The four demos shown to date display different (although related) aspects of the API, showing first multiple file uploads, then a drag and drop upload interface, next adding progress information (although this doesn’t work for me), then reading EXIF data from a JPEG image. You can imagine how these combined would be used for native drag and drop uploading to Flickr, for example.

The File API plays a big part in integrating the browser more tightly with the OS, particularly when combined with the drag and drop functionality, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the other browsers implement this. Congratulations to the Firefox team for their work on this, and hacks.mozilla.org for some great demos.

Which makes Mozilla’s latest invention, Prism, seem a bit of a weird step backwards;

Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

In other words, it puts web pages into a new window, but without the navigation buttons, menu options and address bar. Maybe I’m just a bit of an old traditionalist, but where’s the advantage in this? What reason would I have to run, say, my Gmail in a separate window rather than a tab? The main advantage seems to be that you can run applications from a shortcut in your desktop environment, but you can do that already by dragging and dropping a URL from Firefox.

I don’t know, perhaps it’s not aimed at me; perhaps there are some big enterprises that would find this useful, or people who only ever run a few websites (and really don’t like the address bar). Or, perhaps it’s unfair of me to judge this as it’s only a technology preview at the moment and there are a load of exciting features on their way.

But I’ve read the technical notes and the user experience puff piece, and I can’t get past the fact that it’s just a browser window with no buttons or menus. You know, I’m not saying it’s a bad project; I’m just struggling to see the point of it.

Perhaps there’s a killer app on the way which will make it all clearer.

While it doesn’t perhaps have quite the myriad of features that Adobe’s product does, it does have every tool I’ve ever needed (and a few more besides). Like Photoshop it’s equally good for photo manipulation and web graphics creation; this introduction gives a good overview of its functions, and there are more detail in the features and release notes pages.

The main criticism that gets aimed at GIMP is that the UI is difficult to use; I’d agree with that to a very small extent, but I think much of that comes with switching from a programme like Photoshop, and the latest release fixes many of the previous flaws. My main gripe is that there is no container window so you end up switching between windows too often on smaller screens; I’d also like to have folders to contain groups of layers.

Still those are only small complaints; the positives far outweigh the negatives and in general I think it’s a great bit of software which has saved me an awful lot of time and money. It’s very likely the most full-featured freeware application around, and I’d like to give my congratulations to the entire development team.

GIMP is native to Unix systems, but also works on both Windows and OS X. If you need more features than the average image editing software brings but can’t (or won’t) spend a fortune to do so, you need the GIMP.

Update: After ten minutes play, my initial thoughts are that, on the negative side, it doesn’t integrate well with the Windows look & feel, while on the positive side, it is very fast and the font smoothing is beautiful.

Researchers explore scrapping Internet — While I’m not against the idea of building a faster and more secure network, I am a little worried by the idea of a closed system based on proprietary software and run by companies with vested interests.

A Guide to CSS Support in Email: 2007 Edition — Thanks to Microsoft, CSS support in emails is actually moving backwards. The new Outlook uses Word as its rendering engine, and the new Live Mail drops support for many selectors.

Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid — I think web typography is this years big topic, and deservedly so. Graphics and design have progressed enormously, it would be nice to have type to support them.

HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web and Beware of XHTML — I think XHTML2 is a long, long way from being adopted as a standard by anybody, and while XHTML1 is parsed as HTML there’s no advantage in using it. Coding HTML4 strict is just as good, and that’s what I’ve taken to doing on many sites I build now.

Microsoft Unveils Silverlight to Power the Next Generation of Media Experiences on the Web — This is their attempt at taking some of Adobe’s Flash audience. I haven’t seen the software for creating Silverlight anims yet, but I actually prefer the implementation of this than I do that of Flash; Silverlight uses XML and Javascript to run its commands, so you can make live edits without constant recompiling. However, supporting only 3 OSs (Vista, XP and OS X 10.4.8) and a handful of browsers (IE6, IE7, FF1.5.*, FF2.0.* and Safari 2.04) doesn’t really qualify it as cross-platform and cross-browser. Miguel de Icaza gives a more detailed analysis of Silverlight, Flash, and an open-source alternative.

But I just can’t understand why anyone would use it.

The Gecko 1.8 engine is very good, but it’s not the most standards-compliant; both Safari/Webkit and Opera have overtaken it recently. Camino is fast, but noticeably faster than Safari and Opera? Not that I’ve seen.

Camino doesn’t have some of the features we take for granted from a modern browser; no RSS detection, for example. And it doesn’t have any extensibility at all, so Firefox has it beaten hands down on that score.

As for integration into the Cocoa API: Safari does that too, and is just as fast, and is more extensible, and has more features.

So it’s not the most standards-compliant, not the fastest, not the most extensible, and no more integrated into the OS X desktop than some other browsers; why would someone use it?

And that question’s not meant to be rhetorical; I’d genuinely like to know.

Did you wake up this morning and say “I wish someone would figure out a way to let me do less with my computer”?

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