HellaNZB.com linked me up on their home page and I’ve started to receive a lot of interest in HellaPhone. I’ve decided to make some time to further complete HellaPhone and add functionality that I wanted. Since I created HellaPhone a few things have changed. The most important one is the introduction of iui. This will help greatly in bringing some interface improvements that I wanted to do the first time around.

I plan on adding live monitoring for the downloads and queues of HellaNZB. That is my primary goal. At some point in the future I would like to be able to support all mobile devices, but I don’t have the time nor the equipment to test with at the moment.

If anyone has any suggestions or features they would like to see, please drop me a line and let me know.

I logged into Zecco yesterday and noticed the site was broke. I was using Safari. The layout looked a little different (Most of it was broke), so I tried opening it in Firefox. Aha! It works, and it had been changed. I sent a nice email off to a contact person listed on the Zecco.com site.

The new layout is horrible for Safari. I haven’t tried it on my iphone yet, but it’s probably pretty similar.

Ok, so maybe not terribly nice, but as you can see from the screenshots, not un-truthful either. The following reply I received surprised the hell out of me.

Hello Buckley,

Let me start with the short answer: Zecco does not support Safari. The reason is this:

Zecco supports the following four dominant OS/Browser combinations:
Windows + IE6
Windows + IE7
Windows + Firefox
Mac + Firefox

We have tried to also support other (Mac) browsers, like Safari and Camino for instance. However, optimizing HTML code for these often means sub optimization for the four dominant OS/Browser combinations.

So please switch to Mac + Firefox.

Hope that helps. Thanks,

Zecco Editor

PS: I am a Mac and iPhone user too.

What really surprises me is that this is a fairly large broker who depends on it’s website for it’s business. We’re not talking about some small, short sighted “web development” house that is just ignoring a large portion of mac users.

It’s really a shame these days to not be cross browser. It’s one thing to not support some weird, hardly used browser, but Safari makes up most of the Mac users. The worst part is that it easier to develop for Safari and Firefox and gracefully degrade for IE. They support Firefox, but can’t make the layout work with Safari?

On the mobile front it’s worse now the iPhone is out. This is the most capable browser on a mobile phone. Before you Google geeks scoff, android uses webkit, as does Nokia highends.

It also says they support the four dominant browsers [used on their site]. Of course Safari will not show up there, it doesn’t work! How about, use web standards that degrade gracefully for stupid browsers (IE) instead of “optimizing” (whatever that means in his terms).

With that same type of thinking we as a society would not have anything new. Could you see any would be car company at the turn of the 20th century creating a new product and investing the time and money to sell it when no one was using cars. Of course no one was using cars, there weren’t any available yet.

It’s this kinda of reasoning that should be illegal for accessibility’s sake. It’s this sort of reasoning that keeps a 6 year old browser in the mainstream. No one wants to switch to a better browser when developers aren’t whole-heartedly supporting newer technologies. When I say newer, I mean 3-4 years old. When moron web developers who don’t know how to create a cross browser site, they encourage moron, Microsoft Systems Admins to discourage anything other than IE for their users just because they like to use a site made by inept web developers.

I’m surprised by this attitude mainly because the company runs like a web 2.0 company. They don’t charge for standard trades and they make their money on advertising and premium services. Hell, they even have a social networking section with an investing twist. Maybe I can help make enough waves to change this deficiency in the Zecco.com website.

I took my kids to the mall today to sit on Santa’s lap and get some photos of them. First I started with a 45 minute wait to get to Santa. There wasn’t anything near to entertain the overwhelming supply of kids under 5. I noticed a trend. By the time the kids reached Santa, they were cranky from standing in line for 45 minutes without anything to do. A decent operation would have setup some sort of winter wonderland (even if it is fake) to entertain the kids while the parents waited in line.

From a pure marketing standpoint, if the kids were entertained while waiting, then maybe they would be in a better mood when they were done visiting with Santa and would be more apt to travel the mall with their parents to spend money.

That’s not my real beef though. My problem is with the whole Santa visiting thing. I remember a time when Santa was hired by the mall to attract people to come in and… guess what, by more stuff! Then someone got the idea to add a new contraption called a polaroid and sell pictures on the spot for a few bucks. Fast forward a couple decades now every printer rivals photo labs and are far superior to yesteryear’s polaroids. Even prosumer dig cams are producing output comparing to some of the best 35mm SLRs used years ago.

Now Santa and his crew are paying rent to the mall, and are run by a photo studio. In other words $24 for one 8×10 instant print. They had other options too, two 5×7’s for $24. Those two were the cheapest instant packages. You could order the previous mentioned packages for $17 bones and wait, but I didn’t have that option. I was told that the lab shut down and the only packages available were the instant prints. Bullshit!

Let me get this strait. A studio, whose sole job is to sell prints, shuts down it’s lab. Right. Or maybe it is telling it’s employees to lie to customers to sell them a more expensive print. A photo studio does not shut down it’s labs just because it will be shutting down the santa display. It definitely stays open to keep processing all the business outside of this seasonal job. It really bugs me when the company blatantly lies to it’s employees, and in turn without thinking (like most people do), the employees spout off the same bullshit to the customers. And whats worse, people buy it!

I think I’m tired of this holiday becoming so commercial and materialistic.

Have a Merry Christmas everyone. Remember, don’t spoil your kids with gifts. They won’t remember the gifts a year later, but will always remember the time you spent with them instead of buying them off.

I now include the CakePHP framework with the download to simplify the install. I also gave it it’s own page here.

Newzbin.com is running it’s annual half off Christmas sale again. I usually top up for the maximum (52 weeks) and do it again the next year. iPhone owners, don’t forget to check out HellaPhone - my iPhone Interface to newzbin and HellaNZB