Before moving to Hoboken about a year go, I lived in an industrial park section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Even though my living conditions have vastly improved (I’m in a browstone now), I still miss my top floor corner-unit 2000 square foot loft. I’ve lived there for about 3 years, went through over a dozen roommates and decided to move on across the Hudson in order to have a more convenient commute to work.
I’ve already written an article on my own frustration with Internet Explorer 6 as a designer / developer and posted a simple browser-sniffer script that redirects IE 6 users to a separate page on your site. This article focuses on testing your designs on other browsers, running on different operating systems. Besides testing your web layouts for discrepencies in your margins, paddings, font variations, other things to look for are transparency issues especially when working with transparent PNG files.
We all have our favorite iPhone apps, mine is Touchgrind, a multi-touch skateboarding game from Illusion Labs. Using your fingers, you control a skateboard with which you pull of various tricks such as ollies, shuvits, kick-flips, heel-flips, impossibles, 5-0, 50-50, crooks, smithgrinds, boardslides, tailslides, and darkslides in various combinations.
Designing and developing websites with valid W3C markup and having them even remotely function properly in Internet Explorer 6 is almost as frustrating as working with a client who’s idea of a beautiful button is using the default bevel options within layer styles in Adobe Photoshop. Instead of sacrificing usability and trying to fit a Ferrari engine into a 1958 Ford Edsel, I propose using a JavaScript sniffer and redirecting the visitor to either a separate page or directory on your site. That page can either contain IE 6 friendly version of your site or simply display some text copy explaining that IE 6 is not supported on your website.
