antiorario

Orme di Antiorario

U2’s web designer: funny or incompetent?

Here’s the notice at the bottom of the u2.com home page:

The site is designed for the widest possible access.

For best results, please use a recent browser, set your screen size to 1024x768 and install the latest version of Flash.

First of all, asking users to set their screen size to 1024x768 is misleading, if not just plain wrong: if a screen’s native resolution is larger than that, there should be no problem at all, and it would make no sense to lower it; if, on the other hand, the native resolution is lower, chances are it will be impossible to set it to a higher value. Not to mention the fact that changing a screen’s native resolution most often results in very bad graphics.

Second, “install the latest version of Flash”? Since when does that equal to “widest possible access”?

Orme

Events of the week (Jan. 5-11, 2009)

Last week was full of events, both in the real world and in my little world, where some news seems to arrive with uncanny lateness.

Macworld

In that real-world fantasyland that’s better known as San Francisco it was Macworld week. I think the best summary of it was provided by my Berkeleyan friends, Sheila and Lloyd, in a recent e-mail:

This has been the quietest Macworld week ever. You weren’t there – Steve Jobs wasn’t there.

I’m flattered that my absence didn’t go totally unnoticed. On the other hand, Mr Jobs’s absence was highly publicized, so much that I don’t need to explore it any further. Despite him not delivering the keynote, and leaving it to Phil Schiller, I don’t think it was as underwhelming as a lot of people claim.

Orme

My clean slate

After four and a half years of Orme (and ten years after I uploaded the first HTML file of what would later become Antiorario), I thought I was facing a turning point, considering the lack of posts (especially interesting ones) of late. Sure, the concept of “interesting” is always a relative one, but I realize that my Footprints, from this point of view, have been sinking.

One reason for this lack is definitely the abundance of writing I do outside Antiorario. (Such abundance notwithstanding, though, I always feel I never write enough.) I believe that even Twitter has contributed to this, due to its role of low-commitment pressure valve – one thought is enough for a tweet, and I can do that single-handedly on my iPhone, and I can be sure that those two lines, during those ten seconds on Twitter’s home page, will get read by more people than those who might feel like visiting Antiorario.

Orme

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