Recycling

I’d always wondered how they separate the different material-types in recycling:

Now I know.

This is a Local Search Engine for Local People… etc…

Google Blog AnnouncesGoogle Local for the UK.

Cor Blimey guvnor – where’s the nearest eels, pie and mash in this manor?

Natural Date Formatters are Cool.

The Cocoa Frameworks on Mac OS X have some very cool things in them.

One of the very, very coolest – that relatively few people know about, and I should imagine even less people use, are NaturalDateFormatters.

Bascially they allow you to enter a date in English-like syntax, and it will be automatically converted into a form that the computer recognises.

e.g. It’s a friend of mine’s birthday today, and another’s was a couple of days ago. I realised that I didn’t have their birthdays in the Address Book, so I added them pretty quickly, without ever looking at iCal – or clicking on the clock to get the date.

Here’s how: (2.4mb MPEG-4 Quicktime Movie)

Cool, n’est pas?

p.s. Rendez-vous’s new name (‘Bonjour’) is terrible.

Meteor

Meteor

Sigh… Yet another Flash game to destroy your productivity…

caveat: I found Flash in Safari too slow to play properly, although I may have had too many windows open – and it’s a nightmare with a trackpad.

Safari bathing in Acid2

Designing for the web can be very frustrating.

Here’s the famous workflow:

1. You code your design to the w3c standards.
2. Check it in the (relatively) standards-compliant browsers.
3. Take a deep breath.
4. Check it in MS:IE
5. …weep, and spend the next two days hacking around IE’s quirks.

IE:7 is coming – and alas, it may not change the situation…

The WebStandards Project have now unleashed The Acid2 Test.

Dave Hyatt (Safari’s Lead Developer) is relishing the challenge and seems hell-bent on making Safari the first browser to render the test properly. Even better – (and unusually for an Apple employee) – he’s telling us all about it on his blog.

(edit: Dean Edwards gives some interesting starting prices)

Any other Apple Employee showing the same level of transparency would be instantly sacked. But because WebCore is OpenSource he can, and does – and that’s groovy.

The flip-side of the coin is the IEBlog – a strange place indeed, which I have a morbid fascination with – no two posts seem to be written by the same person and it doesn’t even validate.

Reading the posts being ripped apart in the comments is always fun though… The latest post – Internet Explorer and Connection Limits is a gem.