Category: web

Getting Multi-Safari to Work on Leopard 10.5.1

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

If you’ve upgraded to Leopard but still need to test a site in an older versions of Safari, you can do so through Multi-Safari. Much along the lines of the stand-alone versions of IE that are out there, these packages allow you to run older versions of Safari.

Interestingly enough, though Multi-Safari worked fine under the retail version of Leopard, it stopped working under OS X 10.5.1, offering the error “You cannot use the application ‘Safari 2.0.4’ with this version of Mac OS X.”. Fortunately, the maintainer of the Multi-Safari project, Michel Fortin, looked into it; and, within his blog entry describing the issue, some of the commenters chimed in with their own suggestions.

In particular, Thomas Aylott deduced that “Apple has specifically blocked all versions of Safari < 3 from running on Leopard 10.5.1” (d’oh!), but figured out a workaround by tweaking some of the package internals. To Thomas’ credit, he also compiled a fixed-and-ready-to-download version of Safari 2.0.4. I’ve tried it on my own machine and it works great.

Tab Key Not Working in Firefox?

Ashley Bischoff31 Comments

A few days ago, my tab key stopped working in Firefox. I use tab all the time to move through form fields, so that perplexed me a bit. I had a hunch, though, that one of my extensions might have been causing the mischief. Sure enough, after checking the Firefox forums at MozillaZine, I discovered that Paste and Go was the culprit.

After I disabled that guy, things went back to normal — I guess that one of the extension’s recent updates broke something. So, if your tab key has been acting up too, that could be worth a try. (For those who may be curious, Paste and Go adds an item to the URL bar’s context menu which allows you to paste from a URL from the clipboard and load it in one step.)

Getting Pocket IE to Obey the “Screen” CSS Media Type

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

CSS Media Types can be rather handy for delivering CSS rules to one platform or another. Not uncommonly, they can be used to automagically create printer-friendly pages. They can, however, also be used to create mobile-friendly pages (such as for PDAs, cell phones and the like) through the “screen” media type. The general idea is that large screen devices (CRTs and LCD monitors) can be fed CSS rules with the “screen” media type while handheld devices get a set of CSS rules with the “handheld” media type.

One fly in the ointment is that Pocket IE tries to outthink a page’s media types. Because some front-end coders put much of their CSS in a file with the “screen” media type, the Pocket IE development team decided that their browser should render rules with the “screen” media type. Ruh-roh. All of a sudden, all of the potentially small screen-unfriendly declarations “ floating, absolute positioning and the like — were being gargled and swallowed by this diminutive browser.

What that meant was that coders had to employ CSS with “screen” and “handheld” media types; and, in addition to having the usual mobile-type tweaks in “handheld” (such as perhaps removing extraneous page elements), coders also had to resort to undoing the effects present in “screen” stylesheets. Yuk. Pleasantly, Michael Angeles discovered a workaround — by capitalizing “Screen”, Pocket IE properly ignores CSS with that media type.

I’ve not been able to find a comprehensive table of CSS media support among handheld browsers, but the comments attached to this post about CSS for Mobiles are a decent starting point. There, the author set up some test pages for CSS media support and invited readers to send in their results. Here’s an excerpt:

  • Pocket IE — applies “screen” and “handheld”
  • SonyEricsson browser — passes over “screen” and applies “handheld”
  • Blackberry (7730) — neither “screen” nor “handheld” are applied
  • Motorola browser — passes over “screen” and applies “handheld”

I wouldn’t be surprised if some handheld browsers still incorrectly apply the “screen” media type. All the same, with Pocket IE back on the good side of the force, that helps quite a bit; granted, Pocket IE doesn’t have quite the market dominance that desktop IE does, but (until now) it was still one of the major offenders among mobile support for CSS media types. And, with a work-around as straightforward as tossing in some capitalization, it’s not hard to push Pocket IE in the right direction.

Firefox Extension to Resize Textarea Elements

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

It seems like one of those “now, why didn’t someone think of this sooner?” ideas now that I’ve tried it, but I’ve recently discovered Jeremy Zawodny’s Resizable Textarea extension and I dig it. Like the name says, it allows you to resize text-entry boxes (<textarea> fields) in Firefox. There’re no fancy hotkeys to learn — you just grab the edge of the box, your pointer turns into a double-headed arrow and you can pull on the edge to resize it. Dandy.

Oh, and if you’re running Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 — a perfectly cromulent arrangement — you may have a bit of a hiccup since Resizable Textarea extension has only been green-lit to work on versions up to Firefox 1.5. Not to worry — the Nightly Tester Tools extension can take care of that for you. Among other things, it adds an “override compatibility” to the normal extension dialog box; since most extension authors are very conservative in their version boundaries, overriding those tends to work almost every time.

Prototype/Script.aculo.us IRC Channel on Freenode

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I was pleased to discover the #CSS IRC channel the other day and I’ve just learned that there’s a #Prototype IRC channel for discussing the Prototype JavaScript framework and the script.aculo.us effects library. (Sweet!)

For what it’s worth, I was actually looking for a general DOM Scripting IRC channel at the time, but I was delighted to run across this once since Prototype & Script.aculo.us are the two libraries that I’m actually using at the moment. Anyhow, the channel is #prototype on irc.freenode.net; or, if you want to try connecting to a different server, Freenode has several others from which to choose.