I recently stumbled across an interesting device on the internets, it has to do with one of my favorite puzzles of all time, the Rubik’s Cube (or Büvös Kocka, “Magic Cube” as they call it in Hungary). What is it, you ask? It’s an electronic version of the original puzzle. “Electronic version!”, I thought, “it must have a timer LCD on it, and maybe it even scrambles itself!”. Indeed, I was wrong. I sat there, in shock, as the original Rubik’s cube was being defaced, and even mocked by this abomination of a toy. It’s called “Rubik’s Revolution!”, which is basically a completely different, much easier game that looks like a Rubik’s cube. Is it challenging? Maybe if you find pushing buttons challenging, the goal of the game is much like those “Spider Stomp” games at arcades. Pretty simple, press the button if the light is on.

What does this have to do with Rubik’s cubes, you ask? NOTHING. Is this what American kids have come to? Simplifying this “impossible” puzzle by making an unchallenging, light flashing, button pressing game? I think even the Odyssey’s Chase game was harder than this.

Of course, a WOMAN was behind this ridiculous monstrosity. Even worse, it’s a celebrity. None other than Vanessa Hudgens, a star of some high school musical aptly named, “High School Musical”, which is most likely centered around the love tales of two very obtuse reggies. See a video here of her talking about how she started a “revolution”! Even more worse, she calls it an ‘improvement’ on the ‘old’ Rubik’s Cube.

Anyway, if you’re smart enough, you can buy a real Rubik’s cube and laugh while seeing morons trying to press those lights as fast as possible!

Happy iCal day everyone! Today is a very special day for Mac geeks all over the world. Its the day that is so proudly (albeit, archaicly) displayed on the iCal icon when it is not running. Unfortunately though, I’m a little too late to make my paper hat celebrating this fine day, but I think a blog post will suffice given that they are so uncommon these days.

Hope everyone is having a splendid summer vacation!

I was looking at the new iPhone commercials today, and I noticed that once again, the website chosen for demonstration of Safari on the iPhone was The New York Times’s website. I assumed that Apple chose the NY Times’ website because their pages have a decent amount of content on them with a mix of images as well. For some reason after watching the commercials, I had an urge to go to the NY Times’ website just to see what it’s like. First of all, I am a Safari user, I love Safari. As a web programmer/designer, I really appreciate Safari’s compliance with web standards. But I visited nytimes.com, the website looked like crap in Safari! Below is a picture:

As you can see, we’ve got all sorts of ugly stuff going on here. Content spilling off the right side of the container, broken images for some reason, misaligned columns, and not to mention, a non-fluid type layout.

This is so strange considering the iPhone is supposedly running “real OSX” and a real build of Safari! Here’s a picture of the iPhone displaying the NYTimes’ website:

Even in the ‘long’ mode it looks great!

Is Apple trying to tell us that Safari on the iPhone is actually better than Safari on the mac? What’s going on here!