Testing IE6 on Vista (multiple IE take 2)

Despite numerous free and better browsers being available for a number of years IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) is still used by about 30-35% of web users. This means despite it’s bugs, lack of support for many css techniques or image types as a developer I still have to support it.

I previously wrote about how multiple versions of IE could be installed on one system but this only worked on Windows XP and was extremely buggy, throwing up errors everytime it encountered flash or javascript on a page.

When using Vista even this buggy version of IE6 would not work. Obviously some developers asked Microsoft for a way of running IE6 on Vista. Microsoft said that it would compromise the security if Vista and so the only way was to install a virtual machine running windows XP and IE6. microsoft even provided the virtual machine software and temp XP license for free. I was pleased with this solution as it meant it would be very unlikely Joe Public would get a new Vista PC, decide they want IE6 and be able to install it. The end of IE6 looked near!

Unfortunately, Vista didn’t take off and replace XP, thanks in no small part to Apple’s smear campaign and users with old/obscure hardware being very vocal about performance… But that’s another topic. This meant continued IE6 was needed. While running the Virtual PC worked it was a waste of system resources and slow to open and close so I soon got sick of it. Then came along IETester.

This standalone app enables you to render pages as IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and the latest IE8 beta as seperate tabs. Pages load without the annoying error popups of MultipleIEs and ironically faster than Vista’s built-in IE7 browser.

It unfortunately doesn’t yet support flash in some of the IE versions but this should be in an update. The IETester toolbar replaces the IE toolbars so unfortunately you can’t run IE developer toolbar to help debug. Despite this I highly recommend grabbing this free download (donate if you can) even if you are running XP.

Note if the file is no longer being hosted comment and I will host it for you.

Oh no another attempt at 3D web

When I saw an article about Exit Reality planning to make 3D web pages I had flashbacks of some of my first experiences of the web when an £1500 286 computer would crawl along trying to move through a virtual room in netscape navigator. It made web browsing slow and overly complicated. Now it seems that it is being tried again.

Exit Reality’s ambisious goal of making the whole web 3D seemed unlikely but after viewing their video demo it seems they may have pulled it off. Rather than having to use a new web browser/app and being limited to the dozen sites they may have invested time in supporting this feature Exit Reality have managed to render any page in a 3D environment as long as you install a browser plugin. Some sites have more 3D features than others. Exit Reality seem to have focused on social networking sites where the likes of Facebook, Flickr and YouTube all have full 3D environments designed to make the experience even better. Flickr is now a 3D gallery, YouTube a cinema and Facebook/MySpace have your videos on a TV screen and your photos in a frame and wall mounted. If you have a Facebook/MySpace account you can customise the 3D environment for your page adding in furniture and toys of your choice.

This is all well and good and may appeal to the second life generation. However, what interested me is that they are making web browsing a shared experience. You can now not just send a link to a friend for a youTube video you had a laugh at - you can invite them to join you in your own private 3D cinema and watch it together in real time. You can chat an emote while both viewing the same video. This also means I could potentially showcase my portfolio to a potential client in a 3D demo or even show them their own site after work is complete.

Realistically for it to become a useful shared web experience tool it would require widespread adoption of the plugin to the extent of Flash. In most cases speed of browsing will mean that I will want my pages to be viewed in 2D but there is definitely an appeal in viewing your Flickr photos in a gallery or sharing a web page or video with a friend.

Technical issues have made it difficult for me to say how easy/good the actual experience is. Firefox 3 renders the 3D environment but there is no control panel or way to login to either Exit Reality or the websites I visit in 3D. In IE I get the control panel but I am unable to see the 3D environment. I have only tested on my tired old office PC so will take another look on my laptop when I get a free moment.

3D web, exit reality, web browsing, plugin

Wordpress App for iPhone finally arrives

Today I was pleased to discover the Wordpress App on the App Store. With six apart having a Typepad App available from App Store launch day Wordpress users had been feeling a little left out. This was especially frustrating as using Wordpress from the iPhone Safari browser was near impossible with unedutable forms and crashes.

