Long time no see!

I haven't been blogging for some time now, almost a year has passed and lots of things have changed.

IE8 is now a known quantity and an IE9 preview is already available. This new version of the browser from Redmond seems to signal a new dawn for web designers everywhere, with that old dream of consistent rendering and behavior across browsers that standards bodies have trumpeted for so long finally within reach.

Google Chrome too, has been a reason to rejoice. It managed to keep itself speedy while getting almost 100% rid of the frequent crashes which cursed it in it's earlier days. The good news don't end here, because now it also fully supports Linux and Mac OS X, even bookmark syncing is already possible on Chrome, through either Xmarks or it's built-in Google syncing functionality.

I've also been through a lot in these ten months, my development setup, tool set and workflow has changed considerably too:

• I no longer use SVN, I'm a total Git convert now.
• I no longer edit my code on Kate. I spent some time using Aptana Studio but that was mind-bogglingly slow and not that feature rich too. I've rediscovered Gedit with a coworker and have been making good use of it since then. It's a pretty bare bones editor, but its plugins make up for it.
• My use of Inkscape has dwindled a lot since I rediscovered Xara Xtreme, which means I now spend much more time on my Windows XP VM than when its only use was to run IE Collection, and the other windows browsers for test purposes.
• Hardware-wise, I've upgrade my Eee PC with more RAM (2 GB now) and, when in home, I'm running it from a very fast external HDD. My dreary old 17” 1280x1024 CRT has now been replaced by a 21.5” 1920x1080 LCD.

There have been lots of other stuff that changed too (HTML5/CSS3 anyone?), but these are better left for their own posts.

It's good to be back.

Web Development on the Eee PC

I never liked notebooks, I think they are too expensive for what they can do and also too big/heavy/fragile to be called mobile. But I needed one, so a choice had to be made.

I choose the Eee PC 900, from ASUS because it isn't expensive, or big, or heavy, or fragile.

So I guess this is why they had to come up with a new name (netbook) for devices like this one.

Before you call me crazy for doing all my work on an Eee, let me tell you that I do have a much bigger monitor at home.

Small as it is, so far the Eee has met and even surpassed my needs as a web developer. Here's why:

The 8.9 inch LCD has a wide-screen resolution of 1024x600 and a dpi of 133.3. This means that most websites will fit quite nicely on it, since most people out there still doing fixed-width layouts optimize either for 800 or 1024 horizontal resolution, and that they are also easily readable.

The keyboard is small enough to be ultra-portable and still is (at least for me) big enough to be quite comfortable while touch typing. In fact, it took me little over an hour to get used to it!

The Celeron M 353 Ultra-Low-Voltage processor (900 MHZ) coupled with 1 GB of DDR2 memory and Intel GMA integrated graphics (915 gm chipset) makes it more than fast enough to handle my LAMP development setup along with a couple browsers open and more (Amarok, Kate, Krita, OpenOffice, Inkscape, Gimp etc.). The integrated graphics actually run KDE4 desktop effects nice and smooth!

The SSD devices (4 GB and 16 GB respectively) have more space than I need to work. I've installed Kubuntu 8.10 along with all the applications I wanted in the faster 4 GB SSD and still have roughly 400 MB left on it to spare. The 16 GB secondary SSD still has more than 10 GB left even after I copied all my work and most of my personal files to it.

The Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections are excellent and I've also used an USB 3G modem (HUAWEI E156) for long periods without problems.

Last but not least, I've got mine with a 5800 mAh battery which gives me, usually, almost three hours unplugged from the mains.

All in all, I'm very pleased with it, and I think I'll be using this one for a long time.

First impressions on IE8

So, Windows Internet Explorer 8 is out. As is Google Chrome (In the sense that it is not a beta any longer).

I tried both today and here are my impressions on IE8:

It features better standard compliance, especially when dealing with CSS, but it somehow managed to misunderstand the CSS for the title of this blog, so I changed it even though it worked well in every other browser I tested.

The interface has grown bigger and now it takes an awful amount of the screen real-state for resolutions up to 1280x1024.

Fonts look weird. Some kind of font-edge enhancement must be the culprit, I just couldn't find where to disable it (if it is at all possible) in the five minutes I spent trying.

In the end of the day it is, still, the same old IE, the bad boy in the arena.

What about Chrome? It did not crashed a single time while I was testing it(about 45 minutes). It is as fast as it can be and it does not crashes every once in a while! I'm impressed. All it lacks now is a proper Linux port. That and Firefox extensions...

First One

Hi, I'm called Thiago, and this is my new blog on Web Design and Development. Here I'll be writing some articles about the techniques I use on my own designs. I try to focus on Usability first, then on Accessibility and Multi-Browser Compatibility. I always code by hand, and as matter of fact, the last time I used a WYSIWYG web editor was back at the Netscape Composer 4.8 times.

My current tools of choice for design and development are:

• Kubuntu Linux – My OS
• Kate – Text Editor
• Inkscape – Vector Image Editor
• Krita and Gimp – Raster Image Editors

Feel free to comment, especially if you find any grammatical or code errors.

Hope you like it!