Mike Brittain

John Dvorak has a great piece on MarketWatch right now about how Microsoft has lost sight of its core business.  He points out a number of great examples of how the company has chased after others in publishing, online networks, search, and music, while none of these areas have anything to do with Microsoft’s history and what it used to do best.  The Xbox isn’t mentioned, and while it might look like a separate business (gaming) I think it probably is pretty close to the idea of building an OS and tools for other developers to build for.  Not a far stretch from building Windows when you think about it.

Dvorak hits on all of the points that bother me about Microsoft.  Personally, I’ve felt that over the years I’ve poured a bundle of money into Windows and Office licenses (for personal and business use) and I can fathom that much of the profit that Microsoft has made on these purchases has been sunk into losing propositions.  And that makes me angry.

I used to do a decent amount of reading about e-learning during my grad school studies. I was a big fan of Clifford Stoll’s book, “Silicon Snake Oil.”. The premise was essentially that people keep trying to sell is on this idea that learning should be fun. Education can be built into some sort of game so that it becomes enjoyable and the things we dislike about learning will happen automatically while we are entertaining ourselves.

I just bumped into a great quote from Dave Benjamin that reminded me of all of this, and I wanted to share that because I think it’s important to remember when raising kids in this age:

“Learning is hard work. Making this seem untrue or avoidable is popular and lucrative. Often, the result of catering toward this interest is something other than learning.”

A little matter of house keeping…

The One tsp. blog entries have moved over to their own site at onetsp.com/blog.  I think I’ve covered all of my bases with the original links to posts here.  If you were an RSS subscriber, you may want to just resubscribe over there.

I started playing around with Safari’s CSS gradients yesterday to see whether they would be usable on One tsp.’s mobile interface.  Looks like there has been support in WebKit for about a year now, but I don’t know specifics about how that translates to versions of Safari and other browsers built on top of WebKit.

The demos seemed to work for me in Safari 4 and in the latest version of mobile Safari built into the iPhone 3.0 OS.  I tested the 2.0 OS and it did not support gradients. I don’t know what support the Palm Pre browser has available.

This looked good enough for me, through.  Much of the interface for One tsp. is already taking advantage of a few CSS extensions with varying support.  The interface looks its best on modern browsers (IE excluded) but is still totally usable everywhere else.

So what’s the difference?

I’ve only replaced one gradient background so far, but I’m stunned.  By defining the gradient in CSS, I’ve added just 92 bytes to my style sheet.  This allowed me to remove the background-image rule I had in place to load an image file, which was 50 bytes.  The image file that is no longer needed was pretty small (635 bytes) but also meant another external request that needed to be made.  When we’re talking about a mobile device, extra requests can have a high latency — worse than what we typically think of for the web.

These are pretty small numbers, I’ll admit.  But assuming I have six gradients defined per page, the net savings would be trading around 4 KB and six additional requests for about 260 bytes and no additional requests.  That’s pretty cool.

Faster Mobile Interfaces

Successful mobile web applications need to be super fast. Users trading a native app for a web app will expect it to be responsive. Speed can be improved through faster server responses, low mobile network latency (which we have little control over), fewer and smaller requests to the server, and cacheability on as much content as possible.

Rounded corners and background gradients are two frequently used interface styles that can now be achieved directly in the browser using CSS, eliminating the need for many additional image requests.