Time for a traditional post launch pint.

They’re not cheap. There’s a booking fee and a transaction fee. What’s this though:

Brilliant! Only one transaction fee for the two tickets. So generous.  But hang on:

Hmm. Nice.

I think we’ll not flush the toilet for 4 days, throw some mud over ourselves and watch the bands on the goggle box instead.

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

My personal favorite being:

2. “My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers. I think that says it all really.”

Dave’s favorite phrase is “That won’t take you too long” which we have his permission to kick him any time he says it. No one has taken him up on the offer….yet.

37signals reports on something interesting about the relauch. Apple have stated that they won’t be supporting IE6. There’s speculation that a major player like Apple (re)launching a major web app like this without IE6 support may herald the beginning of the end for IE6. I dunno if that’s true, but I think it’s fair to say that we (along with web developers eveywhere) certainly hope so.

Because of its poor support for web standards like CSS, IE6 adds time to the development of websites and applications. Sometimes not much, sometimes a lot. It’s probably on the receiving end of more in-office rants than anything else here at White October. But unfortunately for us, loads of people still use it and if our sites don’t work or look rubbish in it, then our clients’ users will, likely as not, simply move on and never return.

But how many people really use it? I logged on to Google Analytics and grabbed some rough and ready recent stats for our own site and that of one of our clients. Here’s the all browsers breakdown for the White October site:

and of the 40 (ish) % of those using IE, here’s the breakdown of versions:

So, a significant number of IE6 users. And here’s our client, all browsers first:

(interesting to see PS3 in there but what is BDUE when it’s at home?!). And (bearing in mind that 86% are IE users) the IE breakdown:

A similar %age of IE6 users but more overall since there are significantly more users using IE on the client’s site than ours.

Obviously these are very quickly grabbed stats from which I’d be wary of drawing significant conclusions, but I think it’s fair to say that we’d have a hard job justifying choosing to not support IE6.

So here’s to hoping that more big companies and sites make big public announcements about not supporting IE6 so that we can finally send all our ie6.css stylesheet files to the recycle bin (and then empty the recycle bin).

The problem comes once again with Flashblock, the Firefox plugin I use to kill off resource hogging Flash ads in web pages. I’ve blogged about the BBC falling foul of this already. Here’s what I saw when I viewed the article:

All those lovely headings replaced with the big shiny Flashblock F. Here’s how it should look:

Again, I’m certainly not knowledgeable on Flash text replacement. But after a bit of Googling, it seems as though the sIFR technique is the way forward here. The folks behind this have worked with the Flashblock developers to ensure that for those who are blocking their flash, they see the text (albeit in a normal boring font) rather than the big F. When I look at the sIFR example page, that’s exactly what happens.

I’m not sure what technique the chap behind the David’s Kitchen blog is using, but I think it probably needs reviewing. But perhaps he’s so busy working on “web 3.0 and other deliciousness” that he doesn’t have time for Flash-shy luddites like me.

Whilst researching all this, I was pleased to discover that something that had been troubling me about Flash replacement probably shouldn’t. Does Google dislike the technique? The answer it seems is,  if it’s done right, probably not:

http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/05/05/image_replac/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html