I will start this entry with a little open letter to the music industry (skip down if you don’t care), and admit that I’ve been downloading music illegally for many years. Yes, I’m a pirate. In your eyes, a stinky filthy pirate who’s stealing all your hard earned money. I’ve almost stopped buying records in record stores, except for maybe my absolute favorite albums.

“Why? Why would anyone want to steal our music that our artists work so hard on making,” you suits might ask yourself.  I’ll tell you why, you morons. First of all – It’s too damn expensive! Say that I bought all my favorite albums from the record store. I would probably wind up using half of my months pay in a couple of days. And don’t give me that crap about you’re losing money. You’re not losing any god damn money. Second – it takes alot of space!

So hooray for boobies the Internet and digital music. When iTunes became available in Norway, I started buying songs because it was easier and less time consuming than firing up a P2P-app and hoping I was getting a decent version. The keyword here is “easier”. You gotta make it easier if you really want us to pay for the music. If we have to fight our way into a record store, it’s easier to just illegally download the music we want to listen to. As previously mentioned, it’s even easier to buy digital music – that is if it doesn’t cost us our food budget, which it does!

Many people don’t see why it’s wrong to illegally download music. It’s music! It’s a part of our culture! Why should we give all our money to the giant corporations for culture? There must be a better way - a compromise. What if you give us access to all your music and earn money from the other giant corporations? “How,” you ask. Well, what about intermission ads. It’s a win-win situation. Most of us are so used to advertising in every form getting to us, so we wouldn’t mind listening to an ad for a few seconds if it meant we could listen to all your music for free – because after all, everyone loves music.

So I gotta congratulate you, dear suits. Spotify is an friggin’ awesome product!

I haven’t opened iTunes (which holds my entire music library) since I got my hands on Spotify. Why would I? Spotify has almost everything I want to listen to. Its seamless high quality streaming doesn’t feel like… well… streaming at all. It’s my new music library, and I can’t wait to show it off when I’m hosting a party. Think about it – when you’re at a party, everyone wants to listen to something they like. What’s better than letting them search through a friggin’ gigantic music library and find exactly what they want to hear?

The Music Library

The first thing I did when I opened Spotify for the first time was to search for a long lost band called Apollo 440, which I though was awesome when I was a little kid. A few months ago I accidentally came over one of my old mix tapes with one of their songs on it, Stop The Rock. I searched for them around the net, but could barely find a trace of their existence (not even Last.fm had them in their database). Spotify had ALOT. For me, that says it all. The magnitude of their gigantic music library.

Unfortunately, bands like The Beatles, AC/DC and The Eagles weren’t to be found. Merely because their managers are internet hating idiots, who can’t see the potential of this service. Hopefully they will come to their senses (except for maybe Apple Records (The Beatles)).

The App

Spotify 0.3.8 is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It sort of look like a stripped version of iTunes with its playlists, radio and album art in the small left column, and track browser in the main right column. In addition to this, you’ll find your recent searches, and play queue. The player controls are located at the bottom instead of the top like iTunes.

When you start Spotify you’ll be presented with the Home-screen, which contains a list of newly added albums and artists you might like (based on your searches)

The search works pretty much like iTunes Music Store, with listings of relevant artists, albums and tracks. If you misspell, it will suggest an alternative search term. When browsing an artist, you’ll get a small biography (if available) and a list of similar artists. Another neat function is the Artist radio, which works like Pandora or the Last.fm-app.

Features I’d like to see in the final version

• Ever since iTunes 8 was introduced, I’ve fallen completely in love with the Genius playlists concept, which is a feature I’d really like to see in Spotify.
• A way to connect it to my Airport Express (AirTunes). However, Apple would probably not agree with me here.
• A store that allowed you to purchase and download music without ads would be nice.
• Some sort of community feature. Friends’ playlists, easy sharing, etc.

Again, suits. Congratulations. You finally got it right! This is Music 2.0!

FireBug
Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any webpage.

YSlow (For FireBug)
Analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites.

ColorZilla
Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page zoomer.

