Safari and I Are Having a Spat
Subtitles: “Safari Bugs Are Killing Me” or “No one says spat anymore!”
Remember last week when I mentioned that there have been some weird bugs afflicting the new design? Well after getting a look at some of the found bugs, I seem to have squashed all that I can, but there is one bug that is equally annoying and also, seemingly un-squashable: The Double Text Safari Bug
I’ve tangled with this beast before on the last version of the site and it appears to have sprung back up like the cross-eye-inducing bastard that he is. The ugliness shows every so often, and only in Safari (hence the name). What happens is the right side column’s content is redrawn after about halfway down the page making the lower portion of the column nearly unreadable. What makes it more annoying is although, clearly not in my code, I can’t find a specific reason why sometimes the problem shows up and other times it won’t. I know its probably a Safari bug and I did nothing wrong, but I was hoping I could find an answer that it only happened on “floated divs” or some other style element that I could work around. Sadly, every time I think I have a lock down on the issue, the cause changes on the next occurrence. Take the sites current state for example, when I remove the image of the flash animation for this story below this one on the front page, the double text stops. Put the image back, and the doubling text comes with it. Now what the hell does that image have to do with the side bar? I have no freaking idea! I guess for now I’ll have to deal with it until I either Safari updates, or I get more data. (If you see this problem too, leave a comment or shoot me an email: mike at hellyeahbitch.com, thanks!)
I really liked Safari, but things like this seem to be stacking up against it. More and more sites don’t work as well with Safari and now I’m hearing rumblings that the new Firefox 2 Alphas are looking pretty nice and fast for OS X. Is switching my browser the answer to some of my woes, or is that just like tinting my car windows so that I don’t see the homeless people as I drive in my limo? (The problems with sites, including this one, will still be there, but at least I won’t have to deal with them.) I’ve tried to switch to Camino, but if I’m going to Camino, then why not just go to Firefox and get all the great extensions? However the problem with that is Firefox for OS X is ugly and it has issues of its own. I suppose there is always Shiira…nah, who the hell uses Shiira?
information: Beautiful Flash Art
Truely, this is the type of cool web-art that Shockwave and Flash must have been created for!
This very cool shockwave art is as simple and beautiful as it gets. You just click the picture which takes you deeper into different (sometimes repeating) mosaic pictures. Its hard to explain, so just go check it out for yourself.
Via Stylegala
How Does The New Site Look For You?
We went live with the new site design a week ago, and although I have heard nothing but good things about the new design I have also heard some random and sometimes conflicting report of the visuals on the site behaving weirdly. The only one that I, myself, have noticed is a bug in Safari where it prints a second copy of text over the first, correct copy, giving a double vision effect. However that went away all on its own (as far as I know) after last night. I have also had a report of the background not filling all the way across the screen on the right, leaving a large white space; and another report of the left side being marred by large spaces in certain browsers. Although I have tried, I could not recreate either of the last two compaints, so I turn to you. Have you noticed anything looking a bit off (or wonky) please give me a shout in the comments. Thanks!
I can’t fix what I can’t find.
ESPN ZOOM: The New Busch Stadium
Sadly I couldn’t get tickets, but I’m sure there is a sea of red clad, happy people flooding around downtown St. Louis right now. The festivities for the first home opener for “Busch Stadium III” are set to kick off any minute, with the game starting roughly an hour after that. I’ll get down there a little latter in the season to see the new park from the inside, but until then I have to settle for pictures. However, viewing pictures of the new park on the web was a surprisingly pleasant experience today when I found the new (?) feature on EPSN.com called EPSN ZOOM. Its an auto-resizing flash application that shows each picture in a gallery in beautiful full window size with a simple navigation on the top and a little information / caption box that can be drug around the window or hidden at will. Its is truly one of the best and cleanest flash implemetations I have seen thus far. I know its simple, but to me, this is really what flash should be used for: A simple, clean interface for a single aspect of a site. ESPN has really done some nice work reworking the entire face of the online face of their brand and ZOOM is one of the nicer and more surprising features they have added.
…Oh yeah, I love the look of the new Busch stadium as well. It should be a good day today…and maybe, just maybe I’ll get in a better mood after last night’s this past weekend’s stupid loss to sweep by the Cubs.
View the new Busch Stadium in the ESPN ZOOM gallery
Safari, Site Problems, and Me…and Maybe You
Are you using Safari? Is the left-hand column of this very site look like its been written over twice about halfway down? Do you have any idea what is causing this behavior and why it seems to only be behaving this way when viewed by Safari? Because I sure the hell don’t.
Ideas? Don’t be afraid, just shout them out!
AJAX or Flash? Where is the Line?
