Looks like Google Chat has implemented sound notifications. DownloadSquad reports that "Oddly, you need to have Flash enabled in order to hear the ping". Not exactly odd to me, as I mentioned before, there's no nice cross-browser way to do sound in the browser currently without using Flash. Kudos to Macromedia/Adobe for being so widely deployed and useful in this context. If nimble browser development camps like Mozilla could follow Opera's lead on implementing HTML5's Audio interface this would be a Good Thing.
The Mozilla folks are wrapping up discussion on how Firefox 2 user interface will change. Some of the things I like, but I still don't see my biggest pet peeve about the Firefox User Interface (UI) addressed: I absolutely hate the way that Firefox 1.5 squeezes the Search Bar next to the Address Bar like some inconsequential widget. For me, it's one of most heavily-used things in the user interface. This entry will show you how to tweak the user interface (sometimes called "chrome"). You don't need any heavy programming skills for this. Basically you need to be comfortable renaming files, unzipping and zipping up directories and editing text files. Read the rest of this entry ...
We attended the third and final Web-Based Games Round Table session hosted by Brian Robbins at the GDC this morning. It was focused on the production/design aspects as opposed to the commerce and community issues of the previous two sessions. Read the rest of this entry ...
Renesis finally released their pre-alpha technical preview SVG player. My biggest complaint is that it's a standalone player that can't access the web, but I'll keep my complaints to a minimum because they've finally made good on their promises to release something. The sample SVG files that come with the player are nice, though!
On another front, Firefox's SVG Blog mentions that support for the SVG <textPath> element will likely be included in Firefox 2, which is good news. The alpha for Firefox 2 is due out next week. The earlier the better, I always say. Get it into more hands for testing. Hopefully they can also squeak in the DOM support for text that tor mentions.
Looks like the latest Opera 9 weekly build will be slightly delayed. Borg says they've made a lot of progress, hopefully this includes fixes to their proxy server issues which is preventing me from using the browser behind a firewall. We can always hope for improved SVG support too...
I reported about a month ago that Windows Live Mail (what will be the next Hotmail) didn't support the Mozilla Firefox web browser very well. It looks like they've done an update since then because now I'm able to reply, forward and move my mail messages around using Firefox. Too bad the latest Opera 9 nightly build is still horribly broken (can't get through a proxy), so I can't check that...