Update (12/07/08 - 15:08)

HTML Validator
HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

Clear Cache Button
Adds a clear cache toolbar button. It clears your cache :-) [Thanks Jon!]

Update (15/08/08 - 00:40)

XRAY
Not really a Firefox add-on, but a bookmarklet (which can be used in other browsers as well). Use it to see the box model for any element on any web page.

Pixel Perfect
An add-on that allows web developers to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML. Switching the composition on and off allows the developer to see how many pixels they are off while in development.

Update (29/10/08 - 11:44)

Aardvark
As you glide the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle framing each element under the cursor. You will also see a little yellow caption showing the HTML element type and its class or id if they exist. Pressing certain keys on the keyboard will do various things, as descibed in the Keystroke list below.

Any webdesigner add-ons you can’t live without? Leave a comment!

All in One SEO Pack
Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Wordpress.com Stats
Gives you visitor statistics from Wordpress.com directly in your Dashboard.

WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging.

WP Security Scan
Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.

Do you know of any handy Wordpress plugins?

Case: Apilot.no - Multiple backgrounds

Apilot.no is the product site for one of my current (and neverending) projects, Apilot (which is an easy-to-use CMS, made for easily implementing any kind of design).

Originally the background consisted of two different images. A gradient image, the sky, which was repeated x in body, and the clouds which was centered in a wrapper-DIV (body_wrapper).

The first challenge I encountered was to remove white-space below the site since the background was way higher than the actual site. This was fixed with a relatively easy hack:

#body_wrapper {
background: url(/media/images/bg_clouds.jpg) top center no-repeat;
position: absolute;
width: 100%; height: 100%;
}

This worked, but as soon as you resized the window and scrolled down, the wrapper background was cut off.

Alright, so let’s try a different approach. I googled around a bit and found this hack. It appears that most browsers will recognize the background-attribute in the html-selector. Unfortunately, that didn’t work too well either. Apparently that will make the body collapse to the site height, and no longer the browser window.

Well then. I can’t think of more ways to make this work in an elegant manner, and I’m ashamed to come up with this solution (which actually works in every browser, except for some minor issues with Safari on iPhone).

I can’t wait for CSS3 to become standard, with goodies like multiple backgrounds. If anyone have any solutions to this quite annoying issue, please let me know :-)

What is it?

Patterntap is a great source for inspiration when designing a web site.

Why do I recommend it?

Don’t pretend you’ve never been stuck.

So what’s with the fuzz?

If you’re a web developer, you probably already know what this means – for us, but also for the web experience which IE 6 has prevented for so many years.

If you’re not a web developer, and don’t understand what the whining and complaining is about, let me put it this way: IE 6 is a last generation web browser. It was released in 2001 (yes, that’s seven painful years) along with Windows XP. Since then, there has been close to no upgrades (except for maybe two dozen security patches). IE 6 was broken back then, and it is certainly broken today – It did not, and still doesn’t, support the web standards, making it often quite difficult (and definitely time consuming!!) for developers to make their web sites work perfectly in every browser.

Back then IE 5.5 (which was even worse) and IE 6 had about 90% market share, so it wasn’t such of a problem. As long as it worked in these browsers, everything was fantastic, and if the site didn’t work in e.g. Netscape Navigator – well, too bad for them.

However, IE 6 has remained as the top most used browser, simply because people didn’t know better to actually upgrade to a newer (and more securer) one, thus prohibiting webapps to reach their full potential.

It must get worse before it gets better

Luckily, IE 7 (which was released with Vista) has now reached a higher percentage than IE 6, meaning as developers, we don’t need to use countless hours to make our sites work in this old and out-dated web browser.

As of today, I will also stop supporting IE 6 for my own projects (I won’t restrict them from entering any sites, I just won’t do any effort to make it work – and ask them nicely to upgrade their browser), and I hope many will follow.

