Webthoughts

After seeing this commercial for the PlayStation 3 on Monday Night Football, I will never sleep again.

That is by far one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen on television. What the heck was that?

I'm willing to bet that Apple probably wants to just forget this ever existed.

I find the number of Apple IIIs in this video somewhat disturbing.

So, I'm not really a Ford guy, but I think this is pretty cool. Here's the story (and lots of photos) of a guy who slapped a Peterbilt cab onto a Ford F350 frame and made a pretty sweet pickup truck out of it.

It took the guy three-and-a-half years (and who knows how much money) to build this thing. That's a lot of dedication and the results look great!

I downloaded the Safari 3 Beta for Windows today and took a look around. What struck me the most, interface-wise, is that Apple appears to have, at least in some form, ported the Aqua interface to Windows. Take a look at the following screenshots:

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

Interesting, no?

In the first screenshot, the default button (the "OK" button) even pulses like default buttons do on Mac OS X.

Now, there are a couple of different tracks you could take with this. The first is that Apple ported over the underlying code that generates the Aqua interface and all its widgets (the buttons, popup menus and the sort). But, that seems like an awful lot of work for very little benefit.

The second possibility is that Apple is faking the Aqua interface by simply drawing pictures of the widgets, similar to the way a website might draw a button, and then has custom code handling how the widget should look depending on the state of the mouse button. This even goes straight to recreating the pulsing look of the default button and the throbbing look of the progress bar in the downloads window. But again, that seems like an awful lot of work for very little benefit.

Why would Apple do this? If it is simply to try to show how "beautiful" Mac OS X's interface is, that doesn't seem to be a brilliant idea. Many Windows users don't like using Apple software on their computers (such as iTunes) because it doesn't look and feel like a Windows program. And iTunes, for example, uses mostly Windows-native widgets. Why would Apple depart even more from the way Windows behaves in Safari's case to the point of even recreating the Aqua widgets?

Don't get me wrong. I think the Mac OS X interface is a billion-times better designed and better looking than anything Windows could hope to muster. But still, this just seems like it might alienate people that Apple would rather reach.

Huh.

So, here's what I look like in Springfield—or at least as accurate as I could make it look. No receding hairline in real life, but what guy in Simpsons World doesn't have a receding hairline?

You can create your own avatar at the Simpsons Movie website. Sorry, it's all Flash-based, so there's no direct link.

I'm very much looking forward to this movie. Really, I'm not sure how they're going to make this a "bigger" event than one of their standard television episodes, but I'm still looking forward to it. This might actually be a movie I might go to see on opening night.

While I'm at it, I'll go ahead a mention that I live about 15 miles away from Springfield, Nebraska which is one of the Springfields throughout the country vying to be the site of the world premier of the movie. Go ahead and vote for Springfield, NE (even if Nebraska's movie isn't that great).

WAH! WAAAAHHHHHH!

If the courts actually side with this woman, I have some serious reservations about the future of this country...