The web (or let’s say, the technology underneath the hood) is once again facing an evolutionary step towards becoming more userfriendly for both developers and consumers. I put big hopes into CSS3/HTML5 and a more streamlined production process for creating websites due to less workarounds. With more and more websites haveing heavy usage of ajaxified user interfaces, there will be even more streamlining happening in the future. Of course I’m haveing browser compatibility on my mind as I’m writing this. It seems like even Microsoft is understanding now how important it is to support standards and I think they’re trying really hard to get back their share of the cake by starting to get less ignorant. I can only hope they actually walk the way and don’t fall back to old habits.
The numbers of people using old browser versions is still too high to forget about the annoying compatibility round at the end of every design process, but the trend is to force “nice degradation”, rather than “full conversion”. From my point of view, this is the best approach by far and I’ve been practically going there since about a year. This means, designing for state of the art browsers, but with nicely degrading fallbacks for old versions. This is reducing production overhead and costs. I rather spend the time on the initial design than on achieving the same looks with a fossil browser like IE6.
How does this affect the viewer? Well, basically not at all. The functionality has to be the same of course – it just looks a little bit different in the end, downgraded. The content is still being displayed perfectly well and the brave people using current browsers will enjoy the feature richness, while the fallback makes sure that old browsers at least display the information which is meant to be displayed in the first place. And well, if you think about how someone must perceive the web who is *still* using IE6, he might be used to a lot worse and what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t miss, right?
Well, I know, this isn’t exactly new but I know the fight some webdesigners might have over this, inside and with their bosses and clients. It is, however, a matter of displaying key points to why this approach is more efficient. There are tons of objective reasons which support this approach, be it efficiency or to create future proof designs. Be brave. :-)


Hackintosh Ahoy!
Hooray ye olde swashbuckling, grogg drinking plank lumpets! I’m writing this post on my very first hackintosh which I got to work after 3-4 days of fiddling around and reading, reading, googling, reading, and so on. You get the picture. I have to say, once I got myself the right parts, it was darn easy to install OS X and with the great tools provided by folks like puru.se (Kakewalk) or in my case (haveing a Gigabyte P55-UD5 board) “iBoot + MultiBeast” from TonyMacx86 it was actually rather easy. No command line hacking, no manual kext fiddling. :)
I started this “just for fun” because on one hand, I wanted to get myself again a dedicated gamer PC (I know, but I just can’t stop..). I also wanted to try out this hackintosh thing once and see if I could get it working. Why? Well, just “because”. And in the end, I now replaced my iMac with this very hackintosh setup.
The hardware
Notes
It really comes down to a simple rule: Look at the different hackintosh-methods, then buy the parts which most successful installations use. Not the other way around. The problem in my case was that the motherboard I was looking for initially is already EOL so I had to take the next best thing which turned out to not work using Kakewalk. So I stumbled across tonymac’s iBoot + MultiBeast method. This however didn’t work with the ATI card I bought initially and also, trying to install everything from USB devices turned out to be a huge source for all sorts of bugs and weird behaviours. So in the end, I got myself a SATA DVD-ROM and a cheap nVidia card to fill the gap until the fermi-based cards get a couple of revisions and OS X support. :-)
I guess I learned more about OS X trying to get it to boot on a non-Apple system than by using it every day for 12 hours in the past 5 years. :-)