I am typing this on my Macbook Air. A very pragmatic and great machine for me to use. 13 inch, really small and light to use on the plane, 8 GB of RAM, 250 GB solid state drive which makes video editing a snap; the works. I’ve been using a Mac for about 5 years now and I moved away from Windows because I was sick of having to use a larger part of my processor for virus scanning. Once switched to Mac using Windows also seems unwieldy and I would really miss my Terminal with Unix emulation.

I am not alone in this – at most conferences all you see is MacBooks in various forms and ages. When I started as a web developer this was different. Thinkpads with Windows were the big thing and Macs were too expensive and just not right to use.

Now, as someone working for an open source company it seems to be hypocrisy to use a system that is not open source, and believe me, I had my share of people telling me that it is just that. I run Linux on my servers, I had a Linux laptop, but I just did not get warm with it. Many things like watching movies and playing songs were too much of a hassle because of codecs not being open, I missed Photoshop, and I just didn’t find an editor I liked (that was some time ago).

The fact is that I am happy with the system, it makes me most effective in what I do and everything works and is beautiful. Apple is great at that. It makes sure things work when you stay in the world you have chosen to use. We give up things we thought mandatory (like replacing a battery) for convenience. We don’t screw new hardware in or change the configuration, in many cases this is not even possible.

And all of that is a problem.

Web developers in the Western world are not people using the web. We are much more of a technological elite than we want to admit. Whilst we discuss the merits of high retina displays and how to support them the average world-wide web surfer sits out there with a Windows box or a Linux machine or uses a hotel computer or something slightly resembling a computer in an internet cafe.

Other people only surf at work, on the windows box ghosted by their IT department with no discussion as to what goes on it as every piece of non-IT-certified software might be a virus.

We never suffer their pain, we just don’t know any longer. Using Windows to me now feels weird and I don’t enjoy it. I like my command line, I don’t want to click through layers and layers of menus and find checkboxes to activate.

But this is not who we work for. On the desktop a huge amount of people use Windows and will use Windows for quite some time to come. Does this mean we have to optimise things for Windows, and even older Windows with terrible versions of IE? No, cause this brought us the dark ages of the browser wars with “site only works in IE” solutions that drive us nuts right now. On the other hand it means though that we should not make the mistake to assume that everything works in IE and Windows just because it works in Chrome or Firefox on a Mac.

The biggest irony is that as web developers we’ve been complaining about Microsoft and its lack of standards support for our whole life, and now that Microsoft does support standards we optimise for prefixed and beta functionality in other, Mac browsers instead. It is the same mistake developers did supporting all the cool things IE6 promised to standardise or we told ourselves are “de facto standards” as “everybody has a Windows PC with IE6” back then.

I think we have to face the fact that IE will not go away, and that having a VM running on your Mac and testing in IE is a damn good test to see how your work will perform outside, where the users are. Yes, this is frustrating, yes, it is annoying and means having a VM on your computer and give up quite some space of your HD for virtual images that need to be re-created every 90 days but it is worth it. And Microsoft is dedicated to make it easy for people, as shown in their Modern.ie site with all the info and downloads you need. Of course, having IE on Mac and Linux would be the best solution, but IE being part of Windows’ core, this will never happen.

If we care about standards and about cross-platform support we should make sure our stuff works in IE - it does not have to be the same as in all other browsers, but it needs to work. I see far too many solutions actively blocking IE to ensure there is no testing needed. That is exactly what those sites that state “only works in a modern browser like IE6” did. I think we’ve moved on from this.

Our job is to create enticing and beautiful products for the people of the web. Just because we have access to power tools doesn’t mean we should concentrate on what they provide. Let’s lower our expectations on what is out there and concentrate on making things work. A lot of what we consider amazing right now might never be of any interest for our end users and should happen under the hood instead of being a “you need this to see what I did”.

Tomorrow I am flying to NYC for a week to squat in Queens and as I felt bad about not having a speaking date during that time I asked on Twitter and, lo and behold, was asked to give two quick tech talks next week.

On Tuesday I will be speaking in detail about FirefoxOS at the Flatiron Tech Talk Lunch Series by Reflexionsdata. I will concentrate not necessarily on building apps for the marketplace but on how to re-use existing web content and make it installable and findable with the app search of FirefoxOS.

The 2nd talk will be on Thursday, the 24th of October at 360i at 32 Avenue of the Americas, 6th Fl NY, NY 10013 in TriBeCa. You can sign up for this one at 360i’s Meetup page or the 360i’s Eventbrite page.

