If you browse around the internet these days, you’re bound to come across a website that has an intro page. Usually this page allows you to choose whether you have a high- or low-bandwidth connection. If you select the high-bandwidth option, you invariably get taken to a Flash version of the site, while the low-bandwidth version of the site is static HTML.

When faced with these types of choices, I often forget that one should always pick the low-bandwidth option, even if one is using a high-bandwidth connection. The main reason is that these Flash sites often have annoying background music or annoying animations. From a site design perspective, Flash is best used as a supplementary web technology. A website shouldn’t be designed entirely in Flash. Some core reasons for this are accessibility and search-ability. Google and other spiders cannot crawl a Flash web site as easily. Not to mention the fact that these types of sites always have some crazy navigation scheme and flashy transitions between sections that make it very difficult to navigate around, because it doesn’t fit the typical web mold. Finally, Flash sites are typically absolutely scaled at a specific resolution, which means they don’t look or work great if they’re not at a specific window size. To combat this, they’ll pop open a separate browser window at the specific size they want. Talk about annoying! There is very rarely any need at all to design your site in Flash completely. Many Flash-only site have a stripped down HTML version of the site, hence the intro page where you pick which version you want to see. Since you already have to create an HTML version of the site, why not scrap the flash site and focus your attention on making the HTML site much better?

The trend of completely Flash-based web sites has declined dramatically in the commercial web of late, which is a great development. Instead, sites are using Flash as a way to add a bit of pizzazz to the site in strategic places, or to add a slightly more interactive portion to their site. Judicious use of Flash in this way is good.

The next time someone tells you that you should design your entire web presence in Flash, or have two versions of your site, shoot them.

I had to buy a new tube of toothpaste the other day. This isn’t something I do terribly often. I live alone, and even with my braces, which requires a more stringent dental hygiene regiment, I don’t go through a tube that quickly.

But as I browsed the seemingly endless toothpaste section at my local Fred Meyer, looking for a tube, I realized that I have never bought the same type of toothpaste twice. I get to the store and I realize that I don’t know what type I bought last time, and all of the tubes look the same and have frustratingly similar names. Did I get Mint Zing last time? Or was it Fresh Mint? Maybe it was Minty Fresh… Yeah, it was Minty Fresh.

Nope, it wasn’t Minty Fresh. It wasn’t even Fresh Mint or Mint Zing. It was Mega Mint with Scope, Baking Soda and Peroxide Whitening ++. Sigh. Why does it have to be so hard to buy freaking toothpaste?

I managed to snag a Wii this past weekend at Target. It was a bit of a chore. I spent seven hours in 30 degree weather with 20 other brave souls who dared tochallenge the elements. I brought my heavy coat, a couple of blankets, a folding chair, and some reading material, and settled in with the other friendly members of the line around 1 am on a Saturday night. I was 10th in line, and at about 3am the night shift manager walked out and told us that they’d “probably” have 21 Wii’s. The info was accurate, and at 8:30am, a very tired, cold Tyler walked out of the store with a bundle of Japanese electronic awesomeness.

When I got home I plugged it in and got everything wired up. It was pretty straightforward. I didn’t have component cables yet, so I had to use the composite cable. My gosh, does 480i suck. Ever since I got my new 50" plasma last month I haven’t been able to watch low quality signals for long. I had initially planned to wait to get the component cable, but I ordered one from Nintendo the very next day. They must have shipped from Redmond, too, because I got it the following day, which was awesome. 480p makes the picture less nauseatingly bad.

Anyway, the Wiimote is surprisingly easy to set up and use. Just put the sensor bar in the appropriate location, and you’re pretty much done. I expected to have to do some sort of calibration like you do on a PDA touch screen, but there wasn’t any. Mnoving it around to select things on the screen is easy, and it has a very mouse-like feel. One of the coolest things is that it can detect the orientation of your hand, so if you hold the Wiimote upside down, the pointer icon on the screen goes upside down as well. This capability is important in games too, most notably in Wii Sports Bowling. Pretty cool stuff from a technological perspective.

I had a ton of problems getting my Wii on the internet, though. I still haven’t gotten it working with my own network. I’m mooching off a neighbor’s until I get mine figured out. I keep getting random errors when testing the connection. The Wii of course just gives you an error code, and then you have to look it up on their support website to try and figure out what it is. And then, you have to type in the error code and hit search, because they don’t just have a flat list of the codes and what they mean. And to add insult to injury, they have ranges of error codes that all have the same recommendation. Change the wireless channel to 1 or 11. Check your SSID, blah blah blah. None of it has worked for me. This is one area where I think Microsoft really has it down when you compare the 360 experience to the Wii.

Once I got it online, updating it was painfully slow. It took about a half hour to get all the updates downloaded and installed. Compare this to the 360, which has taken less than 3 minutes for every update I’ve ever applied.

The Wii UI is very minimalistic. There’s not a lot of color, just grey, black, and white, and the occasional blue. And it has this annoying pinging sound that it makes whenever you’re applying an update or testing a wireless connection. It gets to you after awhile. And the Wii Store has this background music that is fun at first, but you get sick of it real quickly.

After all of the fooling around with getting it online and updated, I was pretty frustrated. It took me the better part of the day to get it up and running. So when I finally decided it was time to play Wii Sports, I was in a kind of bad mood. But within 5 minutes of standing in front of my TV, gesticulating wildly, my attitude had changed. Wii Sports is just freaking fun! I majorly suck at baseball and tennis, but I bowl pretty well, and I find boxing pretty fun. It took me awhile to figure out that I could use both hands while boxing. Yeah, I’m an idiot.

