Category Archives: Blogland

Blank Mark

Thanks Emma.

So not only do I need to come up with three inspirational communicators but I also have to make Emma laugh out loud. Oh and she spelt my name wrong as well…

Ok, so let’s try and kickstart my empty brain which has been busy with meetings, “soft launches” and risk management.

Inspirational communicators …

Well I’ll go for 3 people who have have inspired me to change my perspective on life:

Nick Gurney was the first person to make me seriously think about what being a leader actually means and what the price of leadership can be. Nick’s leadership style is completely different to my own but the way he framed his experiences and his approach to tacking some really appalling problems was deeply inspirational to me.

My friend Sarah who once said to me, “Mark, you’re a people person”. That that came as a revelation to me is both an indication of how little I had thought about things before that and of the fact that a single comment or even just one word can change everything.

Finally Muttley who taught me that success often comes despite the best efforts of plans and management and that alas all too often success never comes at all so all that is left is the Zen of action and the empty mind.

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Honey, I’m Chrome!

The internet has been full of stories since Google launched their own browser, Chrome, last week.

Some of the stories have been that Chrome marks the start of the desktop wars as applications and the OS move in to the cloud. Some have been about security weaknesses in Chrome. Some about Chrome as the burning eye of the panopticon. Some about Chrome as UI paradigm.

Well someone has got to keep the Internets burning. But so far no one has touched on the most important thing about Chrome.

It’s yet another browser to test against. 3 versions of IE, 2 of Firefox, Safari and now Chrome. And before you say “Webkit” I suggest you look at Chrome rendering vs Safari.

Citizens, we must stop this browser proliferation now before my team have to spend their entire lives testing browser/platform combinations. So, no to Chrome, no to IE8. Sigh, there’s many a true word spoken in jest. I blame the BLINK element myself, that’s where it all started going wrong.

Cello, Cello, now that was a browser…

Quick, quick, slow

An interesting post on Daring Fireball about the speed of Javascript on the iPhone.

It’s always dangerous to generalise from such things but if I run the test on my N800 “Diablo” running Firefox then I get the following results – 0.394, 0.078, 0.353, 0.65, 0.250.

Apart from the string allocation figure the results are about 0.5x those of the iPhone with the latest Webkit.

Unlike the iPhone, the N800 does support Flash but to be honest I tend to turn it off save when accessing particular sites as Flash ads reduce the overall web browsing experience.

If I generalise wildly on such only mildly related benchmarks I would guess that Flash on the iPhone would be completely possible and would support most sites but it would still have to deal with those blasted Flash ads which both slow the browsing experience and which are very irritating indeed on a small screen.