As soon as we draw near to the close of having to support IE6, well for free anyway – this is a hotly debated topic you can read about here, we suddenly have to start learning the hacks for the latest IE, in this case 8.

Mostly this is related to CSS hacks as this is where i get the most stress an inconsistency, but not anymore, now i have found a wonderful way to force IE8 to render as IE7, so only one set of hacks to learn (which is useful as i am not aware of IE8 only CSS rules, without making an entire new file, something i object to).

Want to know what it is:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Something as simple as a meta tag. Stick in in your site header, and then sit back and smile.

For a while, you still have to make the site work in IE7, but we always have Browserlab for that

If like me you have many things open at once, a bit of a disaster and not very mac-behaviour if you ask me. …now i have the solution

I couldn’t work it out until i tried to download an FLV file to my desktop from one of my servers and the same thing happened. A little more research and i found the answer: There is a bug that is caused by the creation of the FLV icon on the desktop.

Whether this is due to the presence of Perian or one of the many other bits and pieces we have on our machines i do not know, ..when will there be a bug fix form Apple, again i do not know, ..how to fix it, ..this i do know!!

Don’t save FLV files or create FLV files on the desktop, ..the bug only occurs on the desktop, so if encoding, do it to a folder, if downloading, do so to a folder.

I hope this saved you more time and hassle than it caused me.

Many times i am asked by ex students and friends starting out on the freelance route what software or system i use for my accounting and although my answer with a smile is always the same, Kashflow, i thought i’d better take advantage of my recommendations by finally offering an affiliate link.

My accountant and I am both very very happy when it comes to the end of year books as it really does make the process even border on being a pleasure (if he reads this he will disagree, but not because of Kashflow, more because of my propensity to randomly pay for personal things like kites using my business account :) ), and for me it makes managing invoices and revenue stream a real pleasure.

Don’t just take my word for it though, ..they offer a 2 month free trial, ..take it and see.

One word of advice, …that i almost fell victim to, ..don’t opt for some slightly shiner iApp accounting software, .although they may look a little better in your opinion, and mine, this is accounting, accountants aren’t pretty (except mine of course) and neither does the software, ..the most important thing it needs to do is make life easier for your accountant at the end of the year, …which in turn means smaller bills for you.

So click on the link at the top and give it a go, …and if you want a good accountant, ..just email jas@silvermansap.com …tell him i sent you, …there is no affiliate program there, but he is good at working with Kashflow and us media types.

The scam involves sending what appears to be a very convincing email to users informing them there has been a server upgrade and in order for there mail to continue functioning they need to click on the link to perform an upgrade.

Now to the more cynical of us we are not going to fall for it, but it was pretty convincing.

I will show you why. (clients domain name has been replaced with my own)

Dear user of the mogmachine.com mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (info@mogmachine.com) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

http://mogmachine.com/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=info@mogmachine.com&from=mogmachine.com&fromname=info

Best regards, mogmachine.com Technical Support.

So perhaps now out of context it is suspicious, but as a corporate type with no real time to look into these things it appears to be generated from your own domain, and the link also appears to be to your domain, …well i wouldn’t spam myself now would i ?

Once you click on the link however things become clearer, …the url is as follows:

http://mogmachine.com.til1tlli.net/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=info@mogmachine.com&from=mogmachine.com&fromname=info

the bit you need to pay attention to is this:

http://mogmachine.com.til1tlli.net/

This as the red highlighting will show you is not from your domain, but in fact a domain called til1tlli.net which now should make it very clear, this is fake and not to be clicked on.

The fact it then invites you to download a .exe program file should be the final straw, ..but i would hope you don’t get that far.

I hope this has proved useful and highlights the sorts of things to look out for in the future.

They can dramatically improve the usability and responsiveness of your site. They mainly focus on presenting information and visual appeal.

After all, this is exactly what most websites desperately want: to present their content to the reader in an easy and visually pleasing manner.