Summary
Liked:
+ Easy to use
+ includes all important fields (even tags & categories)
+ Saves a draft of your work if you get interrupted by a phone call
+ all work done locally so don’t have to worry about losing signal/connection when writing
+ Can insert photos from camera or photo library
+ has a preview mode that even downloads you wp theme where possible
+ Accepts HTML tags

Didn’t like:
- Crashes if you switch connection type in the middle of submission (e.g. Switch from GPRS to 3G or wifi to edge)
- no control over image placement
- HTML is hard to write on iPhone and no shortcuts are provided in the app. Would liked to have seen buttons for open/closing common tags like strong tags
- impossible to demonstrate code as even & amp and & gt gets converted to & and > when you save.
EDIT:- images get resized to 300px wide regardless of whether image was larger/smaller before

More
Setting up was easy enough. Just provide the URL of your blog and login details. The App doesn’t seem to handle http or www prefix so make sure you start with the domain/subdomain. Seems to support both wordpress.com and self hosted wordpress blogs. You can add multiple blogs and switch between them in the main menu. I don’t think you can post a single entry to multiple blogs though.

Once you enter your chosen blog you see your last 10 posts which can be editted or deleted. You can if course create a new post. The interface is simple to use with fields for title tags and you main text. You can also choose which category to post in and add new categories. Be warned view categories or adding new ones requires Internet access and if you witch from 3G to edge/wifi or vica versa while connecting the app locks up. It appears to be continually trying to submit/retrieve data but never finishes. This is more of an iPhone bug than a problem with the App. A timeout fail would be good though so you can save your work and try again.

The app doesn’t try and be too flash with graphics or effects. This is good as stability of the app is very important as a lock up or drop out can loose your hard work. Apart from when connecting to the blog and having the crash I described above the app has been stable. So although I still recommend saving often you should have problems with losing your work. Just don’t submit you post until you have a solid connection and are not moving.

At first I thought the app only supported plain text posts. However, after hitting done the virtual keyboard is replaced by a new menu which give the options of Write, Pictures, Preview and settings. Pictures allows you to insert images from you camera or photo library. Seeing as you can save images from the web into your photo library and this really gives you a lot of freedom to add imagery to your posts. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to control image place lment though. All images get inserted at the end of your post.

The Preview mode is very useful it downloads your current Wordpress theme from your site and renders your new post in context. Unfortunately it didn’t manage to retrieve my theme and so a simple preview was used. This was still helpful as I was then able to test if the HTML I used would render correctly or show up in the post. The HTML I tested worked fine. Unfortunately, the app is a little too enthusiastic with rendering HTML as even code you want to display is converted. For example & amp becomes & if you put the symbol with text, even if you do not finish with a semi-colon.

The settings option let’s you modify the time stamp and password protect entries, so even less commonly used settings are available.

Actually posting your blog when finished isn’t immediately obvious. There is no SUBMIT/make it go button. Just a status you can change from local draft to Published. It also allows you set status to online draft so you can finish off at a Desktop computer before making it live. For the purpose of testing I am posting this direct from my iPhone.

Overall a great App that every Wordpress blogger with an iPhone should have. A few minor quirks than hopefully can get worked out by future updates. Most importantly it is stable and works. This App recieves a FFE gold award.

iPhone calls with your favourite headphones

At last! No longer will you be tied to using the standard iPhone headphones to listen to your music while your fantastic headphones remain unused. While the iPhone 3G allows you to use regular headphones to listen to music - if you are interrupted by a call you have to pull them out to chat. Things are about to change now that Monster have brought out the iSoniTalk Microphone headphone adapter for iPhone.

There is already NewerTech Mic Extender Cable for iphone but to be honest it looked a bit naff. Now this new adapter from Monster is available I am not stuck with either paying for overpriced headsets designed for iPhone or poor audio quality standard iPhone headsets. Although there is a negative review for this item on Amazon UK, Monster have a good rep for quality Audio/video cables so will give them a try.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, headsets, Monster

BBC Music Beta Launches

The BBC have launched their new Music site. It is still in beta but already looks pretty polished. You can find out more about artists that have been played on any of the BBC radio stations. You can see how many times they’ve been played this week, which radio stations have played them and how many times since records began for that artist. You can even see which DJs plays them the most. Apart from a stat fest you can get links to other useful information such as the artists website and wikipedia page and find similar artists that you may like. Artist details also include a discography, photos and more. Much of the content is powered by Music Brainz which the BBC link to for further info or to add your own input.

The styling of the site matches well with the excellent 2008 look BBC homepage but doesn’t have any snazzy, technical wizardy just great content.