Further reading:

http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-phasin.html
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1072-apples-mobileme-drops-support-for-ie-6
http://browsehappy.com/
http://savethedevelopers.org/

Internet Explorer 6 users should upgrade to one of these modern browsers:

Download Internet Explorer 7
Download Firefox
Download Opera
Download Safari

Dropbox is an incredible easy way to sync, share and backup your files – and it integrates seamlessly into your desktop.

What is it?

Say you want to sync multiple computers, or you just want to be able to share your files online without any hassle. Dropbox works as your regular folder – just drop a file in, and it will automatically upload it to your own personal space. Install it on another computer, authorize it, and it’s automatically synced. If you want to share a file with a friend, right click the file in your filebrowser, and copy the url. It’s easy as pie.

But, it doesn’t end there. Dropbox even has its own revision system, meaning you don’t have to go on a panic spree if you manage to delete or overwrite a file. Just bring it back in the web panel, and you’re good.

With a beta account, you get 2GB to play around with.

Why do I recommend it?

Well, I want to sync multiple computers and be able to share my files online without any hassle. My co-workers and I have already adopted this when we’re working with the same files – which is too small to require something like subversion.

It’s a great app, it has growl support and it’s free!

I’m giving away invites. Just ask in the comments area :-)

Sorry, I’m all out of invites.

Secondbrain is a cool and easy way to manage (most of) your web 2.0 services.

What is it?

Secondbrain gathers all most of your bookmarks, social media and files in one place, and lets you follow your friends and discover new cool content. Some of the supported services are Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Del.icio.us.

Why do I recommend it?

If you’re like me you’re probably up to here with different web 2.0 services, and it’s kind of nice to gather most of them in one place.

As the new iPhone3G approaches, I’m looking into what’s really the big difference between it and the “old” iPhone.

First things first, the iPhone3G has 3G-support (as the name implies) and GPS. Many people have complained about the iPhone lacking these features, so that’s cool. It has gotten a little design tweaking with a glossy posterior. Another great feature is the support for regular mini-jacks, which for me is the biggest win of them all.

But that’s about it. The rest of the features lies in the new firmware 2.0, which will also be available for the “old” iPhones, for no extra charge. Here’s a little graph over the iPhone (with 2.0 firmware) and iPhone3G features.

Wow. Three whole extra features (I don’t consider the glossy posterior a feature). And of what I have read, none of them are better camera, video recording, ability to send/receive contacts or MMS-support, all of which I would have much appreciated.

Another thing that is bothering me, is that you will not be able to purchase the new iPhone without signing a perticular carrier subscription, nor will you be able to purchase it online.

So, I’m sticking to my old iPhone. But I am very much looking forward to the 2.0 firmware update!

Update (15/06/08 - 01:30)
Sources (in Norwegian) says that the iPhone3G 16GB will be available without subscription in Italy. Hopefully that will be the case in other countries as well.

“Beautiful New Exterior”

The “beautiful new exterior”, as Opera puts it, is a path in the wrong direction. This is, of course, very individual. Some might say the dark glossy topbar is super cool, but I think it draws way too much attention from what really matters when you’re surfing the web – the content. It’s not there to look cool and pretty. It’s there to give you an overview of the current tabs. That’s it!

I don’t have made much thoughts on the other elements. It looks alright – except for some of the icons, who again screams a little too much for attention.

As for the Macintosh native skin it looks down right unfinished. I don’t see much resemblance to the OS X look. They’ve just colored it to look kinda like OS X. In comparison to Firefox 3’s native skin, this looks like a dead mule - and I’m afraid that might be an insult to the dead mule.

What about the rest?

As I said, Opera has always been a very good browser – both by performance and functionality. It has always been very good with web standards, and is one of the first browsers to take use of the new HTML 5 tags (they’re awesome by the way). Its version of the “Awesome bar” is a very neat and useful function if you tend to forget to bookmark sites that you might want to pull up later. This is just one of many cool features.

The conclusion

I’ve never been able to convert to Opera. I’m more of a firefox fan. Mainly because of some of the extensions (like Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar) are crucial for me.

However, it is absolutely a very fine browser – except for the new standard look. But luckily that’s easy to replace.

Get Opera 9.5 and try it out for yourself!