Jim Barraud

Today marks the release of Pronto - All is Golden. Pronto is the side project of Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen. Don’t let the Wilco association give you preconceived notions of the sound of the record. It’s less of the Wilco alt-country sound and more of a grass roots Americana sound. I’ve heard some refer to it as AM Radio rock. I’m not exactly sure what that is (I hear the older folks used to listen to it), but what I do know is that it sounds damn good and you should pick yourself up a copy at the the Contraphonic web store, iTunes or Amazon.

In addition to the new album, today also marks the launch of the new Pronto site. I assisted in the XHTML/CSS development and Wordpress implementation. Visit today to find out the latest band news, tour dates and sign up for their newsletter. They’re also on that hip new thing called Twitter, so you can follow them there as well.

Full Disclosure: The exceptional drummer of Pronto, Mr. Greg O’Keeffe, is not only a friend of mine, but also my employer. While that may insinuate some bias in my opinion of the album, it doesn’t. I’d just as openly let him know that it sucks if I thought it did… right after my yearly review.

Yesterday Apple released the public beta for Safari 4, their latest and greatest web browser. I’ve always been a Safari fan. It’s always seemed faster then the other browsers and has lead the way in implementing new standards and experimental features. And Safari 4 builds on that, while taking a couple missteps. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons.

Pros

• Speed. Safari 4 is significantly faster than any currently shipping browser and it’s very noticeable upon use. I say shipping because the current nightly builds of Firefox appear to be on par in terms of performance.
• Coverflow History. I’ve usually found browser history to pretty much useless unless you know the exact time your were looking at a particular site. Being able to scan through your history as a series screenshots is awesome and makes using the browser history much more usable.
• Topsites. While not particularly ground breaking (this was introduced with Google Chrome, topsites is a nice to have feature that will display your most visited sites as your homepage and notify you if they’ve changed.
• New Web Developer Tools. I haven’t had the time to fully try out the new web developer tools, but from my quick poking around I can tell they’re vastly improved over the previous version. Time will tell if they give Firebug any kind of run for it’s money.
• New Web Technology Support. I’m itching to try out some of the new standards (non-standards) support for upcoming web technologies they’ve added.

Cons

• Tabs at the top. Placing the tabs at the top of the window is an interesting choice, but I feel it’s done purely because google did it with Chrome. I don’t have so much an issue with the tabs at the top as much as I do with how they’re implemented. Now that the tabs are at the top in the window title bar, you can’t just drag anywhere on the tab to move it around. Doing that moves the window. You need to click and drag on the designated area on the far right of the tab to move it. You can also no longer double click anywhere on the tab bar to create a new tab, you need to click the designated button to do so. And visually having the tabs break up the title bar is a little jarring, especially when you have other windows layered on top of them as in the following image.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with the new Safari beta. And it is just that, a beta. I have noticed a couple bugs here and there, but no show stoppers. Like I said, my only real complaint is the new tabs, I’m just not digging them. Luckily there are a couple of hidden Safari preferences, one of which that allows you to revert back to the old tab style.

On twitter (my new favorite gauge of public opinion) I’ve noticed that the general reaction to the tabs has either been met with absolute dislike or the “going to try and get used to it” attitude. Along with a smattering of people who really like it. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds in further betas or in the final product.

It’s been a while since my last major redesign, so I figured now was as good a time as any to launch this one. I’ve ditched the single column stream of news format for a more traditional approach. With this design I was aiming to get a bit more organized in how I’m presenting content on the site. Two sections in particular that I wanted to break out were my photography and projects I’ve worked on. Each of these now have there own separate sections on the site.

I’m not going to go too much into detail with what’s changed visually or technically. I’ll just invite you to check it out and let me know what you think. I’m still cleaning up a bit of the code and will probably be making tweaks over the coming weeks, but overall I’m pretty happy with this one.

One thing I will mention though is that I’ve completely dropped support for IE6. So the 36 of you out there who are still using it to visit this site will get a completely unstyled experience. It’s time to upgrade people.

As a followup to my original Email Newsletter Makeover post, I wanted to share the latest Mini email newsletter I received this morning. It’s an improvement in that I can actually read the header and footer text and they are more effectively used img alt tags. But there’s still a lot of room for improvement. For example, why is all the main text your writing in order to sell your product embedded in an image?

Below are screenshots showing the email with images off (default) and images on.