Other JavaScript UI libraries focus on desktop-like features such as drag-and-drop, sliders, sortable tables or draggable windows. They are meant to build “rich internet applications” (RIAs) such as email clients, task managers, image organizers or feed viewers. Websites are not desktop applications. They are different.

The most exiting fact about this library is that it is a single JavaScript file weighs only 5.59 Kb! This file can be included on your pages from free Content Delivery Network (CDN) so that it will be loaded to your customers fast no matter where they are on the globe.

You don’t need to be a programmer to use these tools. and you can copy their source code to your site and things will work. Each tool is used in a similar manner and by learning one tool you can easily learn the other tools.

If you want to see more jQuery Tools website offers lots of demos to explore.

Source: noupe.com

However, only the most foolish developer makes websites for a mac, although we have all probably seen them at some point, a self righteous designer proclaiming that he is happy to only make himself available to <20% of the marketplace.

I make websites for companies of all shapes and sizes and of course a fundamental part of the development process is cross platform and cross browser testing. To achieve this i have always employed a selection of tools and techniques, and as there is a new one i am currently championing i thought it best to put some of this in writing.

1 – Buy a PC.
Why not, ..you can pick up a cheap secondhand ex corporate work horse for under £200, which is half a day to you an i, ..i know i have spent a lot more than half a day banging my head against IE6, so perhaps a wise choice.
I have one, …no, i didn’t buy it myself, my friend with the PC whom i shall speak of in point 2 bought it for me as i think he was getting a little annoyed at my skype chat IE debugging sessions, …conversations that consisted of “refresh again”, ..”clear your cache” ..”refresh”, ..”well mine doesn’t look like that”

The pitfall, ..in order to properly run all of the browsers and work in a secure environment, ..your going to need to find a PC running XP, that is not so bad, ..the bit i find frustrating (other than actually having to open a pc of course) is that even with a PC in my hand, and my friend on the phone on his PC, same browser, same OS, …different results. Is this due to one of the many many builds of IE6? …there was a time when i would have had to find out, ..no i simply invoke the words ‘gracefully degrade’ and ensure the content is presented in an acceptable fashion.

2 – Buy a friend
Ok, so you don’t have to buy the friend, it is best to start off with the friend in the first place, but after a few projects said friend will start to get a little annoyed at your request to know “if it looks ok in IE”.
Mine got so fed up he bought me a PC.

..and in case your wondering, no it mostly didn’t look ok in IE.

3- NetRenderer  - http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/
So now i am actually starting to give you some useful information, NetRender is very very useful , especially if you use the FireFox plugin as it enables you to view your site in IE6/7/8 all in one click, and does seem to agree with the masses.

It falls down in one big heap though when it comes to being REALLY useful, you see not only does NR not allow you to interact with the page, rendering a static image, therefore making any testing of JS/AJAX functionality virtually useless, better than this, it only renders to the page fold !! …which is not exactly very useful to those of us that believe scroll bars were invented for scrolling.

4- Adobe BrowserLab – http://browserlab.adobe.com
Hello BrowserLab. BrowserLab from Adobe is not the be all and end all of solutions, but it offers a significant step in the right direction away from NetRenderer.

You have to sign up, but once you are in you have the ability to view you site in all of the major browsers and platforms and although it is not interactive in the page display, the entire page is viewable and scrollable. Better yet you are offered a 2-up view and also, my favourite, an onion skin overlay that allows you to easily spot the pixel differences in designs. Just check out the 2-up view and then the onion skin below and see if you spotted the differences in the 2-up without the onion skin version.

2 up display of page, spot the differences

Onion skinned version, the pixel differences are now clear, ....or fuzzy

Of course i do not think there is any replacement for extensive testing across multiple machines and environments and the allowance of suitable time to do this, but in the world of development keeping tabs on potential IE design issues as they arise is critical as often if left too late the rabbit hole can be too deep to find your way out of without losing hair and sleep, ..both of which i value.

