Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl
  • Warp Records To Provide Entire Catalog For Download Via Bleep.com

    This caters directly to the hearts and minds of file-sharing users who frequently seek rarities, out-of-print recordings, singles and b-sides through peer-to-peer trading networks. A service like Bleep.com eliminates the need for users to host rare files or spend hours scouring for the few rare songs they can’t find or are only available in poor-quality or corrupted files. In addition, the service isn’t beholden to the limitations imposed by a service like iTunes; anyone can have access to the music without installing the proprietary software.

    !!!, Anti-Pop Consortium, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Broadcast, Plaid, Prefuse 73, and Squarepusher are among the label mainstays whose entire Warp output will be available through the service, which is being designed by the estimable Designers Republic and Kleber (the same madmen responsible for the Warp site’s distinct look and feel).

Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl
Posted on by lhl

My Treo’s touchscreen was freaking out on me for a little while, but it seems ok for now. I’m thinking I’ll need to give Handspring a call and see what’s up. In any case, I think I’ll do a little blogroll list a-la what I did for the hiptop (to this day btw, most of the list remains accurate; Danger never fixed anything).

The Blazer 3.0 browser has fairly complete CSS + JS support; and for the most part renders stuff well. It does take a while to render stuff (it’s not efficient about letting you navigate partial pages – still not bad, avg time to navigation is about 20s from hitting the request button, full page typically loads in about a minute), and doesn’t seem to be very smart about its caching (it’ll try to reconnect the last page when you don’t have a signal but won’t load up the cache). I’ve included the page sizes that it gets (spoiled by broadband). These are of optimized views (wide layouts seem to be even better; congrats Blazer team):

+ randomfoo.net - no header in optimized mode; 270.5K
+ a.wholelottanothing.org - header compressed, otherwise good;  221.1K
+ lyd - looks real good, miniblog shows up first; 47.4K
+ waxy.org - looks real good; 55.2K
+ torrez.org looks real good; 10.3K
+ sixfoot6 - looks real good; 192.2K
+ onfocus - loads, eventually; 334.7K
+ megnut - looks real good; 48.8K
! kottke - causes a soft reset!  no joke; tried multiple times
+ anil - legible, has two columns (?)
~ Simon Willison - wraps just a little wide; 37.3K
- 0xDECAFBAD - content space is a thin sliver, funky even in wide mode; 216.5K
+ Zeldman - nav first, otherwise good; 103.7K
+ Mezzoblue - long nav at top, works; 108.7K
+ whatdoiknow - scaled headers, otherwise good; 74.4K
~ Clagnut - text column half-width; otherwise ok; 139.4K
+ meyerweb - some design overlap, but quite legible; 77.6K
+ eatonweb - all nav on top, otherwise good; 45.0K
+ unoriginal creativity - nav appears first, otherwise good; 53.8K
+ disastro - no header, nav text/bg color rendered the same, otherwise good; 14.9K
+ boingboing - looks real good; 298.6K
~ mefi -  slightly thin text columns; 63.6K
+ /. - looks really good; 82.9K
Friendster, Tribe, and Upcoming.org load up fine.  Friendster sometimes renders
weird (ads or frames space weirdness?), but I was able to use it well enough 
over the weekend to look up an event location from a bulletin board posting.

Browser improvements I’d like:

  • Threaded browsing, heck being able to access the menu while it redraws would be nice
  • gzip support
  • Bookmarks that remember wide/optimized pref
  • easier switching from wide/optimized mode
  • image zooming
  • easier to switch images on/off, CSS and JS while we’re at it
  • Typing goes directly into URL bar, a la hiptop
  • drop-down type auto-complete
  • Better Cache Control
  • can’t be fixed really, but the 11-bit screen is *really* annoying

To look into: more into browser info, does it support handheld stylesheets?