Benny Ling’s Bling

This is amazing.

via YouTube – Every Class is Different.

Awesome.

Don’t get me wrong. In many respects, the Palm Pre is a groundbreaking smartphone that portends the obliteration of the line between phone and full size computer. It joins the iPhone and arguably the Android devices as the only computer some people would ever need.

However, Palm missed a lot of the little things in this first release. It’s an admirable attempt, given what they’re shooting for, but the fact of the matter is that the devil is in the details, and Palm fumbled too many. Any one of the following items is easy enough to overlook in an otherwise stellar device. But the difference between, frankly, the Palms and the Apples of the world is that the Apples don’t miss over 20 of them. They add up to an annoying user experience more akin to Windows Mobile than the iPhone.

via Picking nits: why I’m skipping the Palm Pre.

An excellent, concise list about why the Palm Pre isn’t the next “iPhone killer” – instead, it’s just another chance for Apple to prove how awesome they actually are. XD

My favourites are the no scroll bars (which genius thought of that one?), no way to jump to the top or bottom of a long list (oops, huge oversight there), non-universal “universal search” (if you’re going to do it, do it right, like iPhone OS 3.0), copy and paste only in “editable” text fields (no, you can’t copy that text from the web page, or an email unless you forward the email first (cmon, l-a-m-e), no Street View in Google Maps (lulzor).

Favourite quote would have to be:

22. Easy to run into “can’t open a new card until you close some existing cards.” Say what you will about the iPhone and multitasking, but memory management generally isn’t something the user has to think about.

…and people wonder why the general public refer to “iPhone killers”. It’s really no surprise – in this day and age, there’s simply no way any company can catch up.

However, kudos to Palm for trying. Thanks for helping Apple stay ahead of the curve.

So… Hopefully you’ve noticed the new theme by now.

If you haven’t, I have no idea what you’re doing here at this very second. You do realise that you’re on the internet, yeah? :S

I hated the old theme for a number of reasons -

1. Horribly commented code.
   One of my pet peeves has to be programmers (web or otherwise) who don’t follow good programming practices. In Satiorii’s case, it wasn’t just lack of comments – just a lack of readability in general. Ugh.
2. Sidebars at the BOTTOM of the page.
   Uh, hello? Sidebars at the BOTTOM of the page? That’s just not cool – it might have been had you included links to jump down quickly, but in any case, sidebar widgets looked like they had been hacked together, and ugly as hell – misalignment, horrible formatting, etc..
3. No search.
   See 2. Because search was so horrible, it wasn’t even worth using.

The previous theme – you could clearly tell it wasn’t designed to be modified. Plus it didn’t seem to be made by someone who understood how wordpress works – at least, not in the traditional blogging sense.

However, it wasn’t all bad – I chose to look past it’s shortcomings to focus on the good, because that’s the kind of guy I am.

I did like elements of it, otherwise it wouldn’t have stayed as long as it did – particularly the awesome header links that showed off my pages:

They’re quite nice – I love it how it placed those things front and centre, exactly where they should be.

Another thing I quite liked was the awesome typography of the blog name and sub-heading – under OSX, it just looked awesome. However, under Windows it was a different story – it seemed to be borked for most people anyway (or maybe just Chris). Maybe it’s how the two OSs render fonts, or how the anti-aliasing was waaaaay nicer on OSX, or something.

Anyway, I hope you like the new theme. It’s (the somewhat popular) Grid Focus, by Derek of 5thirtyone.com – if you have a chance, head over to that site to check out more themes. I’m even thinking of using The Unstandard theme for the Radi8 website… Oops, probably shouldn’t have leaked that