Using Apache’s mod_deflate module, I’ve significantly lowered page size and load times on a few Fusion Bay projects and my personal website. Some load times have more than doubled in speed, from an intense loading time of 4-5 seconds to a measly 1 second.

The crazy thing about the pages that used to take a while to load was I always assumed it was the computer slowing things down due to a large amount of text to be rendered, not the size. I simply never paid attention! How silly.

I understand there are some issues with HTTP compression and older browsers that don’t support it properly, however I think this is a very unlikely scenario for 99.9% of our viewer-ship.

For more information on mod_deflate you can check out the Apache Documentation.

I personally used the simplest configuration possible, opting to do the following:

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    SetOutputFilter Deflate

The staff here at Fusion Bay read a lot of blogs. A few we read are written by popular Venture Capitalists — not because we’re looking for investments, but because they’re interesting to read and seem to have breaking news about new web services and technology companies.

I came across an article today on “The Penny Gap” which I thought was worth a mention: It talks about consumer based web applications and the difference in free vs paid-subscription revenue models.

The article talks about the negative trend of price vs adoption… the more you charge, the fewer subscriptions you receive. That seems logical: fewer consumers can afford your service the more expensive it is. But I wonder: Is there a price point that might increase your adoption? Will more consumers subscribe to something priced higher because they perceive it as higher quality? Or are higher quality things just more expensive?

In my last post, I briefly mentioned that I modify hotkeys for my applications in OS X. If you have ever wondered how to do this, it is quite easy assuming the item you want to create a hotkey for is in the main menu of the application. If it is in the main menu (File, Edit, View, Help, etc.) the file you’ll edit is usually called MainMenu.nib.

There is one caveat to this process. You’ll have to have the Xcode developer tools installed. I don’t know a way around this, but as a power user you should probably have this installed anyway so you can compile programs and do other nifty things.

1. To begin, right click the application you want to modify and select “Show Package Contents.”
   
2. Navigate through the Contents, Resources, and English.lproj folders.
   
3. Double click MainMenu.nib. It should have a pretty icon. If it doesn’t you don’t have Xcode installed.
4. Double click the MainMenu icon in the Instances tab that comes up and you’ll now see the menu as it appears in your toolbar in OS X.
   
5. And you’re done! You can navigate through the menu and double click any hotkey to replace it with something else. Just remember not to set two hotkeys to do the same thing! You’ll confuse yourself and your computer.
   
6. Oh, and don’t forget to save before you quit.

Tabs in applications are the new thing. They’re hip, they’re cool, they’re useful to organize and save screen space. They’re the closest thing you can get to “black” other than web 2.0. My biggest irk is that application makers can’t seem to come up with a standard for the keyboard shortcuts that will cycle through tabs.

Adium is an example of a great application that gives the option to choose how tab cycling should work:

Considering how varied this process is, I think the programmers/designers of that project stumbled upon a great idea that more developers should implement. There are so many good reasons to do this. It gives the power user a choice without going in and editing the resource file. I don’t want to do this each and every time I update your application. Let me save this in the preferences and be done with it.

I have cycled through a few preferences for the way keyboard shortcuts should work since I started using OS X. Recently, I settled on the Safari method for cycling tabs:

Every time I download an application that does not utilize the Safari method, I go through the process of manually modifying the resource file for the application, customizing the keyboard shortcuts as I see fit.

The following applications utilize methods other than the Safari method: Transmit, Firefox and Camino. I can’t think of anything else off-hand but especially when it comes to browsers standardization is vital!

I can’t give Firefox a really bad rap when it comes to tabs though, simply because Firefox has a feature that I really miss: The ability to go directly to tab 1, tab 2, tab 3, tab 4, etc. simply using the option + 1 shortcut. I wish more developers would do that.

My final thought on this is creating an application that would easily allow you to modify the keyboard shortcuts of any application in OS X would be really useful and might even make enough to support a small software company. Being a developer though, I’d rather just see developers allow for choices in their applications. In that sense, a free framework allowing developers to implement customized keyboard shortcuts in their application might be useful.

We’ve all seen web applications that require the user to do a repetitive task. Unfortunately, programmers often ignore how unnatural it is to go through a multitude of form fields, how unclean the design looks, and how hard-coding the number of elements one can enter at a single time limits the use of your application. Stick with keeping it simple, and keeping it simple means keeping things clean and intuitive. (more…)