Binary By Accident

Jakob Nielsen wrote two weeks ago about the problems with PDF files. I held off linking to it since he promised that his next column would cover solutions. Today he revealed his solution, which is a good step forward.

His best advice, however, was:

It’s actually not very expensive to, say, create a set of Web pages for annual report information as long as the Web design is done while the annual report is being written. The cost comes when companies have a glossy annual report already finished and then say, “Webbify this.”

For the past couple of weeks, John Walkenbach has been singing the praises of the Firebird browser (1, 2, 3). I’ve had it installed for some time now and have played around with it. I finally took the official plunge and made it our default browser. It’s a great alternative to Internet Explorer. Tabbed browsing and pop-up blocker are great features.

I’ve also installed Thunderbird to replace Outlook Express as our mail client. Warning - not for the faint of heart as it is a 0.1 release. But, it’s already an improvement over Outlook Express. I did have some difficulty importing our old email messages. We had 5 “identities” in Outlook Express but the Thunderbird import would only pull in the mail from one of them. I will detail the steps I used to get all our data over so the next poor schmuck to hit this scenario has a quicker time of it that I did.