Sam Soffes

Being a professional web developer (that is someone who makes there living by developing web), I think myself, as well as other professional web developers, should have some what of a say in what they will be developing for. All we really care about is the engine. I’ll explain.

I saw this story about the browser war on Digg and started thinking about how dumb all of this is. People are arguing about which browser should be the new mobile platform in the comments. Firefox, Flock, or Opera were the options. First of all, Firefox is running Gecko. That is the engine it uses to render (X)HTML, CSS, etc. so you can see it (in other words it takes code and makes it pictures on your screen). Flock is running Gecko too, although a newer build which was funny to me. They are the same thing with just different wrappers on them. (Even Netscape in all of its crappiness is running Gecko now.) Opera, Safari (which runs WebKit), and Internet Explorer all have there own engine.

The fact that people are comparing Flock, Firefox, and Opera amazes me. I really don’t like Opera. It’s slow, ugly, and not very user friendly. I rarely check my stuff in it because so few people use it. They do have a few innovative features, but overall I don’t like it. Flock is cool. I like that they’re trying something new, but I still like Firefox over Flock. As far as my personal preference goes for a browser, I like Safari. It looks nice, it’s quick, and easy to use. What can I say, I like Apple? When I’m developing, I always use Firefox because of FireBug, an awesome web development plugin for Firefox. The ugly form fields bug the crap out of me though. If they’d fix that and make it faster, I’d switch from Safari.

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I’m getting tired of my green and gray with leaves. I think I go trough more of website designs than I do desktop backgrounds. (Speaking of desktop backgrounds, InterfaceLIFT has some great ones.) I am currently working on a new one that is very CSSy and very text focused.

I really liked how my new design looked in Photoshop with Myriad Pro Light. It just didn’t look as good with Lucida Grande. I just happened to mention to my friend Sam McDonald. He reminded me of sIFR. I forgot all about sIFR and how awesome it is.

sIFR uses some Javascript and Flash to replace certain elements on the page with flash versions with the non-web font. It’s kind of hard to explain. Check out Mike Industries for and example or his post about sIFR.

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Christmas is coming a little early for me this year. I just purchased an Insignia 26-inch LCD HDTV. It was only $379 at Best Buy. It’s a pretty good TV. It was really cheap so I didn’t expect it to be fantastic, but so far, it’s pretty nice. I only bought it because it was cheap. Since I have this nice new HDTV, what am I going to do with it? I guess I’ll have to buy an Xbox 360. So I did.

It’s pretty nice too. I really like the 360. I was going to buy a Wii, but I changed my mind. I figured that, at the end of the day, I’d rather sit on my couch and play Halo 3 or something instead of run around and play tennis or something physical. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of video games. I thought the whole point was to be lazy. The Wii is awesome if you have a group of people. If it’s just me in my apartment, I’d rather play the 360.

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So today, after moving my musings (or blog if that’s what you want to call it) from my own engine that I wrote in CodeIgniter, to WordPress (which is also fantastic), to nothing, and back to WordPress, I have finally landed in ExpressionEngine. Since I am using ExpressionEngine is multiple places now for work related things, I figured it would probably be good to use it on my own to get more familiar with it.

ExpressionEngine is awesome. It is really flexible, powerful, and still easy to use. I am using it currently at Southeast for the Student Ministry web sites. It works really well for us there. I know that LifeChurch.tv is redoing their website in ExpressionEngine as well. They all love it too.

The cool thing about ExpressionEngine is that it is built by the same people that built CodeIgniter. ExpressionEngine uses a lot of the same core classes that CodeIgniter uses. From what I’ve heard, writing modules, extensions, and plug-ins is really easy. I haven’t written any yet, but I will be soon for work related things. I’ll probably get a podcast maker of some sort going here in a bit.

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So I bought Logic Studio. It's awesome! I haven't even scratched the surface yet. It's awesome to know that you have all of the tools right in front of you to make any sound you could possibly think of.

I have had the Behringer FCB1010 for awhile. It's a MIDI controller with 10 stomp boxes and 2 expression pedals. I have only spent a few hours playing with MainStage with it. It's going to be awesome! I am really excited about having an awesome guitar rig.

I think I am going to sell all of my analoge pedals, pedal board, power supplies, and Mbox. I'll probably just buy a better audio interface and save the rest. I've been having latency issues. I need to test my setup with some different interfaces.

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