I just completed a complete redesign of a site for my company and part of it was to create a web application that allows the user to play with a myriad of options and configure the product how the want it all while giving them a preview of their progress and a continually updated pricing list. They had something like this on their current site, but it was old, and clunky perl CGI with lots of refreshing and rebuilding after every change the user made, so I opted to go with an AJAX approach. After many changes and feature tweaking and adding, I found myself staring at a small-ish group of PHP files and one very large file of javascript. Its finished now, and seems to work well, but as I look back on this aspect of the site that seemed to be growing every day, I wonder: I should have done it in flash?
AJAX has been a great tool for the modern web designer and it has allowed the creation of even more dynamic web applications with relative ease, but at what point of complication do you drop AJAX and move to a more cohesive tool like Flash? One of the first things I heard when AJAX became vouge was the flash people screaming: “We could already do this!” and its true. Flash has always been the go-to platform for web apps of the more complicated nature, but now AJAX has cut Flash off at the knees with its ability to do things like Google Maps without having your users download the latest Flash upgrade and wait to download the app. So when does an app cross the line from being “Perfect for AJAX” to being “Wow, that sounds like a Flash app.”? Or does it have to? Is 700 lines of javascript to get an app working with AJAX still better than having to go pick up a copy of Flash MX? What about 1000 lines? 2000? If you drop that much time and effort into a cool AJAX app, are your worried about how easy it is to get a copy of the code with just a right-click?
I think it depends on many things: Your familarity with Flash (ActionScript) or AJAX (PHP/ Ruby/Perl…, CSS, XML, and JavaScript) and your time. Play to your strengths so to say. The obvious answer, I know, but I also think that AJAX, in its present form, can only take you so far. That might not be the case in a few years, but currently, for a complated app, like the one on SpreadShirt Flash seems like the best option. Couple that with the on-going issues with standards compatibility on the world’s most popular browser: Internet Explorer, and if you are going for a complicated web app targeted to everyone, Flash seems like the clear choice. For everything below those tough standards, things like Backpack, Google Maps and Yahoo! Mail (in beta), AJAX seems to be working fine. Hopefully in the future, they will become competing methods where a developer can use one or the other at anytime, like PHP and ASP. For now, it looks as though one must be able to learn both and adapt to the project at hand.
Stop Supporting IE 5, Start Supporting Safari!
Long story, but I’m moving this weekend and I needed to change auto insurance companies, because my current one thought I was moving to the ghetto or something, and made my new rates ridiculous. Anyway, I ended up with Progressive and I had to sign some electronic documents on their site. I click on the link, sign in and then I get presented with some serious OS-racism: “Compatibility Error: Please click here to download Internet Explorer 5.0″ Ouch…and no. There is no way I’m letting that most horrible of horrible browsers on my beautiful iMac. Hell I don’t think you can even download it from Microsoft’s website still can you?
Either way, that was my situation. So I reach for my trusty Safari Debug menu and change the user agent to “IE 6 Windows” and reload. No dice. I tried using Firefox…also denied. Luckily I have Virtual PC installed on my machine which I’m now having to use for this stupid task. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find this very unacceptable.
OS-racism must end. Take the extra time to make a site that works in ALL MODERN BROWSERS. That means: Safari, Firefox, Opera (Yes, Opera), Camino, Internet Explorer 6 (Yes, IE). It does not mean: IE 5.0 for mac. If Microsoft doesn’t support it, no one else should. In fact, that should be the rule: If a browser is no longer updated, web developers (like myself) no longer need to support it. It might be nice if they did for a while, but they don’t have to.
Let it be spoken, let it be done!
Make A Stupid Favicon For Free
Stopping by Gadgetopia today, I found this: FavIcon from Pics Dz found a site that will make you a favicon (translation: That little picture that site have next to their name in your address bar) out of any image for free. Its a nice little site with a good purpose, which is something I admire because I run a site with no purpose.
As you can see above, I tried the site out, and with no other ideas I used the contest winning picture of myself as the favicon. As fun as it is to look at my mug up there, I would like something that isn’t all about me. It would be fine if this was a site all about how “the world is a dark pit of dispair and I hate my job at Cinnabon“, but its not. So I looking for any and all ideas for a more permanant picture for Hell Yeah Bitch! .com’s favicon. Just remember the longer takes for all of you to comment with some suggestions, the longer you have to see my face in your bookmarks menu and address bar. Scary huh?
Links:
Gadgetopia | Favicon from Pics
FavIcon from Pics (Direct link to site)
This link explains the “Cinnabon” comment.
Test How Fonts Look At Typetester
Sub Title: How bored are you?
The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. It’s primary role is to make web designer’s or web developer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.
Typetester is a new web-based tool (does that make it web 2.0?) that allows “webheads” to play with font controls and view the results without having to refresh their site 2,000 times before getting the look they want. It also allows the boardest of the board to do something boring.
If you are part of this niche audience and you have something very specific to check out, its a nice little tool. Otherwise your time is better spent kicking old people.
Sweet Christ, its a slow news day.