Misc crap

I’ve put a search box inline with the menu on the left and removed the ‘search’ link from the navigate menu.

I’ve been working hard on some other designs that deviate quite a bit from what you’ve seen from me before. The only problem with these designs is that they make heavy use of the latest CSS2 standards and some browsers (cough Internet Explorer cough) break the design pretty badly. It absolutely flips me out to build a site, conform to all available standards, have everything validate, and then load it up in six different browsers and get three different outputs. It genuinely discourages designers to try new things because they want what they create to look the same across all platforms (as it should if you remain adherent to standards) and so they are forced to not think outside the box; whatever, I’ve made this argument many times before.

I’m debating whether or not to start using an iTunes utility called Kung-Tunes. This would allow me to display, in real-time, the song I’m currently listening to on the site. It works by gathering the relative data from iTunes and then uploading this data every so often to my webserver. From there, I would write a small PHP script to parse the file and display its contents on my page. Like I said, still not sure if I’m going to implement this or not.

I got a chance to play with an iTrip today and walked away less than impressed. The FM signal was extremely weak and just wouldn’t work well in any practical position in my car. I could hold it up and put it near my roof and my radio would receive the signal fine, but that’s obviously not an option. I’m extremely disappointed as I’ve been looking forward to this device for some time. Not only is it the smallest iPod FM transmitter, but it also runs solely off the iPod’s battery and eats up as much power as headphones otherwise would. Speaking of the iPod, I read today that the latest software for the iPod (Mac) will keep track of the number of times you’ve listened to each song (something that iTunes does as well) and will update iTunes with this information each time you sync it. Brilliant. :)