Month: January 2007

Yay!

My Final Cut Studio crossgrade finally arrived… now I can get back to not making cute animation videos because I’m busy doing something else instead of because Motion doesn’t run on my MacBook.

For the record, this is the most awful software upgrade procedure I’ve experienced.

  1. The previous versions of various Apple pro media apps such as Motion don’t run at all on newer, Intel-based machines. BOO!
  2. The various individual products have been discontinued in favor of the Final Cut Studio bundle which includes a bunch of them. You can no longer get just one. So to run your old copy of Motion on your new MacBook, you have to upgrade to the entire bundle… BOO!
  3. …which they offer a huge cross-grade discount on! YAY!
  4. To get your new installation media, you have to mail in your original installation DVD… which will naturally get lost in the mail. BOO!

The good news is, if you have enough documentation you can talk them into replacing your lost media so you can send in for the upgrade again.

fruit ratings

[[Wikipedia:Apricot|Apricots]]: YUMMMMMMM! Easy to slice in half and remove the pit, and verrrry delicious. Dried apricots are also nice and last longer in the cupboard.

[[Wikipedia:Peach|Peaches]]: Similar to its smaller cousin the apricot, but IMHO they’re harder to work with. The pitting vs deliciousness ratio is unfavorable.

[[Wikipedia:Blueberry|Blueberries]]: Pretty awesome when you pick them yourself in the forest. Prepackaged, though, I find them kinda… boring and tasteless. Maybe I just got boring mass-produced Chilean blueberries, though.

[[Wikipedia:Blackberry|Blackberries]]: Upside: yum! Downside: full of little crunchy seeds.

Denied

Every once in a while we get a rash of complaints about how Wikipedia renders on somebody’s mobile phone or PDA web browser.

Unfortunately we don’t seem to have a lot of such devices ourselves to test with, and they all behave differently, so we haven’t really had the resources to seriously work on testing tweaks for better phone/handheld support.

My crappy little phone just has some kind of WAP browser, I think, which I’ve never really been able to get to do anything productive. For kicks I took a peek to see if Opera Mini would run on my phone, since I *think* it has some kind of Java… alas, once I finally got connected to the site it claimed my phone isn’t supported.

Opera Mini actually handles Wikipedia pretty decently. The really cool thing is that since the client side is Java, they have an applet version so you can test the actual Opera Mini rendering in any desktop web browser. I LOVE YOU OPERA! YOU MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO TEST MY WEB SITE IN YOUR PRODUCT!!!! IIII LLLLLOOOOVVEEE YYOOOUUUUU!!!!!!!ONE

Of course currently our fundraising drive notice covers the entire screen, but… hey… ;)

Update 2007-01-07: I’m collecting links to mobile testing resources at [[mw:Mobile browser testing]].