Good media players?

Apr 26
2011
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Howdy

After using iTunes for a few months, and being thoroughly unimpressed by its lack of features and adaptability, I’m looking for a better media player. It worries me somewhat that I’ve added everything as .m4a format to my Mac when I might want to play the tunes elsewhere and have problems.

I tried Songbird by Mozilla a few months ago and it was rather unintuitive to say the least, especially when trying to play videos. Not sure if this is a Songbird / OS X compatibility problem or a programming error. I was put off by the interface colour, design and much more besides. Update 10 May 2011: Something completely solved by an add-on that made it much prettier.

That said, I’ve heard good things since and the ability to use Songbird on my Mac and Android phone might just be the ticket. That’s an interesting point actually. I won’t buy an iPhone as you have to go through the (sometimes) risky jailbreak process to get it working in a way that Android already does anyway.

Android has more free apps and has a UI overlay tailored for many people’s tastes. Why have screens and screens full of apps? Nobody uses a PC or Mac that way so why use a phone that way? The intelligent folders on iOS are actually very good but the inability to do anything more than this is rather annoying. Oh, and if you don’t like the form factor of the iPhone 4 as it has zero ergonomic design considerations, you’re screwed. The 3GS was much more confortable in the hand but didn’t have the “premium product look and feel” of the iPhone 4.

On that token, the MacBook Pro is actually the single most uncomfortable laptop to type on that has ever been created. The sharp edge where your wrists sit, the slightly awkward proportion of the keyboard make it rather painful. And the ultra reflective screen is impossible to use in anything other than dull indoor lighting. Apple seem, as always, to favour what a product looks like switched off over what it’s like to actually use a product.

Do people only work on computers in dark, enclosed rooms in California?

Written by admin in: Blog |

dislpay: inline-block – a rule you should know

Apr 11
2011
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I recently encountered a need to add an inline-clock css rule to a page I was working on. While one of the more obscure css rules, inline-block is excellent for displaying items that usually wouldn’t appear together. My case involved inline-block being applied to some text that sat between a pair of icons that had the display: block property. This combination was used for a page navigation block (i.e. < 1 of 7 >).

But I also came across something else peculiar. To override an H1 that had a display: none applied to it, I had to evoke the display: inline-block rule. Now this seemed a bit strange at first but when you think about it, header (h2, h2, h3, h4) elements are pretty much always inline-blocks. They’re never really sat next to anything and are meant as block-type dividers.

Inline-block has therefore become a very fast favourite of mine. It works on pretty much any browser (not tested in IE6 as I find IE6 alignment a thoroughly pointless exercise designed only for people that work at the most technologically inept of conglomerates – I know a few of them). Seriously, if anyone’s using IE6, display a huge banner stopping them using the site, or switch off CSS altogether. Companies will soon learn when all of their employees can’t use the internet without being physically sick on their over-secured, castrated PC’s.

Wow, that went in a different direction. The point was display:inline-block is a miracle css property that lets you help a page to become what it logically should be when constructed with semantic code.

Written by admin in: Code Centre |