There are a lot of music sites out there - many with a lot more artist info and the ability to sample tracks or music videos. In fact the only content BBC is providing is the artists play stats on it’s Radio stations the rest is from wikipedia or music brainz but it is presented really nicely and the unique BBC stats can help you pick a radio station that suits your music tastes or it can help you discover similar artists you may like.

If you are keen to find more artists you may like and suggested artists on BCC music beta aren’t enough check out last.fm
Technorati Tags: BBC, Music, Beta, Feeds

iPhone: The Phone of Choice for Super Heros (and Villans)

This weekend I spoted the iPhone being used by various celebrity heroes and villains. Seems to be all the rage:

Lord Vader still can’t get used to working without a stylus

Supergirl calls up Superman and complains about him swapping costumes again:

Batgirl checks where she parked the Batmobile on google maps:

Captain America watches videos of Wonder Woman on YouTube:

Batman likes that it comes in black (matches his outfit) but still keeps his in his pocket:

For a more serious look at iPhone 3G check the reviews at testfreaks.co.uk

The App store spells death to Jailbreaking the iPhone?

I’d love to say that the quality of Apps on the Apple App store is so superior to those made for jailbroken iPhones that no one would bother jailbreaking anymore. However, this is definitely not the case. While a few of the apps are quite polished a lot are on par with their jailbreak equivalents and many jailbreak apps will never make it to the Apps store as they will upset network providers or apple - e.g. the app that allows you to create multiple iTunes library’s on the phone so you can sync with more than one computer, or VoIP apps that allow you to make calls without getting charged a penny by your mobile provider.

Add to this the fact that most of the apps on via AppTapp on a jailbroken phone are free and it makes jailbreaking your new iPhone 3G very tempting. Some have already managed it as seen in this video:

So what are we waiting for - lets unlock our phones and get lots of free App goodness. BUT WAIT Jailbreaking was tolerated before and some of the jailbreak app developers have been welcomed on to the App store… however, before Apple had no competing service to rival the jailbreak apps and now they do. They will not want users to be able to choose between a free jailbreak app when they are trying to sell a similar App for $9.99 in the App Store.

So what will Apple do. Expect a lot tighter policing of iPhones. Regular updates closing loopholes that hackers have used to jailbreak, and even bricking of phones that it detects have been tampered with. While not illegal it will be a lot riskier jailbreaking your phone this time round.

Email - it’s the new SMS

With Mobile me up and running and Push working my iPhone 1 (the 3G just arrived and is syncing) Email is the new SMS/Text message. If your a heavy SMS user and burn through your free texts each month then having your most frequently texted buddies on Mobile me could save you. I know find it just as quick and easy to email my @me.com friends as texting them - plus I can add photo attachments. It’s not quite picture messaging but it’s getting there.

Not too impressed by the me.com site though. Some featurs appear to be broken in Firefox 3 such as the ability to add things to the calendar. Other browsers are greated with a message advising them to use Safari or Firefox as Apple can’t be bothered to support them. But rather than saying they can’t be bothered to make the effort that us web developers have to to support IE and others they simply say the features are too flashy for your browser and blame IE for not supporting modern web standards properly. I wish I could do that - if enough sites did do that rather than spend hours or days working to make IE happy or removing features because they cannot be supported in IE6 then maybe those users might upgrade to Firefox and save me having to support IE.

Anyway - back to enjoying 16gb of iPhone 3G goodness. If you haven’t managed to get hold of one yet don’t panic and pay mad fees for them on ebay - more are coming and their is no rush - their is hardly any decent apps on the App store yet.

App store vs Jailbreak

so I’ve had time to play around with a dozen or so Apps from the iTunes store and scanned through the rest.

Is there a giant leap in quality/selection compared to the mostly free Apps on AppTapp? Surprisingly - not really.

Since doing a restore and moving to firmware 2.0 I’ve had more crashes and restarts than when using Official Apps than on firmware 1.14 using jailbreak Apps. The range available is significantly smaller but that will change as more Apps are added.

there seems to be an App store equivalent to many of the jailbreak apps such as mobile flickr replacing iFlickr and in general the quality is higher. in some cases the Apps are identical apart from the fact you now have to pay.

While there are a few gems in there you’ll find some of the best apps like Fring and Video recorder absent. While useless apps like alarm and phonesaber have made it onto the store.

I will give a run down on all the apps I’ve tried soon, as well as which apps will never make the cross over from AppTapp/jailbreak and why. So check back in a few days.

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