Changing Hoster for ArtivFact.com

After having ArtivFact.com hosted on OLM.net for several years, it's time to move on. OLM's price is out of line with what other hosters charge. I might have stayed on but I talked to a person in OLM sales and asked the question, "What am I getting for $29.95/month" and all he responded with is that it's a business account. Humpf! GoDaddy offers okay service though I was tempted to go with BlueHost or HostMonster.

Useful Apple iPhone Apps

While waiting in the iPhone 4 line at BayBrook Mall, I learned about some very useful, inexpensive apps for the iPhone from DC Software Arts. The apps are for 'splitting' or evening up expenses whenever you have more than one person involved in, say, dining expense, trip expense, or just an event expense.  The apps are colorful and very easy to learn. The Bill Splitter OCR app scans in a bill and then you touch buttons to map bill items to people. Taxes and tip are computed, and each person's amount owed is shown. The trip splitter is awesome because you can 'even up' expenses over some number of people and days. Love It!

Flummoxed about GoogleBot 2.1 Time-Outs

Flummoxed about why the nice little search engine simulation tool at seo-browser times out when looking at http://www.vacationatoneeleven.com/ using GoogleBot option.  I use PVII's Image Rotator Magic and also SoThink's DHMTL Menu generator on the page, and then there's a link to FaceBook.

SiteScan by EpikOne

SiteScan™ is a diagnostic tool from EpikOne that verifies if your Google Analytics (GA) Tracking Code is installed properly on your website.

One more free tool to help the free-lance web site services community.

Adobe Flash and Apple iDevices

In http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ writes about the reasons Flash is not allowed on the iPhone and iPad. My 0.02 fiat money's worth is that I see Job's point about Flash not being touch sensitive and having been designed for last-generation devices, and Flash not being appropriate for apps.

I recall the evangelistic tone to the Human Interface guide of the first Macintoshes. The big deal was consistency and economy of motion. Apple has done a great job on the user interface of its devices since then. Now, think about Flash plug-ins in web browsers. When one comes upon a Flash element on a web site, there is no telling what the user interface might be. Consistency is not in Flash'es vocabulary.

Yes it's a pain to a web developer knowing that if I put Flash into a web site, mobile users will not be able to use it. On the other hand, I would rather see Apple in complete control of the stack of software yielding the user interface of my iDevices.

I watched the WallStreet Journal interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and sure he has the Flash ecosystem to defend. His retort about Mac OS should be fixed if Flash causes crashes was a cheap shot but it is somewhat revealing. Change your operating system and your user interface to accommodate my software. I side with Jobs and would rather use the new HTML5 standard on my web sites that would be viewable on iPhones and iPads.

Testing txting from cell phone to blog. Why I would want to blog from cell is good question

Ugly TypeFace Rending of FireFox on PCs

I recently came across http://browserlab.adobe.com/. I examined several of the sites I manage and to my chagrin, some functionality did not work on all browsers on the PC and Mac. One especially annoying discovery (which I suspected earlier) was that the same page would display ugly with Firefox on the PC, okay with Internet Explorer on the PC, and okay on Mac FireFox and Safari. How could that be?  A little sleuthing on the net revealed that there is a setting in the PC control panel for enabling ClearType. That resolves the problem. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306527. Do my clients and their users look at their web sites via PC Firefox and barf?

The more germane question is whether ClearType is automatically set in Vista or  Windows 7. It doesn't appear to be default in XP.