michaelsauter.net - the log

There has been a lot of talk about HTML 5 recently. On the contrary, XHTML 2 is finally dead as of today. So, what to do with HTML 5? Praegnanz.de has a great article which sums it up pretty well. There's a good chance my next project will be done in HTML 5.

In other news, a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon the Drupal 7 User Experience Project. There is a lot of discussion going on and the website shows some of the really interesting results. I really recommend to at least skim through the last blog entries, especially the one about designing accessibility into themes (also available as a PDF).

I just read an article at Spiegel Online (unfortnately, it's in german only) which talks about Lenovo's decision to enlarge the ESC and DELETE keys. 

Actually, I can' believe this is really true. According to the article, they tested the new keyboard with 30 (!) persons and came to the result that it would be great to make those two keys larger. In my opinion, the DELETE key is really used very often (that's why it's already quite large on my Macbook Pro keybaord), but the ESC key? That's one of those keys I wouldn't miss if it wasn't there ... 

• Our semester project is coming along nicely ... see our test website.
• I really enjoy using Safari 4. It's just so much faster ... incredible. And Top Sites and the History Coverflow is quite useful, too.
• Already looking forward to Snow Leopard!
• Had a great weekend in Rome and Venice (and only lost my sunglasses :)). Pictures are available in my gallery.
• Only three weeks left till the end of my fourth term. After that, no more programming at university, which is both bad (no more ActionScript) and great (JSP is really cumbersome)
• Some band news: This Beautiful Mess uploaded some new songs at myspace and Anderson is quite nice, too.

In the last three days, 19 students and 2 teachers worked 28 hours each. This is our result:

This is an AIR application (with two screens, the second image shows just the main screen, there is a setting screen on the laptop on the first image with a cool intro, too). A camera above the big screen creates a landscape with land (the black sand on the screen) and sea. Inside the sea, the application creates food and creatures with different properties. The creatures move to the food and eat it. They get older and die finally ...

It's really much of what was planned ... but unfortunately we didn't have enough time to make everything work so that all written code would be executed (like creating children from two parent creatures ... and mixing their properties!)

Interesting new web app: Mobify let's you creates a mobile version of your website - for free. (via Veerle's blog).

I haven't tested it extensivly myself yet, but a mobile version is definitly something worth looking into, so once I find some time ...

During his lecture, our teacher said this after showing a new powerpoint slide. He thought we would see the quote on it about communication problems ... but we laughed at the Windows Update alert that showed up. Great timing.

So today was the first day of my fourth term here in Hagenberg. To me, the next couple of months sound really interesting: Lots of programming (Flash and Flex development, PHP & XML, and very likely some JSP). This term is also the first one where we could choose between some courses. And due to a mistake I am going to attend 6 hours per week instead of the required 3, but hey ... I chose Accessibility, eJournalism, Film Analysis and Flex development.

There will be a lot of projects, too, so maybe I will write more about that in the coming months ...

I really don't know how I could have missed this: Several stylesheets are „connected“ via the title attribute.

I have been using CSS for several years now and would consider myself an expert, but recently I was really puzzled because one of my stylesheets just had no effect on how the page was rendered. After some time with Firebug I discovered that the problem were the different title attributes. I had two stylesheets, both with media set to screen, but one with a real title and one with only „no title“. Turns out that if you select different titles, only the first stylesheet is applied to your page (the user can switch between the stylesheets in the browser, though).

I am totally surprised that I didn't run into these problems before. Seems I have always used the same stylesheet titles by chance ;)

Pizza Project (german only)