Kim Siever’s Blog

Interestingly enough I received two job applications tonight.

I am not hiring. In fact, I don’t even own a business. I do not even advertise myself as a business.

I find it kind of interesting though because it says something toward my branding efforts.

What else was interesting is that both applicants had the email subject of “Looking for a position”, were from Toronto, were marketing graduates, were both fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and neither included any information about HotPepper.ca in their email. Just a resume.

Chris Wilson, the lead program manager for the web platform in IE, announced on the IE Blog that IE 7 will be rid of many of the CSS inconsistencies that plague IE currently. To boot, it will also support PNG transparency. Oh how I’ve wanted this for a while.

Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.

Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely. For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs documented at positioniseverything.net so use of floated elements become more consistent.

Good work. I can’t wait for it to come out.

Firefox is playing around with keyboard navigation.

Although that idea is far from new, the spin here is that the keystroke combinations take users to the next link by visual position, not its place in the HTML source code. To move to a link immediately to the right of the current link, users would press Shift-Alt-right arrow.

Google is advancing personal search.

The new Google service, available starting Wednesday on Google Labs, tracks every search users have done when they are signed on to My Search History and it also lets them search all the pages they’ve found using Google.com’s search engine.

Users will be able to review the full text of any Web page they clicked on from a Google search results page. They also have the option to disable the service or remove particular searches from their history.

Even though it’s late, it’s still very cool. I don’t use Yahoo! so what do I care if they had the same feature already.

This has to be the hardest maze I have ever tried to complete. I am doubtful anyone could make it right to the end.

Google has gone outside of North america for Google Maps. It now includes the UK and Ireland.

I’m delighted to introduce Google Local UK and Google Maps UK. The Google UK office and a few of us homesick Brits in California have been helping out with the development.

In an announcement that is rocking the design blogosphere (Todd, Andy, Veerle and Mark), Macromedia has revealed they are going to be bought out by Adobe for over three billion dollars.

Macromedia agrees to be acquired by Adobe Systems for $3.4 billion, or 0.69 Adobe share per Macromedia share. The company sees first-quarter revenues exceeding $108 million to $113 million in guidance provided on Jan. 19, 2005.

This is a huge shock and one for which I was not at all prepared. I have yet to get the CS 2 suite or the MX 2004 suite and now they may end up being the same thing.

That’s all I need. It was hard enough to try and get my boss to buy me the MX 2004 suite. with Adobe owning it, now, the price is going to quadruple to be on equal footing of Photoshop and the like.

And with all the time and training i have put into ColdFusion over the last two years, I really hope CF isn’t dropped.

I am still not breathing.

Many of you may have seen the free iPod contest that has been circulating around the Internet. This is probably old news to many. The new thing though is that the contest is finally available to Canadians.

The deal is you sign up, choose one of seven offers (I choose a week supply of vitamins and paid 15$ CDN for shipping—cheaper than over 200$ for the iPod), then invite five other people.

If you want an iPod (for guys, read “need an iPod”), just visit www.freeipods.com.