Officially Lucky ❡ a blog by Clint Ecker

Rentzsch nails it from another angle. However, most of your readers don’t own them either!

Peter-Paul Koch:

We’re doing exactly the same as ten years ago. We now say “iPhone” instead of “IE6,” but otherwise nothing’s changed.

No, wait, there’s one more change: the iPhone has far less mobile market share now than IE6 had desktop share back then.

ppk’s overly-bombastic text unfortunately distracts from his message, but he has an excellent point.

Regrettably he reaches for the almost-always-incorrect stupid/lazy/undiciplined argument, delivering only a cursory glance at the foundational issue:

Web developers should take a look at their sites on a Nokia and a BlackBerry and fix whatever’s wrong. It isn’t that hard to get your hands on a testing device. Just ask around or use PerfectoMobile. (I do not trust emulators, so I don’t recommend their use.)

To his credit, Koch directly acknowledges “Safari iPhone” as the best mobile browser.

It’s no surprise that we, in the profession, would like to carry and use the best. We live and breathe this stuff, and pick up on even the little niceties.

And there’s the rub regarding developing for the non-best mobile devices.

We don’t own them.

I agree with PPK on one count.

The return on your investment in time and resources when your build a mobile site will always pay back the most dividends if you just go ahead and target the majority of your audience’s mobile clients.

More often than not, though, and even more so if your site’s readership is primarily US-based, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not targeting the mobile Webkit found on the iPhone, iPod touch, Android, and WebOS.

His sales stats might be technically correct in saying that the Nokia/S60 browser is the most widely installed mobile browser in the world, but it means exactly jack shit if no one is using it to browser the web (they aren’t in the US, apparently).

Go to any major website and survey the mobile clients in use and you will find the vast majority are iPhones and iPod Touches; a growing percentage will be Android and WebOS.

SymbianOS will be somewhere down around 1 or 2 percent.

Web designers, web developers and content producers aren’t dumb.

In fact they are quite savvy and well aware of where they should be focusing their efforts, energy, and money. Perhaps this can be shortsighted at times (see: IE6 c. 2000), but I can’t exactly fault anyone for pursuing those choices for those reasons at that time.

We aren’t looking at our web stats, seeing a million Nokia S60 users and 10,000 iPhone users and barreling ahead an building an iPhone compatible mobile site.

At Ars Technica for example we did a formal survey of our readers, took design feedback throughout the whole process of building it, and combined that with statistical data from our logs.

Webkit, and specifically iPhones and iPod touches were by and far the most popular platform with Android, WebOS, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile coming next.

Now, you tell me how you justify to your bosses that you should be spending your time and my company’s money on targeting a browser based off PPK’s stats when, for most people, they have no basis in reality.

7 Feb

1066 NOTES

Holy. Shit.

3During the Q & A portion of Sarah Palin’s appearance at last night’s Tea Party Convention, she was caught on camera reviewing response cues pre-written on her hand. Enhanced images confirm that Palin indeed had the words “Energy”, “Tax cuts” and “Lift American Spirits” scribbled on her palm.

Let us put aside the fact that this proves that her softball questions were screened in advance, and that she needed help answering pre-screened softball questions — and focus on the fact that she has a clearly visible POW/MIA bracelet with her son Track’s name on it.

What is that about?

[fark.]

via (thedailywhat)

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2 NOTES

This photo released by Melanie Typaldos shows Typaldos and Caplin her pet capybara wearing his Halloween custome. The capybara, Hydrochoerus Hydrochaeris, is a semi-aquatic rodent of South America. It weighs about a hundred pounds, and is about 2 feet tall at the shoulder.

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Gaga Dollars for Sale. Be careful though, dude’s website is definitely not work or young-child safe ;)

Ayup:

The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. … Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

Blaine Cook has coded up a “Hotload” branch of node.js that lets you do hot code reloading:

Now, any time you modify myRequestHandler.js, the above code will notice and replace the local requestHandler with the new code. Any existing requests will continue to use the old code, while any new incoming requests will use the new code. All without shutting down the server, bouncing any requests, prematurely killing any requests, or even relying on an intelligent load balancer.

This would actually be pretty sweet for my little node.js IRC bot I’m writing ;)

6 Feb

9 NOTES