I also got Zelda, but I haven’t played it yet. I also have a ton of GameCube games that I haven’t tried yet. That is one really cool thing – my Wavebirds are still useable, as are my memory cards with all my save games. I could fully retire my GameCube if it weren’t for the Gameboy Player, which I use to play Gameboy games on the big screen.

I still have a lot of stuff to check out. I added Patrick to my address book (seriously, this is a painful experience compared to the Xbox Live accounts and friends list. A 16 digit number? Come on! I can’t remember that to tell my friends!), so hopefully we’ll be exchanging Mii’s soon. Not sure what that means, but no doubt it will be a cultural experience.

It’s clear that this console was designed by a Japanese company. The design and focus are very different from something like the 360. And that is awesome! Variety is good. I look forward to better online experiences as they roll out new services and channels. There’s a lot of potential, and just like Xbox Live, it’s going to take some time to really grow.

Until then, anybody up for a round of Wii Bowling?

A lot of people have made a big deal about the limitations of the Zune wireless functionality since it was released a few weeks ago. While I totally agree that there is a lot of untapped potential with the device currently, there is at least one “obvious” omission that people have pointed out that simply isn’t a good idea, to be honest.

I’m talking about syncing to the device using the wireless. Sounds cool, right? You just walk into your apartment, turn on the Zune, and Boom! All of your music is synchronized to it. But what people don’t seem to realize is how slow this would be. The maximum bandwidth for USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s, or 60 MB/s. 802.11g, on the other hand, has a maximum raw data rate of 54 Mbit/s, or about 24.7 Mbit/s net throughput. Now, by applying some simple mathematics:

480 / 24.7 = 19.4332

This means that syncing to your device using wireless would be roughly 20 times slower than using USB 2.0. Even if we assume the theoretical max data rate for 802.11g, which isn’t realistic, to be clear, you’re still looking at a transfer speed that’s ten times slower. And don’t even think about using 802.11b. Frankly, this doesn’t sound like a good idea.

“So what?” you say. “I can leave the Zune syncing all night and it’ll be ready to go in the morning. Speed isn’t a real issue.” OK, fine. You walk into your apartment, you turn on your Zune, and it starts syncing. You go to bed. You wake up the next morning, and your Zune is finished syncing, but it’s battery has also been drained. Good luck using it on your commute.

So what do you do next time? You plug it in so it can charge while it’s syncing. But at this point, why not just plug it directly into your computer to sync and charge at the same time, at a much faster rate? So to me, it’s clear that isn’t really a desirable feature, and I’ll bet that some Program Manager on the Zune team came to the same conclusion.

One thing that I will point out, however, is that many times, when you sync, you’re not syncing that much data. Your library hasn’t changed that much, and the only thing that’s being synced is play counts or updated track info or something. In that case, this feature might make sense. The amount of data wouldn’t be large, so the process wouldn’t take long and the battery drain would be minimal. There might be some scenarios where this feature would be useful. However, I think that a lot of people had a knee-jerk reaction and haven’t really thought through the ramifications and technical limitations of that feature. But hey, that’s what we PM’s get paid for, right?

My friend Patrick managed to get his hands on a Wii, and I am a bit jealous, to say the least. My own weekend Wii hunt did not go well, but I plan to persevere and head back out next weekend. Supposedly the Redmond Target is getting a bunch in on December 17th, so I’ll be standing in line if you want to join me.

However, this post is _really _meant to be about Microformats, an interesting little technology that allows you to add a bit more metadata to existing markup, ostensibly to provide a better way to work with that data and leverage it in unique ways. I learned about it at the Gilbane Conference a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to do some checking to make sure you could leverage them on your MOSS site if you wanted. Seems like you can, as this post suggests.

If you view this post in Firefox you’ll see a little icon next to Patrick’s picture above. This is done using CSS, but you won’t see it in IE because IE doesn’t support :before and :after. But anyway, this isn’t all that interesting, because I could already do that using CSS. What _is _interesting, however, is if you go to http://inside.glnetworks.de/2006/06/05/microformats- have-arrived-in-firefox-15-greasemonkey-06/ and download the Greasemonkey script there. Then return to this page, and you’ll see that miraculously the following menu has been added above Patrick’s name:

Nifty, huh? If you’re using that same Greasemonkey script you’ll also notice that the text above about standing in line to get a Wii at Target is an event that you can add to your calendar:

All of the data in the sentence I wrote is wrapped in some appropriate tags that a compatible client reader (Firefox + Greasemonkey script in this case) can parse out and act on. Plus, because it’s well-known markup, there’s a nice backwards compatibility story for downlevel clients. For example, looking at this page in IE is pretty boring, but stuff lights up when you use Firefox and the script.

Anyway, this all goes to show that there is a lot of opportunity for Microformats to take off if there’s better client support. Just consider RSS - now browsers inherently know how to read some markup in the header of the page and automatically detect RSS feeds on a page. It’s not hard to image a time when Firefox will include the functionality currently offered through the Greasemonkey script natively. Plus there’s some great tools already out there for dealing with this type of data. Just check out this link to Technorati, which will automatically parse out the hCards on this page and let you download them as vCards.

I could also write some code that runs on the server and outputs special JavaScript and CSS when Microformats are encountered. Then no client side support would be necesarry. I’ll be looking into this in the next few weeks. Anyway, I think there’s a lot of potential to include Microformats in more places on my site, so keep your eyes peeled.