I will be speaking about “HTML5 Beyond the Hype: Current Issues & Near-Future Solutions”:

HTML5 has been sold to us as the new Flash and somehow fell behind in delivering that promise. The main issue is that the platforms that hyped HTML5 failed to cater to its needs. In this short presentation, Christian Heilmann of Mozilla shows what HTML5 can do in a more dedicated environment and how Mozilla pushes the standards with FirefoxOS. Learn how to worry less and deliver more for the next generation of users and browsers which are just around the corner

After this, I am off to San Francisco for the Samsung Developer Conference. See you there.

I am lucky that in my job I manage to come across amazing people all the time. In some cases it takes a while for them to come out of their shell and show what they can do. One of those is my friend Luz Rello (luzrello.com) from Barcelona. Here she is next to me with my friends Javier Usobiaga and Marta Armada when we met in Barcelona (and she asked me a few things about presenting on stage, which I happily shared):

Why is Luz amazing? Well, many things. For starters, she is an accessibility researcher with dyslexia. And she just delivered an amazing talk about “New solutions for dyslexia” at TEDxMadrid:

Now, I don’t speak Spanish, but seeing how Luz delivers a talk full of passion, movement and speed makes me not doubt at all that this will be soon translated in subtitles by TED and accessibility enthusiasts. And this makes me happy and this makes me hopeful for accessibility to get out of its niche in technology, education and digital literacy and become what it should be: a litmus test for content. If what you publish is easy to understand, structured and clear you will reach many, many people. In far too many cases what the final product looks like dictates how it is built, and that needs to change.

This is the kind of passion I want to see from accessibility advocates, these are the voices we need. Not another library to add ARIA to badly thought-out HTML, not another course that teaches web accessibility as pleasing screenreaders or text-to-voice tools. We need people who stand up and be passionate and bring information that matters and is up-to-date. Not guidelines from long ago that forgot that technology moves on. People like Luz, and people like you, if you are up for the challenge.

I have no doubt at all that Luz will move a lot in this space, and guess what? She does like to move it (from her Madagascar trip).

I am currently in Bucharest, Romania and yesterday talked about current issues with HTML5 and how Mozilla found solutions for them during the creation of Firefox OS.

photo by Ștefania Ioana Chiorean

The slides with notes are on Slideshare

There’s also an audio recording available on Soundcloud

It was good fun and I got some interesting questions from the audience.

Update: The recording of the talk is now also on YouTube:

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, these are my views, yadda yadda.

Today Google released the Google Web Designer (beta), a WYSIWYG editor to create HTML5 ads for Google AdSense.

The designer is an installable app for Mac or PC but seems to be an HTML app under the hood. The interface is very familiar to people who use Adobe’s tools to create ads in the past (yeah, the F(lash) word) and seems to be a directly catered to AdSense alternative to Adobe’s Edge suite.

Of course, when there is a new editor out, shenanigans are afoot really quickly and David Matthams scored the Twitter goal with his Google Web Designer creation of outstanding beauty (yes, this was sarcasm, yes, David’s creation is a joke).

Here’s the thing though: I do applaud Google for what they’ve done here. First of all, the tool creates CSS animated ads – not JavaScript driven ones and despite a few hitches (div class=”gwd-div-s33n editable editable editable editable editable editable gwd-gen-8p5fgwdanimation gwd-div-ydjn gwd-gen-8p5fgwdanimation-gen-animation0keyframe” being an interesting one) the code is clean, supports all the browser prefixes and a non-prefixed fallback and is editable by a machine and readable by a human.

The latter is a very important bit: getting on our high horse and trying to quarrel with the semantics of generated code like this is futile. These are ads. They are clickable videos, and their main task is to look pretty and get people to buy stuff whilst working in all environments. And this code achieves that goal quite well.

HTML5 needs tools, there is no question about it. And whoever had to work with ad providers knows that a lot of ads cause havoc with your memory consumption and page performance. This tool, at least, does not do that and uses Google’s fixation on performance.

So before we snigger at “the return of Dreamweaver or Flash’s fallback output”, let’s take a moment and remember that a lot of content out there on the web that pays our wages and bills is built by people who have no clue about HTML. And we are arrogant enough not to ever touch the projects they get paid to create.

So, I for one, am happy about more tools that are having a good start and hope they’ll go far. In this instance especially, I wouldn’t be surprised if that will be a part of the AdSense site sooner or later and I am extremely happy that it is not a Chrome App that does not work with other browsers, but a tool that people can use.