The Apple Macintosh, and Why I Dislike Having to Support It.

July 30, 2007 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Internet

So Apple claims that a growing number of people are using the Mac platform each and every day. If you Google around for “Mac market penetration” (and manage to avoid the inevitable penetration porn) you’ll probably find numbers that vary between 5 and 10%. An anonymous Las Vegas news & entertainment site which had roughly 1.5 million page views so far this month claims 5.3% of its users favor the Mac platform, and I, judging that to be an adequately sized pool from which to draw a conclusion from, will assume that number to be relatively accurate.

So, 5.3% of all web traffic belongs to Mac users. Ideally, that would mean that 5.3% of your sites profit is dependent on Mac users, whether you make money with ads, memberships, sponsorships, or other. But, lest we forget, we are living, in a Windows world, and I am just a Window girl (or boy), so in order to support the Mac platform, I must first purchase a Mac. Now, I’m not here to debate the merits/cost of a PC vs a Mac, I don’t care. Let’s just say that, for argument’s sake that getting a Mac will cost you, at a minimum, $1000 - it’s a nice even number. This would imply that you’re site would need to be generating $20,000 in profit in order to justify supporting a Mac.

Remember though, owning a Mac doesn’t make your site Mac compliant. You must use your system, and test your site on said Mac before you realize any real value. Let’s assume that for every hour spent designing a web application, you have to spend 10 minutes testing, of which 5 will be spent testing for a Mac. That’s 3 hours and 20 minutes of Mac testing per week, or rounding up for simplicity, 2 work days per month. An average salary for a programmer here in Alberta is around $45,000/year, implying that testing for the Mac platform costs a company around $4,500/year per programmer. As you may be able to guess, the larger the application, the more programmers involved, the higher the cost of supporting the Mac platform. So far, our application needs to be profiting $110,000/year in order to justify a lone programmer supporting the Mac platform. (We have three… *sigh)

To be fair, you probably only need to buy a new Mac every five years or so in order to maintain your rigorous testing regiment, so, if you’re the financial forecasting type, you’re spending $14,500 every five years so that 5.3% of your users have a marginally improved web experience, and that assumes you only have one person testing for the platform. To justify this, in that same five year period you’re site will have to profit $275,000, and remember, that’s profit. You’re still on the hook for developer salaries, software, bandwidth, hosting, rent, and let’s not forget, PCs. When you take into account how skinny some sites are running, that $14,500 could really be better spent on sales and marketing to the 94% of users happily running Windows, software upgrades, new PCs, or improved facilities.

Here’s the rub though, all of the sites I build strive to support Macs. Why? I suppose it could be a number of reasons:

• I believe in web accessibility, regardless of platform or handicap.
• I like the Mac platform and fully intend to buy one in the near future.
• Sometimes, honest to God, it just works, and you don’t have to change anything.

I’d have to say though, the number one reason why I support the Mac platform is because Chris Sealy, President and MOB of Statusfirm, runs a Mac, and he gets downright pissy when a site that he’s paying for doesn’t work for him.

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Not Everything is AJAX

July 24, 2007 at 7:33 pm · Filed under Internet

I don’t know when exactly it happened, but some time in the recent past the web community embraced AJAX, and for a while it was good. AJAX stands for Asynchronous  JavaScript  &  XML (while I agree that it’s probably in poor taste to use an acronym as a part of an acronym AJAX sounds a lot cooler than ALAXML, so you’ll just have to let it go). Here’s the thing though, AJAX isn’t a technology, rather, it is a methodology by which a web application can fake a persistent connection to a web host via JavaScript.

What AJAX is not, and this is important, is DHTML (Dynamic Hyper Text Mark-up Language).  DHTML, in a nutshell,  is using JavaScript to render changes to a static web page. I keep seeing links for AJAX web-kits, and all they do is animation, or tabbed navigation, or fancy pop-ups. What they do not do is use JavaScript to make a remote call to another page which then returns a response in XML.

While I would make the argument that neither of these acronyms are actually necessary - as “using JavaScript” is a perfectly good phrase to describe both methodologies - I would still appreciate it if those stuck on the pretense would at least use it correctly. While I don’t pretend to be an English major by any stretch of the imagination, at least I make an attempt to understand an acronym before I start throwing it around all willy nilly.

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I Am Unexpectedly Canadian

July 17, 2007 at 7:52 pm · Filed under General

At the ripe age of 26, I played hockey for the first time. I won’t pretend that it was pretty, or even respectable, but I was there; I laced up and I played. Sitting in the change room prior to - watching the other guys to see how they put on their equipment while trying desperately not to be “that guy” in the change room - I briefly wondered whether or not this was a wise course of action.

For a deceptively brutish and violent game the mere act of “suiting up” proved far more difficult than I first imaged. It was no help that I was missing a small, but important piece of equipment - a garter to keep my socks up. I realized my predicament when I saw Justin putting his on.

“What’s that?” I inquired.

“A garter,” he replied.

“What do you need that for?”

“To hold my socks up.”

For some reason it had never occurred to me before that moment that hockey players are all out on the ice wearing shorts and long socks. Without a device to keep my socks aloft, I was doomed to flash some thighthroughout the course of the night. It wasn’t a good look. Unfortunately it was potentially the least embarrassing aspect of my appearance that night.

I can’t skate. Well, hardly at all anyways. I suppose if I were to venture to Africa, construct and cool a rink, and challenge a few of the locals to a race, that I could beat most of them. Unless we had to stop and turn around. I can’t do that, so it’s more of a slow circle. I can’t skate backwards either, so I should probably rule that out too.

I must admit though, there was something absolutely fantastic about it. Something distinctly natural about skating around and chasing the puck. Watching hockey is nothing compared to playing it; finally having the opportunity to comprehend the skill and finesse required to do something so simple as pass the puck. I’m going back for more. It would seem that I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more hockey.

I have never been more Canadian. Not even that time I ate an entire package of bacon.

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