Christopher Mackay’s Blog

TechBlog: Mozilla hits its Firefox 3 download goal, and then some: 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours, including 300,000 from Canada.

(Via spreadfirefox.com and chron.com.)

From the Daring Fireball post on Wired’s story on 37signals:

Long profile by Andrew Park in the March issue. Pretty good overall, but there’s an awful lot of ginned-up conflict. E.g. the last paragraph contains the sentence: ‘Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt,’ and suggests they’re somehow losing customers due to their emphasis on simplicity above all else.”

Doesn’t seem so “ginned-up” from here. Count me among the lost customers.

37signals have earned their success. They get an awful lot right in their apps, from lack of data lock-in to an admirable overall level of intuitiveness.

So why have I given up on them after trying to use Basecamp for nearly 3 years?

A big reason would be that “vetoing customer requests” is standard operating procedure at 37signals. Don’t take my word for it: it says so on page 62 of Getting Real:

Don’t worry about tracking and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be your memory. If it’s really worth remembering, they’ll remind you until you can’t forget.

Or until they go away because they have better things to do.

It’s fine with me that DHH would say “fuck you” to this, but he doesn’t get to do that and have my money.

For people looking for something, um, less simple than Basecamp (on Mac OS X) take a look at OmniPlan, recently upgraded to version 1.5.

TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Leopard Emerges from Beta as 10.5.2 Ships.

What is it with everyone’s obsession with Leopard’s transparent menubar?

If you’re using a desktop image that’s in any way useful — as in it’s easy to find icons on the desktop, you know, big blue sky, as opposed to some noisy, distracting pattern that camouflages everything you put on it — then it’s not a big deal.

I agree with Matt’s assessment that iCal’s new behaviour of requiring a double-click to show event details is still an annoying step backwards, though.

So Microsoft’s going to buy Yahoo! Good for Yahoo!; not so good for Yahoo! users.

The cultures of these companies will not mix. It makes me thing of the joke doing the rounds of the auto industry a few years back:

Q: How do you pronounce ‘DaimlerChrysler’?

A: The ‘Chrsyler’ is silent.

Anything good that Yahoo! brings to the equation (Widgets, Flickr, search) will be obliterated almost immediately or allowed to wither slowly.

But this is really all about Google:

It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google…

—Tim Weber, business editor, BBC News website

Microsoft is finally admitting that Live.com is no threat to Google, and it really needs to be a player in the online advertising space that Google owns.

Microsoft will spend the next three years rebuilding everything Yahoo! has from the ground-up with their own tools, just because they need to prove they eat their own dogfood; that’s a lot of money just to buy a brand.

Katemonkey.co.uk: X-UA-Lemur-Compatible: “Lemur 11: It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had an Internet riot. Let’s go for it.”

The blue Zeldman toque is an instant internets classic.

(Via Digital Web.)

Twittering From My Newton on Flickr - Photo Sharing!: Grant Hutchinson out-geeks us all…

I really should fire up the old eMate again…

(Via John Moltz.)

Apple’s beta release of Safari 3.0 has certainly got lots of people talking. While I didn’t have any issues with installation or launch, as some have reported, I did have it crash on me once, which is quite uncharacteristic.

Today I noticed a really odd behaviour: I was doing some data-entry, copying-and-pasting data from BBEdit 8.6.2 into a web form in Safari 3. Copy, switch, paste, switch, copy, switch, paste… The weird thing is that it was sometimes (maybe 10%?) remembering previous clipboard data. E.g.: first “a” is copied-and-pasted, then “b” is copied, but “ab” gets pasted. Impossible; each new “copy” clears the previous one.?Ǭ