If you have several instant messenger accounts to keep in touch with all of your friends/colleagues/clients then this could simplify your situation.
Pidgin offers a free, simple to use, single application that will allow you to communicate with all your ‘buddies’ (I have never liked this term) regardless of their account - gmail, AIM, Yahoo IM et al.
Click the screenshot above to visit their site and download the Instant Messenger Client and configurator.
I found this novel wooden bike on GP designpartners website and the article shows a great deal of the design process that led them to this very novel design (click on the pic to visit the site).
It is possibly the only bike that would make me want to go green and ditch my car - if it had a stereo and an ashtray…
A laptop this beautiful insists on beautiful websites only! In fact, the only think I can see wrong with this laptop is that it is running Windows Vista but that’s another story (and probably another blog).
The full story on this laptop can be found at Business Week.
To get some understanding of how browsers managed to diversify and standards become ignored, it is necessary to look back to the 90’s and to Netscape and Microsoft’s browser war at the dawn of the web.
Netscape Navigator was once the de-facto browser, used by 80% of all internet users at its peak. Version 3 of the browser was very good and dealt with the homogonous HTML that made up the Internet at that time very well. But things change quickly in technology and for Netscape the danger came from Microsoft who had noticed their dominance in this area and wanted their threat removed. Internet Explorer 3 was released and heavily promoted in 1996. What’s more, Microsoft distributed the browser free with Windows and soon it was taking market share from Navigator at a very fast rate.
In the competition for m,arket share, the two companies released new versions of their browsers at ever decreasing intervals, sacrificing quality for hype and functionality. New HTML and DHTML tags were released with poor documentation such that the tags would be interpreted differently in each browser.
Nestcape blundered with a poor version 4 and when IE4 was released it saw the demise of Navigator. By the time of IE6 Microsoft had 95% of the market. Microsoft’s implementation of HTML had suffered considerably and soon it was commonplace to see the words “optimised for ‘Internet Explorer 6, screensize x by y’ on a splash screen for a website.
As you can see from the graph above, IE wiped the floor with Netscape (and suffered a serious antitrust case in the process) leaving the world with a unique, ubiquitous, insecure, non-standard browser.
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