Chris Meller

I’ve got some friends going through rough times in life right now. One isn’t happy with her path in life, and the other doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life… Having gone through some similar periods in life (I’m not sure they ever really end), I tried to offer my somewhat more ag

I’m still having trouble believing it… Safari, the little browser from Cupertino that no one thought would go anywhere, has apparently passed the Acid2 test for browser web-standards compliance.

You can find the full story here, and the Digg comments here are humorous and a tad informative (especially if you’re too lazy to research on your own).

I really find this quite amazing. I know I wasn’t alone when I groaned as I heard Apple was releasing their own web browser. With Firefox just taking off and garnering support and publicity, the last thing we needed was yet another browser from someone as rumor-prone as Apple.

As with everything they do, however, Apple has surprised a lot of people by developing a totally standards-compliant browser before anyone else, even the mighty Microsoft (ha, rigghhttt) and those open source gods at the Mozilla Foundation.

I’ve read several reviews of the Acid2 test that were brought up when Firefox was being bashed for not passing the test yet. It was even mentioned on the Microsoft IE7 blog as being out of reach for IE7 (and with a good explination as to why).

Honestly, I’m quite excited that Safari is finally being released as an Acid2-compliant browser (since it actually passed the test in the Apple labs back in April). With any luck, this will encourage more people to try and make their browsers even more compliant (read: Firefox), although I wouldn’t hold my breath. Who knows, Microsoft may see this as a throw-down challenge from their rivals in So-Cal and decide that Acid2 is a major priority for IE7… If they were to do something like that (along with their planned tab-browsing and other features), I know I would certainly consider using IE again…

Any opinions here? Anyone else have unlikely predictions?

I came up with a few suggestions (crappy ones, I know) for the FeedLounge Read / Unread icon. Since they weren’t displaying properly in those comments, here’s my post again:

I think having the favicon in the list of feeds wouldn’t be a bad idea, but I’m really not seeing how it would work as a read / unread indicator…

For those not using FL right now, you can see exactly what Alex is talking about in the screenshot here. You’ll notice under the “View” section that the first button is depressed and shows “Read” with a blank piece of paper. That’s what they’re talking about changing.

So far, I’m liking Alex’s idea about the rolled and unrolled newspaper. I suppose the open / closed envelope would also work. Even if it’s not technically accurate, people would still be able to associate it with read / unread since they’re so used to seeing it.

Something else that would be cool is to use something like the Firefox RSS indicator, like:ReadUnreadOr my favorite from the Microsoft suggestions:ReadUnreadOnly problem with the Microsoft one is that it’s wide. When you shrink it to 16 wide, it’s 9px high, which is itty bitty… Of course you could eliminate the text “Read” and “Unread” afterwards and have simply the icon, but that messes up the whole icon naming scheme.

Just my .02…

Got suggestions of your own?

Google has thrown together a page listing all their services, targeting them at the College students of the world. I give you College Life.

This really doesn’t bring anything of interest, aside from a consolidated page listing multiple services. I think it’s particularly interesting, since I just complained about a lack of integration among their products on Thursday while talking about Scoble:

Now tell me, where

I came across this at some point last week here, and just had to post it…

I take it from the “Fox” watermark at the bottom that this was actually shown… well, on Fox. Wish I’d seen him dancing around, especially after having just watched Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story.

If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, then you’re a loser and don’t deserve to read my blog, so be gone vile beast!