I’ve had some recent issues with Firefox. Nothing that bad, just frequent crashes, corruptions, and an unwillingness to create new tabs with any sense of speed. I know that barebones Firefox probably wouldn’t have these issues and my problems are likely the result of some malicious script or bloated add-on. However, This would be the third time in two months I’ve had to wipe the software and start over clean slate.

Frankly, I’m sick of it. I love Firefox, but when software stops working for me in a repetitive fashion like this it’s time to find alternatives. I chose to go with Firefox’s cousin, Flock. Flock has many great social networking features already integrated (in fact I’m posting this from Flock itself, not a webpage in Flock, the application itself). It’s also based on the Mozilla Firefox codebase so the experience is very similar. I don’t have all my favorite add-ons, but i suspect porting them wouldn’t be that difficult.

Here’s to change!

As of tonight, I decided to discontinue pursuing future projects in the area of traditional HTML/CSS design. This is partly based on my mounting frustrations with the CSS standard, that despite being explicitly defined by the W3C, has never been fully and properly implemented by any browser. Every designer instinct tells me that CSS is necessary and not to use table designs, but recently I’ve found it increasingly hard to rationalize this as a benefit against productivity.

As far as I’m concerned, technology should be an aid in my pursuit of the holy grail of Design. If the technology is too old, or just not up to par with my needs and expectations, than I have no other recourse but to pursue other technology that lets me do what I want consistently and with the relative ease I expect. To this end, I have recently put much time into developing with Flex, and in the future plan on working with Silverlight (as much of an Adobe fan as I am, I’d be a fool not to learn more about the competition, for more info, see Blue Ray). I like pushing the edge, and to me, CSS feels like a hack to make HTML, nearly a 30-year old technology, look decent. Ditto on JavaScript in terms of AJAX (that aside, I love what JavaScript is, just not how it is used).
Another factor in this decision is a shift in career focus for me. While I intend on continuing my design skills, I find myself enjoying application programming more and more each day. I find myself more challenged with this, but challenged in a good way.

I find it so much more rewarding not to be fighting the technology, but instead fighting against my own lack of knowledge as I push myself into these areas of programming that are, at least to me, new. I don’t feel like I’m giving up on HTML/CSS. In fact if anything, I consider my journey through HTML/CSS based design complete. It’s been a mix of good and bad, but what I take from it are the lessons and the experience.

So here I am, feeling at a crossroads of sorts. While I find comfort in what I’ve learned, I feel the urge to push forward, and while my past and the present is important, in many ways they both hold me back.

Now all along you’ve probably been wondering about that little picture up there. It’s for the analogy I’m about to give you: Living as a developer/web designer is much like swinging along on monkey bars. You want to keep moving because if you stop too long on one rung, you lose your momentum, you risk losing your grip, and even if you want to start moving again, it’s not that easy.

RIP, HTML/CSS
2002-2008

Things have been quite busy lately. My last semester at college starts in a few weeks but I’ve already begun my final internship. Between coding ActionScript 40 hours a week, a 20 hour part time job in the evenings, plus one evening class and a slew of other projects, I really wish I had more time every day to do a few extra things. Hopefully this craziness will force me into really scheduling things, but so far I’ve just been running back and forth trying to get what I can get done when I can get to it.

Today I’m starting a pretty big visualization project for my college. I’m creating a large, photo-realistic, 3d visualization of the entire campus for the school’s website. I have to go around today and photograph around 70 buildings from all sides so I can get a really good idea how the buildings look. Probably going to be about 3 hours of photographing. Then I can really begin the project. I will, of course, post some progress images on here when I have the time. I will be using Autodesk’s Maya for the 3D visualization progress as well as Photoshop.