This is what utilities look like with the new windowing system.

One of the more obvious changes are utilities. We’ve launched our first two: a message center utility, and a centralized task list. Both of these aggregate information across all your accounts, and let you work with that information from anywhere in Smibs via the navigation bar. This magic is performed by the windowing script I wrote about a few months back. You can drag, resize and adjust columns. We even carried over some tricks like holding down shift to select multiple messages. After working with desktop browsers, our interface should be really intuitive for users.

The next trick is less obvious, but even more useful. While Ajax is great for loading data from the server without reloading your webpage, the back button stops being useful. Doorbell used to jump back to the Dashboard when you pressed the back button. I am now proud to announce that we no longer suffer from this annoyance. Thanks to a handy tool called HistoryKeeper, we can now use JavaScript to add items to the browser history in the form of anchor tags. This may result in a messy url, but now Doorbell keeps track of your history for more that 4 items. Once you have browsed through several contacts, groups, or opportunities you can use the back button to search through a true history of your browser.

We’ve had a lot of fun building Smibs and Doorbell, and hope that you’ll have as much fun using them. Login, check it out, and let us know what you think. We love feedback.

It is actually quite possible to draw lines on the screen. An excellent explanation of an efficient method can be found at http://www.p01.org/releases/Drawing_lines_in_JavaScript/ (I believe it was written by Mathieu ‘P01′ HENRI) I recently turned this method into a Prototype class with some useful functionality.

My demo is at http://lines.live2code.ca (Tested on IE7, IE8, FF3 & Safari)
or you can check out the code at http://github.com/forrest/javascript-line-class

Big reason #1 for not upgrading: “Upgrading may break our current apps.”

IE6 behaves differently than every other browser, so it requires more development time. It is a last generation browser which doesn’t support many newer features. It is half the speed of most modern browsers (on a good day). This limits new applications, not to mention the price increases that accompany longer development processes. Google has been actively pushing people away from IE6. When you log into Gmail with IE6 you get a “Get faster Gmail” message which encourages you to switch to Chrome or FireFox. Even 37Signals has dropped support with an explanation of IE6’s limitations at http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-phasin.html. It is much easier to upgrade an app to a modern browser, than develop modern apps to run in IE6. While these organizations may need to spend money on upgrading older applications, they will save money in the long run because all their new projects will be quicker and easier to develop.

Big reason #2 for not upgrading: “We don’t know the security and compatibility implications of upgrading.”

Even Microsoft has decided it is time to move on. They have announced that they will stop actively supporting IE6 in June. It will be grandfathered in, but will receive no more compatibility and security updates. If this isn’t an indication that it is time to move on I don’t know what is. In 2009, Secunia, a computer security company, reported 142 vulnerabilities compared to the 34 in Firefox (http://secunia.com/advisories/product/11/). I wonder how long it will take for IT departments to catch on that upgrading will be cheaper and easier than trying to support software that even the company that wrote it won’t support.

If anybody else has complaints about IE6, let’s hear it.