Interesting comment over at http://wordpress.org (WordPress is the software that powers this blog). Have they let the ‘cat out of the bag’ (pardon the bun as this may be Mac OS X Leopard related) over a new feature in a ‘yet to be releases’ Safari, or is there a feature in Safari I am not aware of?

A new version of WordPress is out, bringing it up to version 2.2. The list of new features was quite interesting, but what caught my eye was:

What was that? A hook to support WYSIWYG editing of blog entries using Safari? I know that webkit (the ‘code’ behind Safari and the maps in PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor) can support ‘WYSIWYG editing’ of web-pages (although it is very flakey), but as far as I know this is not available in Safari… Maybe this will be added to the next version of Safari in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard? Interesting….

Now, if WYSIWYG support is coming to Safari then this could be good news for my web development work. At present I am Coda, which at version 1.0 is a good start for a new program, but lacks WYSIWYG editing… May be I will get WYSIWYG editing in Coda when 10.5 comes out in October?

Read about WordPress 2.2 – details

Version 0.4 of theSnowSite has been released.

New this version? The ‘dynamic’ search is back, and there are a number of ‘under-the-hood’ fixes, most of which are applicable for version 0.5.

The big new change on the site is it now ‘remembers’ how the windows were left on the last visit, that is, which windows were rolled up or down, and where the windows were positioned on the page. In addition, on a users first visit they are greeted with a ‘welcome message’ explaining how to use the site.

As every, the site has been tested on Safari, Camino and Firefox on the Mac and Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape on Windows, and works with all of them. And as usual, Internet Explorer gave the most problems!

The theSnowSite domain and website is hosted at UK2.net

MMISoftware has made a minor update to theSnowSite.

The update has addressed some problems with the way the map displayed in Windows Internet Explorer (as usual it displayed OK in all other browser tested, namely: Safari, Firefox and Camino on the Mac, and Firefox and Netscape on Windows).

The problem with the way the map displayed in Windows Internet Explorer was that the area behind the map controller (on the left) was transparent (as was the area behind the Google logo) and when a country was clicked the shadow of the pin markers was also transparent. The problem got worse when a marker pin was clicked and the ‘bubble’ displayed, all the area of the ‘bubble-shadow’ became transparent and the text in the ‘bubble’ was grey on a white background (actually the text was also transparent).

After a bit of digging in the code (well, a lot of digging) it was found that the problem was with some transparency calls in the map window display javascript. A quick tweak and the problems was solved. Guess this puts the site at 0.3.1 now!

A big thanks to the people who reported the bug!

Work on version 0.4 is continuing. Most of the code has been written and the database has been updated/modified. The site will now go through a series of tests.

The theSnowSite domain and website is hosted at UK2.net

A new version of theSnowSite has been posted.

theSnowSite is being developed by MMISoftware as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for skiing and snow-boarding information.

Version 0.3 was developed about a month ago and included a lot of new features, however, there were some technical/interface problems. Basically, there was too much information on the page and it was found that there was really no easy way of showing all the data. The site ended up using multiple sub-menus within the pages and this was rather ‘clunky’ and cumbersome. The site didn’t ‘flow’ and was ‘navigationally’ intensive; the user had very little control and testing showed it was not particularly user-friendly.

A possible solution was found, and it initially working well. In fact, it worked great with Safari, Camino and Firefox on the Mac, and with Firefox, Opera and Netscape on Windows. However, guess what? It didn’t work with Internet Explorer….. Many hours of work did not solve the problem so it was back to the drawing board!

Finally, the problems were solved… and the new site has been posted!

So, what is new with the version? In terms of content, nothing! The site is displaying the same information as in version 0.2, however, what is new is the layout and the way the information is displayed.

The new layout consists of a series of windows that the user can position anywhere they want in the browser window. Some of the windows can also be resized, as needed, and all the windows can be collapsed/rolled-up/minimised by clicking on the ‘minimise’ button, or double-clicking the window title bar. Essentially this can be viewed as an ‘operating system’ within a browser.

After this version has been tested, and left in the wild, for a few weeks new features which were in an earlier ‘build’ of 0.3 will be added…

The site is still driven by ‘AJAX’ (i.e. asynchronous Javascript and XML) and uses php and MySQL at the ‘backend’.

Version 0.3 works great with Safari, Camino and Firefox (slight problem with scroll bars not hiding when a window is collapsed) on the Mac, and it works with Internet Explorer, Firefox (oddly scroll bars do hide correctly) and Netscape on Windows. This version does not work with Opera…

Anyway, check out the new version at: http://www.thesnowsite.com.

The theSnowSite domain and website is hosted at UK2.net

A new version of theSnowSite has been posted.

It is odd working on such a website as it is really like working on a fully fledged program – you go through the same design, code, test, debug, and write again cycles.

