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I’ve been using .mac for over a year now and it was fairly smooth. Recently the service switched to MobileMe and things just weren’t so reliable. I only use MobileMe for calendar syncing. The other features they offer I’ve found better solutions that fit my needs.

For web hosting I use Media Temple. For the purpose of my company I need a more professional solution. Since I have quite a few emails on different domains I use Google Apps to handle that. It also offers calendar syncing now but I’m just not happy with the implementation so far. For file syncing I use Dropbox. It’s not as much storage but for document syncing the web interface is excellent and sync across machines is almost instantaneous. On top of that I can share folders with clients.

That pretty much leaves contact and calendar syncing to MobileMe. I haven’t had any issues with contact syncing. The problem is with the calendars. I have 1 PC and 3 Macs as well as MobileMe’s web interface and an iPhone.

Since it switched to MobileMe I’ve had some problems. I get missing and duplicate events, invalid alarms, and just problems syncing.

I’ve tried resetting data and backing up and restoring each calendar implementation. On the PC I don’t have Outlook and MobileMe doesn’t support Vista’s built in calendar. I figure I can just use the web app if I can getthe right data in there. It also keeps telling me my trial has expired even though I have a subscription that doesn’t expire for 11 more months.

It’s a good thing I keep backups both in house and off site as well as online and offline. I haven’t lost data because of this, but have been late for a few appointments.

I don’t know if it’s me or an issue with MobileMe. I am hoping that if it is an Apple issue that they implement a fix in a timely manner. If it’s just me which it could be if anyone has any suggestions it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

The Olympic Games have started and it’s been a pretty good show so far.  There’s a lot of events, and I like to follow certain sports, but I can’t really stay glued in front of the TV on several channels throughout the entire day.  I don’t think clients would be very happy.  I do like to check out their websites to keep up with the latest standings and results.  For as long as I can remember using Olympic websites they’ve all been pretty good.

They offer the overall package: good design, good user interface, and best of all good functionality.  I’m able to find what I need in a pretty effective manner.  It’s nice to see that over the course of many years, even larger sites have transitioned into XHTML/CSS.  It’s been a long process, but I think many companies and organizations have seen the benefit.

NBC’s Olympic website does a good job as well.  I think people put more time into websites that will see a lot of traffic in bursts.  Of course these websites probably get the bulk of their traffic hit during times like this so it’s a good chance to shine in front of a large audience.

Well, that’s all I really have.  Do you like the Olympic sites or do you think some things could be improved?

There was a post on TechCrunch yesterday regarding MySpace and Facebook’s inability to penetrate into a market like Japan.  In the post it says it took a long time for translation (Internationalization) to happen, but more importantly the site that works here in the US market isn’t catered to that of another global market.

With my clients now, it has become important to build sites with global aspects in mind.  Previously, clients just wanted an English based site, which for most businesses based in the US, is probably just fine.  For more complex projects like social networking, developing the site with this in mind early makes for a much easier task than trying to do it later.  This was seen by how long it took Facebook to get up to speed.  Translations take a long time so knowing what you want to do in the beginning can be a great help.

As for Localization this is a little bit harder.  There’s a lot more research that needs to take place in order for your site to look and feel just right for your target audience.

So the terminology Localization (L10n) and Internationalization (I18n) gets mixed up at times and people believe them to be the same thing.  In general clients think Localization is your website translated into another language so that the target country can understand the content. This is actually part of Internationalization. Internationalization covers language, number formatting, dates, times, currency, etc. Localization deals with catering the site to the target market. An example of this may be a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge here in America, but using a graphic of the Great Wall in China.

Overall, I think it’s great that people are looking to expand their site to different markets.  It’s also good that clients see that they want to do this up front which makes it a lot easier.  Don’t get me wrong though, the way we design sites, we can always do the translation after the project is complete, it just always seems to be planned better knowing beforehand.

A new search engine, Cuil, was launched recently and it claims to index 3 times as many pages as Google and 11 times as many pages as Microsoft.  There has been a lot of buzz around the blogs with the new search engine.  It got me thinking, what’s it going to take in order to beat someone like Google.  Google has become the household name and I think the majority of people still use it as a search engine.

I figured I would give Cuil and shot and see what all the buzz was about.  I have some mixed feelings about it.  In some of the searches I performed, the actual search results were okay.  I think I am happier with the results that both Google and Yahoo show.  Also I noticed in some posts they have thumbnail images.  Some of the images have nothing to do with the article and I’m just wondering where they even came from.  They don’t even appear in the article body at all.  For example, I searched for “apple” and I expected results from Apple Computer and those showed up.  One result was for the Apple Cinema display, but it had a thumbnail of the iPod Touch.

