Our thoughts on life, business, design, and creativity.
Here’s an ad that we’re running on several blogs and websites this month. Good thing we know someone who can do ‘rockstar’ Flash ads! 
Btw, the ability to create the rockstar quality of this ad was not so much the actual animation, but the fact that the size of the ad is under 50K. Nice job Dan!
This month, we are participating in a networking event called Ignite NEWDA Hudson. The presentation topics will focus around Marketing, General Business, Technology, and the Internet.
The Ignite program is an international networking event that has presentations followed by activities, libations, and networking. The presentations are all 20 PowerPoint slides at a duration of 15 seconds each, so a total of 5 minutes per presentation.
The pilot event will be held on Tuesday, November 16 at the Harvest Cafe in Hudson, MA.
Our objective is to build the model of a successful event and help run similar events throughout New England in the spring of 2011.
Ignite NEWDA Hudson Dates
Event Schedule:
Event Details:
View Map of Harvest Cafe Location
If you have an interest in attending an event, or would like to run an event in your area, please contact: Al Morel: al@commareus.com 978 618 0686.
For more info on the New England Web Developers Group: www.newda.org
As many of our friends and business associates have heard, Dan is getting married this first weekend in Septemeber. Here’s a photo in traditional Cambodian dress. This really does make tuxes and white dresses look boring!
All the best to Dan and Lika!
by Al Morel
The short and sweet answer is not for a while yet, but someday…
As you may, or may not know, IE6 is the bane of existence for web designers and developers. It’s old, weak, and tired, and many sites have stopped supporting it, but somehow, it still lives.
Just in the last few weeks, we’ve found a couple of examples of lasting entrenchment of IE6. In one instance it was physician who wanted to use an eComm that we had created. This person was running IE6 and was using a system maintained by one of the largest medical networks in the state of Massachusetts. As it turned out, IE6 was not the culprit but their own firewall. In another situation it was an mid sized insurance company with about 20 employees.
In some ways, it’s actually a good thing. We test all the sites we build in all the browsers shown in the chart below. It’s not easy getting them all to cooperate together but it certainly separates the web pros from the wannabes.
I found this breakdown of web browsers from this website: w3schools.com. As you can see, IE6 is slowly dying, and if you go to the site you can see the withering, and emergence, of other browsers over the past few years.
Remember Netscape and AOL?
Browser stats January 2009 to April 2010
by Al Morel
Whenever you can get Microsoft and Apple to agree on anything, you are probably close to a consensus.
Such is the case in the future of Flash and the direction that both of these companies are taking to support HTML5.
Here’s Steve Job’s post on the Apple site and Dean Hachamovitch’s view. (Dean is the czar of Internet Explorer at Microsoft)
Interestingly, there is zero mention of Microsoft’s Silverlight.
So long term, perhaps it’s buh-bye Flash and Silverlight. Of course, this will take a few years and in the interim, who knows? Someone will probably come up with a clever work around.