They are not wrong, VLC is a great player and it does do so many great things, its subtitles jog has saved me searching for subtitles to sync to my obscure release of a movie, or worse still, manually edit subtitle timecodes, and i have always loved the ability to crank the volume way past 100%, saving me a stretch to my amplifier :)

However there are times when VLC simply doesn’t play ball, whether it is dropping frames in 1080 BluRay movies, or simply stuttering to a giant fail on the 1080’s, subtitles that it just didn’t like the look of, etc etc.
I can compare VLC to the Finder in OS X, when it works it does what it does perfectly, but when it fails, it does so in the most useless uninformative fashion one could imagine (try copying 5,000 photos in finder only for one to be corrupt :) ).

I always had an alternative though, in fact, due to the borderless player in an age when everything was being covered in swathes of brush metal, a preferred alternative. MPlayer.

MPlayer was ported from its origins as a Linux media player, it did everything VLC did, it rarely complained, it just did it. …however development for MPlayer stopped in 2005, and although i stuck with it for a while, by 2007 it lay dormant on my HD, a testament to times gone by.

The other day i spent just under an hour search for subtitles to my BluRay version of District 13 – Ultimatum (a fantastic film in case your wondering, a must see!!), the problem was that i knew the subs file was good, i checked it in TextEdit, but whatever i did VLC just wouldn’t play.
I was annoyed, …so i decided to do some research into what happened to MPlayer, ..actually i just wanted to see if my old version would load the subs, …and what did i find, ..

MPlayer Extended. It turns out that late in 2008 the development was picked up by a rather lovely swiss guy called Adrian Stutz (he may not be lovely, but as he enabled me to watch the film and re-ignited my love with MPlayer, i think this is a safe assumption to make) who has been continuing to release updates along the way, with the omission of version number with the following promise:

MPlayer OSX Extended is not aimed at long release cycles and maintaining stable branches. To keep development simple and to focus on bringing the project forward, there’s only one branch and no release numbers. Just ongoing revisions, of which each should be better than the one before.

So now once again VLC has been demoted to second place, I now download the full 1080 HD movies as i know they will play (to those that know me well enough to know my projector is only 720 – that’s you Stefan, ..i can’t hear you la la la :) ) without a hitch.

A very welcome lightweight re-addition to my app arsenal. Thank you Adrian.

The upgrade process as expected was seamless, however, as usual we tend not to read up on problems and issues until we actually encounter them, so to help you through what were the 2 most pressing concerns i thought i should put them down for your reference (and to save you an hour of googling).

Google Gears and Safari 64 Bit – aka. GMail / MailPlane will not work on line / aka. Where have my Gears settings gone !

That’s quite  long title i know, but given how this error may affect you, i thought it best to cover all the bases.

Firstly the problem. You have upgraded to Snow Leopard and once you open  Safari you no longer have access to your ‘offline’ features in GMail. Those who use MailPlane or Fluid will also notice the same problem when viewing offline mail or anything else that requires Google Gears, …for me additionally, Wordpress install were no longer functioning in ‘turbo’ mode.
The apps all told me to go to my ‘Google Gears Settings’ menu, which funnily enough, had vanished :)

Don’t Panic! First of all why? …no not why you shouldn’t panic, why has this happened.

You may not have noticed it but your Snow Leopard upgrade actually installed a new version of Safari, even if you thought you had the latest version!! Why? this is because Snow Leopard natively runs in 64-bit mode as opposed to 32-bit mode, and quite simply Gears has not been released in a current stable format for the 64-bit browser. (MailPlane and Fluid of course both use the Safari engine and therefore are simultaneously affected).

Now you can actually force Safari to run in 32-bit mode (apple+i on the application icon, and tick the box that says ‘open in 32-bit mode’) …but who wants to downgrade their upgrade? :) not me.

The solution, a modified version of Gears released by the lovely people at MailPlane.