The two and three column layouts are kind of cool, but a little unusual.  I think it takes some time to get used to, but I don’t find that it helps or hurts the ability to search.

I like that they have tab recommendations and also category recommendations.  The other search engines have this as well, but I think it is layed out well and sometimes I find that it’s not prominent enough on other sites.  I think Ask does the best job of making the feature easy to use, but Cuil does a good job as well.

Overall I think I could use this search engine, but I think I am much happier with Google results.  I’ve found that I’ve built up a comprehensive del.icio.us bookmark list and find that I can find most new information through those channels.  Usually when I looks for businesses or restaurants I use Google maps as opposed to a search engine like I had in the past.  So as of right now I’ll just stick to what I’m already doing.

Facebook has just released their new layout to its users today.  Just login to the site and you will be directed to the new layout.  I think they did a good job on the redesign and improved quite a few things over the previous beta versions I have seen in the past.

Facebook seems to be the standard as far as usuability in social networking.  The layout seems to load very quickly and they use AJAX technology effectively.

If you get a minute, it’s worth checking out.

Apple released the iTunes App Store last week for the iPhone and iPod Touch and I’ve spent some of the weekend using a variety of applications.  For the most part all of the applications run better than their web application counterparts which is expected.  Some of the applications are lacking features, but I’m sure as time progresses those features will be added and they will become complete miniturized versions of their desktop web based applications.

For a few months now I’ve been contemplating jumping into iPhone applications.  I don’t have any Mac OS X desktop experience.  I do have experience in several programming languages both computer and web based.  I’m thinking that this platform would be something worth looking into.  With all the lines in front of the Apple Stores each product launch, I see this platform being just as popular as the iPod.

I did apply for the program and was initially rejected.  I recieved a letter from Apple recently stating I can now join the program.  I’m sure all the other developers that applied were notified as well.  I think it’s going to take a lot of research, development, and testing and hopefully I have the time to take on the challenge.

I see it much more fulfilling to create native applications over the web applications for this platform.  Sure you are limited to the specific platform of Mac OS X for the iPhone, but I think that platform will grow much larger than other manufacturers we see today.

If I start dedicating more time and the company moves more into this sort of development, I’ll be sure to post.  Until then back to web development.

I’ve really gotten into Twitter lately and I’ve been able to incorporate it into my daily life as well as integrated into many of my blogs and websites.  I think it’s a great idea and a great service, but in terms of reliability not so great.  I’m hoping that their new investments will really help out the service because I think it brings a great deal of value to my sites as well as sites of others.

Recently since Twitter has been down, it’s slowed a lot of my websites down.  The connection needs to timeout and this can make a website seem extremely slow.  I suppose I could cache results more often, but that defeats the whole idea of Twitter where you want to know what’s going on right now.

I’ve read articles saying that the platform wasn’t really developed with scalability in mind and that they are looking to develop the system using a different architecture.

I think a lot of people don’t take this into consideration.  When I develop websites for clients many people don’t take that into consideration.  Sure if you are a small business with little website traffic or you have a small blog with a few writers it probably doesn’t make a difference.  If you are trying to build the next best social network however you need to consider it now or pay the consequences later.  You could always neglect it now, but look to change that in the future.  You would need to make sure that you do take care of it before you get as big as something like Twitter.

Now it’s a huge task for them since they have a ton of users using it all the time and they are looking to build reliability into a system thats already developed and running.  I hope they have the time and money to fix those issues because it really is a great service.  It would be a shame if I had to remove it from my sites completely.

So today is the big Firefox 3 release and starting at 10AM PST they are trying to go for a Guiness Book of World Records title as the most downloaded piece of software in one day.  If you want to be part of the action head over to the download site.

Noupe had another great post yesterday that collects some of the most common bugs, hacks, and fixes that us front-end CSS developers use on a daily basis.  Those fixes are broken down in the following categories:

1. IE Bug Fixes
2. Centering A Block Element
3. Column Issues
4. CSS Positioning
5. CSS Float Concept
6. Easier Rounded Corner Solutions
7. CSS Form Issues
8. Worth Checking Out CSS

If you are trying to learn CSS or just wanted to review some of the tips, it’s a good article to check out.

Jon Skypes wrote up a CSS performance test across browsers comparing CSS styling by no styling, by tag, by class, by descender, and by child.  While for most cases everything seems pretty close as far as Safari and Firefox goes and of course IE is a whole lot slower.  In real world applications you would never really have that many styles in your style sheet so in most cases I don’t think you would see a difference in speed.  It is interesting to note as these web applications become more and more complex this may be an issue.  As of right now I think we’re pretty far off before we need to worry about it.