Code Away

Opacity, Shadow and Rounded-corner control over rendered objects make CSS3 exciting stuff. Imagine creating a beautiful website with all these features, without using an image editing program! (ok, throw in @font-face and you have the font of your choice on the webpage as well. That’s it. Image editing is out)

Its safe to assume that not all developers will be using these features for mainstream websites unless our very dear IE supports them. So we still have time to see these beauties in action. But we have a lot of gray area for what happens when these are used together. The implementations are still juggling with these questions.

For example, what happens when opacity of a box is 50% and a drop-shadow attribute is used for the box? Or, what happens when a shadow drops on a box which is having less opacity? Should the shadow have rounded corners for a box with rounded corners? How should a shadow with bigger fade (black to transparent area) render on a shadow with smaller fade?

These are just some tricky “beginner” questions with no straight answers. Fortunately the community is pretty enthusiastic about rendering these effects with markup. Lot of such issues and fundamentals have been discussed.

In an image editor you can manipulate the effect rendered depending on which operation you perform first. This is not really clear for CSS, and with browser implementations which can vary, it might be a bit of a hassle for us to have consistent cross-browser CSS3 markup ready to use.

Perhaps the best example of converting an irritating popup into an “unobtrusive”, conveniently placed message is the “Remember Password” dialog of FireFox:

Upto Version 2.x

Version 3.x

It was indeed very irritating to decide whether I want to remember the password or not for some xyz website where I had just one minute of quick work to be done. Good UI always deserves applause. After all, for most users, the UI is the Application. Thanks FF!

The focus on usability has increased considerably in the past decade. Firefox, Ubuntu, Wordpress are all great examples of powerful software or systems which strive for ease of use. There is little surprise that they emerge as clear winners or strong contenders for pole position in their respective domains.

Some of the lesser known apps which provide awesome features are the Portable Apps Suite and my favourite virtualizer, Sun VirtualBox. I’ll yak a bit on the benefits of Portable Apps in this post, and cover VirtualBox later.

In one way, Portable Apps is a platform that should never have been required, let alone developed. But here we stand, with all our major desktop software for Windows machines - depending somehow, somewhere, on the Windows registry.

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Dependency on the registry isn’t required for all apps. Most should be able to manage configurations using a simple flat file akin to what *nix apps use. Efficient read of config property is not an issue at all; one can just load the config file and  store the contents in a map. But some developers anyway proceed to use the registry in order to hide the configuration from the user. Included in these are all those great apps which require a registration key or something of that nature to function. This key or identification, unique to the user, is stored in some obscure corner of the registry, so that the (regular) user cannot tamper with those.

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So back on line. To many of the users who were content with the Windows-IE-Office-Y!Messenger installations and need no more than that, the scenario above made little difference. But as increasing number of people found themselves using more than one (sometimes-malfunctioning, virus-infected) Windows PC, it became necessary to install and maintain all required software on multiple machines.

Enter Portable Apps. While this suite doesn’t provide any sort of portability between OSes (Windows, *nix, mac), it does give a very neat and clean platform for those who would like to develop applications running directly from a flash drive or external disk. Basically this means that the apps ought not to refer to Windows registry for state information or configuration. Many subsequently altered their code and came up with portable versions of their apps. The Open Source Software devs were some of the first to cover this ground, since none had any intention of locking the user with registration keys or the sort. Thanks to them, we have a humongous list of free portable software (some free as in freedom ). Better still, we have the most-used software already included with the portable apps suite. All this, with a very neat menu providing a list of all apps “installed” (basically just copied to a proper directory) in the external drive, and all documents stored.

For anyone with a flash drive of more than 256MB, this is a must-have. Not just for people regularly working on multiple machines, but also for those who visit relatives and would like to show them the new video on their flash drive, but can’t, because the Windows Media Player on their PC simply doesn’t work

My list of awesome portable apps:

• ClamWin antivirus
• Mozilla Firefox (always )
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• OpenOffice suite
• Pidgin
• DOSBox (good emulator those old DOS games)
• Sumatra PDF
• TrueCrypt
• GIMP
• VLC Media Player
• Notepad++
• uTorrent
• Skype
• IrfanView
• 7zip
• ImgBurn
• Winamp
• Filezilla