07.03.08
It’s been a while! Time flies when you have a baby. Ayaan was born on January 19 and has been keeping us busy ever since.
Started a new job a few weeks ago with Aptela. They are a small company which provides business VOIP services. I am in charge of building and designing the UI for their web-based control panel as well as any upcoming consumer-facing applications. It’s been pretty interesting going from a huge corporation like AOL to a small 50 person company like Aptela. As with any job change, there is some adjustement, but overall I am pretty happy with the new position. There are a couple people there who I have worked with before so it helps with the transition.
All the work I am doing so far is in Flex, but I am already dabbling in SQL to analyze user metrics, and will also be learning Erlang, since it’s the language of choice for the back-end systems. Erlang is a functional language, and my only functional programming experience is a brief introduction to LISP about 9 years ago in college. It’s going to be fun learning some new stuff!
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:09 pm by Osman Ullah
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06.12.07
So, Apple has released Safari for Windows into public beta. It’s an interesting endeavour by Apple. I am really wondering about their business reasons behind it. Do they want more market share for Safari? Are they planning on releasing some Safari-specific functionality on their websites? Do they think Safari is cool and slick enough to convince Windows users to try a Mac?
After using safari for a little while I really didn’t see anything that impressed me and would make me switch from IE7 or Firefox. Even though I know it’s a public beta, there are few things missing which really made me raise my eyebrows. There are almost no window borders. On an XP machine this can make the window get lost amongst the other applications. You can only resize the window from the bottom right, but even then the cursor doesn’t change to a resize indicator until you actually press down the mouse button. They say it’s faster than IE7 or Firefox but honestly the way IE and Firefox render pages seems to be “smoother” and less “choppy” than Safari…and Safari didn’t seem any faster. You can only download data so fast, correct? Also on my HP laptop I press both mouse buttons down at the same time to auto-scroll; this doesn’t work in Safari. And there are no tooltips! Bad bad bad! Releasing a brand new product (to windows users, at least), and you can’t even hover over buttons to find out what they do. I am sure Apple knows how important tooltips are for discoverability and exploration, and I am really intrigued that such an important feature was missed. I guess they figured since they only have 2 or 3 “ambiguous” buttons, it wasn’t worth the effort?
Anyway, otherwise it feels quick and smooth. I wouldn’t switch though. It will be interesting to see what happens with Safari for Windows, to say the least.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 9:54 am by Osman Ullah
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04.02.07
Well, it looks like Greg found out how to turn on the black skin I was working on before we shipped AIM 6.1. It wasn’t quite done yet but everyone seems to love it so I thought I would give it a mention. Follow the link to his blog for instructions.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:28 am by Osman Ullah
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03.28.07
AIM 6.1 was launched yesterday. It has a lot of bug fixes as well as some new features, including buddy list docking and skinning. Be sure to let me know what you think about skinning (leave a comment for now). The Buddy Profile window is also cleaner, smaller and easier to read. Overall it’s a pretty minor release. Look for some more interesting stuff later this year. I would recommend anyone using 6.0 upgrade to 6.1 today
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:41 am by Osman Ullah
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03.06.07
I came across this interesting article on 5 ways to make crap code worse. Very entertaining, and it also gives any programmer some stuff to think about.
An interesting question for me is when do you draw the line between fixing really, really ugly code and just leaving well enough alone? Sometimes you are fixing old, worn out duct tape by piling on more, but just as bad, duct tape.
Posted in Development, Miscellaneous at 8:47 am by Osman Ullah
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