted to Flickr from my mobile phone on 30th March, 2008.

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Posted by Marty in Moblogging

From Steps towards Winki

From Steps towards Winki, posted to Flickr from my mobile phone on 30th March, 2008.

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Posted by Marty in Moblogging

March 26, 2008

My MacBook is a May 06 model and came with 60gb of HDD space. Six months ago I started to run out of storage space so I bought a 320gb external USB hard drive. My photos are on it (15gb) and I also use it for backing up DVDs (50gb), my files (<1gb), and all my music (16gb), but to be honest the external drive a bit of a hassle. I'd much rather that my photos were on the MacBook so that I can have a single iPhoto library, plus using the external drive requires me to be in my office wired up to it ... which sort of defeats the purpose of having a laptop. Also despite my photos being on the external drive I have only 7gb remaining on the MacBook. Hmmm.

For $200 or so I can replace my 60gb internal hard drive with a 250gb one. I'd eBay the external HDD for around $100, so $100 changeover seems like a good move.

But another alternative is to sell the MacBook and the external hard drive (for around $1,000) and put the cash towards a new one with a bigger hard drive. For $950 outlay (which I can salary sacrifice) I can pick up the middle MacBook with a 250gb HDD, a faster processor, OS X Leopard, 2gb of RAM and a superdrive. Currently I have a slower processor, OS X Tiger, 1.25gb RAM and no superdrive.

But I can get by without a superdrive, and although more RAM is always nice I can get by without that too. The faster processor would certainly be lovely, but would I notice the difference? Maybe, but probably not. Leopard has some cool features over Tiger, but Tiger does everything I need it to.

And in today's belt-tightening environment I guess I need to spend less and make the most of what I have.

I think I've answered my own question. Prepare to be pimped, MacBook!

* Update: this afternoon I bought a 1gb stick of RAM ($59) and a 160gb Seagate Momentus HD ($129) from Landmark Computer Systems on LaTrobe St, Melbourne. Haven't fitted the HD yet … that’s job #1 tomorrow!

** Update 2: Just read that only two years ago that Seagate drive was high end and cost $599. Amazing.

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Posted by Marty in Apple, Not important, but potentially interesting, Web & Tech

March 25, 2008

This is why I like reading newspapers

Consider this screenshot from The Age Online.

That’s what I see when I browse The Age during my lunchbreak … I have a bookmarks toolbar turned on, tabs on, and my Windows Start bar on. (I wish I could use my MacBook when I’m in the office but that’s another story for another day.) The screenshot is 1008 x 588 pixels, so 639,744 pixels in total.

Now look at it again with the story highlighted.

The red box is 182 x 212 pixels in size, which is 38,584 pixels in total. This means that until I vertical scroll, just 6.03% of the pixels on the page are dedicated to the story I want to read.

To make things worse, there are 46,448 pixels of advertising (which is 7.26% of the screen real estate), and another 29,714 pixels of navigation that looks like advertising (4.65%). See below:

It’s bloody annoying and I reckon they’re doing it on purpose. Well, I know they’re doing it on purpose as (a) web sites don’t just design themselves, and (b) they need to fit heaps of ads in to pay for the thing, but what I mean is that I think they don’t actually want anyone to enjoy reading The Age Online because they’d rather those people go out and buy the paper.

Well it’s worked on me, Fairfax, because I much prefer to read The Age in print over online. Unfortunately you rarely get $1.50 out of me as I usually sit down in a cafe and read their copy. Sorry.

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Posted by Marty in Not important, but potentially interesting, Random thoughts, Web & Tech, Web design

March 23, 2008

Hey eBay …

… how about concentrating on the basics?

You’ve implemented some sort of “talk to your buyer via Skype” function, but your site doesn’t work properly in Safari and parts of it are broken in Firefox.

No WYSIWIG in Safari means 10pt arial or nothing