My wife surprised me with a nice evening out for dinner and a movie for Father’s Day Saturday night. It was fun just hanging out and having a good time without the kids.

We saw Knocked Up, and let me tell you; it was a great movie. We’ll probably have to add it to our collection when it comes out on DVD. A lot of the same people that were in Anchorman and 40 Year Old Virgin were in this movie so if you found those two movies entertaining, you’ll really like Knocked Up.

If you have the means, check it out before it leaves the theaters.

Jeff Rocks

While reading TechCrunch earlier today, I was reminded that Yahoo was closing down Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr. I personally like Flickr so much that I paid for the pro account and try to post photos as time permits.

Just for kicks, I logged into Yahoo Photos to see if I had ever posted anything in there, and sure enough, I found a great photo of my brother playing guitar back in 2001. Jeff was an incredible musician and played guitar and tenor sax from a very early age all the way through his 20s. Just like me, he’s kind of gotten away from playing as other priorities have taken over, but I’m hoping we’ll play together again some day. There’s nothing quite like jamming with your brother on stage while the crowd goes crazy. Good times!

Anyway, when I logged into Yahoo Photos, I was asked to transition my photos to Flickr or another service, and the whole process went very smoothly. Of course, I only had one photo to move so I guess it would be tough to mess that up. Now that Yahoo has finally decided that having two photo services doesn’t make a lot of sense, I hope they continue to put resources into Flickr to improve an already great service.

OneTrip

OneTrip is a great little shopping list application written by Neven Mrgan. It works great in Safari on my Mac, and will presumably work on the iPhone when it comes out at the end of this month. It is a very good example of what is possible when you combine the latest web standards with high quality visual design. If OneTrip is the start of things to come, I’m going to need to figure out how to justify to my wife that I need an iPhone. Great job Neven!

From Digg.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this video I first saw early last week.

This has to be one of the coolest offices ever. I’d love to work there, but I’m afraid these guys would think I was an old fart at the ripe old age of 33. From all of the comments on CrunchNotes, these guys work for a company called Connected Ventures in NYC. If I were 20 something and in New York, I’d be busting down the door to work for this company. Enjoy!

From CrunchNotes and Internet Business Daily.

Safari

For anyone who has read my blog for a while, you know I usually write about how great Apple’s latest and greatest hardware and software are because in most cases, they usually are truly great.

Yesterday’s release of the Safari 3 Public Beta made me take a step back and really think about the quality of Apple’s Windows applications. I installed it on my Windows XP and Windows Vista machines with no problems, but the performance is sluggish at best, and there clearly needs to be some performance tuning before Safari is officially released in the fall.

The thing that really bothered me about Safari was the blatant disregard for Windows development standards. The user interface matches the Mac version of Safari instead of taking advantage of the look and feel of Windows XP and Windows Vista. Apple did the same thing when they released iTunes for Windows. If they truly want to create the best Windows programs available, they need to embrace and take advantage of the underlying technologies in the platforms in which they develop. Just imagine the uproar that would occur if Microsoft released Office for Mac using the Windows Vista look and feel. The Mac community would go crazy for good reason. Oh wait, this happened already with Office 6.0, and the Mac community did go crazy.

I am lucky enough to have both Mac and Windows machines at home to play with, but if I were purely a Windows user, I would be confused and frustrated by the iTunes and Safari user interfaces. They would seem foreign and sluggish to me. The applications clearly take a performance hit by trying to look like a Mac program in Windows.

It is time for Apple to recognize that if they really want to be in the Windows applications business, they need to embrace the platform and make the best looking, easiest to use, and fastest applications that take advantage of the foundation that Microsoft provides. Why try to reinvent the wheel? Apple needs to create Windows applications that look and feel like Windows applications.