This of course resolves the problem for Safari, Mailplane, WordPress and Fluid, now enabling you to have your full gears functionality back.
Although they have a disclaimer on the page and offer no support, i encounter zero issues with this install and it picked up on all of my old Gears settings.

Phew, ..Gears issue resolved.

Where have all my Quicktime editing functions gone aka. What happened to Quicktime Pro?

Now open up Quicktime X :) …doesn’t it look lovely. It does indeed, and how nice to see that you no longer have to ‘upgrade’ to Pro (i use that term loosely as the same serial number has been floating around since i started using mac around 10 years ago) to access full screen playback, plus, and this one is very very useful to me, you can now perform movie screen grabs (my clients will be most pleased at the vast array of tutorial videos in the pipeline, ..and i will be quite pleased to say goodbye to the software i was using for this).

However, WHERE IS MY EXPORT MENU? and WHERE ARE MY EDITING CONTROLS?

This almost had me in tears as i spend quite a lot of time converting video and performing minor edits on video for clients, something that i have always relished the power of QT for, allowing me not to have to open up Final Cut and create projects that involve rendering and generally take more than twice as long.
For me Quicktime pro has been an indispensable tool over the years.

You can’t take it away from me Apple? Yes they can it would seem, they new QT is a while new product, yes you can have full-screen for free, but goodbye codec based exporting and basic editing.

Luckily before downgrading back to Leopard i had a little browse through the install DVD, and thankfull if you browse to the ‘additional installs’ folder on the CD you can in fact install a Quicktime 7 back onto your machine and still retain the nice new shiny X version.
Better still, QT will always opt for X, but if X cannot play the movie (which given the size of my codecs collection in 7 is highly likely) it will revert back to 7, allowing me to keep 7, and maintain the position of being able to quickly fulfil my clients basic video needs in next to no time.

So that is it for now, i am sure i will encounter new issues as my day progresses, but for now i can continue working as i was which at the end of the day is the most important aspect of a major OS release.

Thanks Apple, smiling resumed.

Although a little overdue in my opinion it is still nice to see they have made the effort, …or so i thought.

It turns out of course, that the app simply does not work. You load it up, enter your details and it simply says:

“Error: Network unavailable. Please check network connection of try again later”

Amazing !! So I had a little google on the subject as well as checking the comments on the appStore. It transpires that the majority of users are experiencing this exact same problem, and although some report to success over 3G with wireless disabled I can report this did not work for me.

Have o2 under estimated the number of users who may want to use this service, ..surely not, surely as we are all signed up to contracts with them they know exactly how many people will potentially want to use this service.

Is it just me or is this pretty much the worst bit of PR a telecommunications company who currently have a national monopoly on a handset could manage to heap on themselves.
As a developer the mere thought of releasing a piece of software  that quite simply does not work is almost criminal, and certainly someone somewhere should be hung out to dry.

Has this altered my opinion of o2, of course not, it has further cemented it in my mind as a corporate giant so fat it can’t see its feet and what they are treading on, us, the customer.

Let us all take a moment to congratulate them on such an unbelievable fail :)

In case your wondering, ..this is what it would look like if it actually functioned.

Additionally, those who did get the application working were not exactly heaping praise on the usability either. No doubt if it ever works for me i shall let you know.

The issue arises when using WordPress and turning on ‘permalinks’, suddenly nothing works and you are shown a blank white page with the following error:

Forbidden, perhaps you need to change the file permissions for this document or upload an index page.

Now first things first, ..always check you have a .htaccess file at the root of your wordpress folder (you may need to refresh your file view as WordPress may have only just created it).

Assuming you are using the /%postname%/ custom link structure as i was your .htaccess file should look like this (this also assumes your WP installation is in the root directory of your domain, ..but this doesn’t really matter WP generates this code for you automatically anyway):

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

So assuming you have this correct permalink .htaccess file content and then like me it is still not working, …just add these two magic lines to the top of the file:

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

Now your completed .htaccess file will look like this:

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

…and work perfectly.