So, what is new on theSnowSite ?

Up front:

The site now contains a ‘menu bar‘ which contains two tabs:

Tab 1 – Map: This tab, when clicked, displays the map. It is possible to navigate from country to country using the list of countries on the left. Clicking the country name moves the map to that country and displays a list of ski and boarding areas in the country below the map. This list is in two parts: mapped resorts (i.e. known location), and unmapped resorts. Clicking on the resort name displays a list of information, to the right of the map, on the resort. The details contain the address of the resort, web address, e-mail address, a link to a piste (ski/board) map, as well as the ‘vital stats’ for the resort (number of lifts, runs, run type etc.). The map also shows the location of the resorts and moving the mouse over the markers displays the name of the resort (clicking a marker brings up the resort details in the same way as clicking on a resort name in the list).

Tab 2 – Search: Clicking tab 2 brings up a search page. In the box provided start typing the name of a resort you wish to find (handy if you know the name of resort but not the country) and once you have entered a few letters the system will ‘guess’ the full name and display a list of possibles below the search box. Each suggestion comes with two links: Link 1, Show Details – clicking this will display the resort details on the right of the page; Link 2 – Map It! (only displayed if the resort has mapping details), clicking this link will return you to the map page and display the location of the resort and the resort details to the right of the map. The list of search results will be displayed below the map.

Adding these tabs was surprisingly difficult as there were the usual browser-to-browser variations and problems.(Actually that is not true, it was relatively easy to get the menu working with Firefox, Safari, Netscape, Camino, and Opera, the problem was getting it to work with Internet Explorer and the other browsers at the same time!).

There are also some changes to the map. The map now has ‘map type controls’ which allows you to select different map types (funny that!) such as ‘Map’, ‘Satellite’ (handy for areas in that don’t have ‘road map’ coverage in Google) and ‘Hybrid’ which combines the road map and satellite data.

In addition, large map zoom and pan controls have been added and ‘mouse-over’ pop-up information added for the markers.

Under-the-hood:

The Google map system has been updated to version 2. This is not obvious from looking at the site but it adds additional functions to the map system which will be used later on the site. As a result of changes in version 2.0 of Google maps some ‘in code’ changes had to be made and also some data in the database, which controls the map display, had to be tweaked.

Browser Compatibility:

theSnowSite has been tested with the Windows versions Netscape, Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer, and on the Mac with Safari, Camino and Firefox.

For best viewing results Firefox (Mac or Windows) is recommended. To get Firefox visit http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/. The theSnowSite domain and website is hosted at UK2.net

With work on theSnowSite, and also work on a few other web projects (see Quartz, Court Park Properties and one to be announced – coming soon!) I decided to buy a Windows laptop so I can easily check how things look in different browsers.

What I have found is that if website is developed on a Mac and tested in Safari the chances are it will work, and display the same in:

• Firefox on the Mac
• Camino on the Mac
• Netscape on Windows XP
• Opera on Windows XP
• Firefox on Windows XP

Now, if you look at the above list you will see one browser missing – yep, you guessed it Internet Explorer on Windows XP.

It is amazing. Windows Internet Explorer (IE) consistently fails to meet internet standards. I think it is very telling that six browsers seem to meet standards and one doesn’t…. Coincidence? I think not!!!

What is most annoying is because it means ‘solutions’ have to be developed twice, once for Internet Explorer and once for every one else. Having been forced to use IE on Windows I just can’t understand why people use it. Firefox on Windows is soooo much nicer.

On the plus slide IEs market share is slipping, in 2002 it was around 85 – 90%, it is now down around 60% (Numbers from: http://www.w3schools.com/). Let’s hope that IE market share continues to slip and Microsoft decided to fully adopt internet standards, or at least make their browser behave like all the other browsers out there, in an attempt to get back some market share….

Update (17th April 2006): Hmmmm…. Just found some different figures online for browser usage: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 which puts IE at 85%. Most depressing….

Today MMISoftware posted the first version of ‘theSnowSite‘ has been posted at: http://www.thesnowsite.com.

This project has been a year in the making and has taken many many hours; hence the reason for the slow down in application updates.

First, you will need a ‘state-of-the-art’ browser to view the site (I would suggest Firefox).

The site has been tested on Mac OS X using Safari, Camino, Firefox; and on Windows using Internet Explorer (more on that later), Firefox, Netscape, and Opera) and it seems to work as expected. For a long time there was a ‘display problem’ in Internet Explorer, which was finally resolved thanks to some ‘fiddling’ with the code (typical of Microsoft to ignore the internet standards that everyone else seems to follow – the site worked fine in all the other browsers, it was just IE that caused problems).

For my fellow geeks: The site is using AJAX (asynchronous javascript and xml), which is sometimes referred to (incorrectly it is argued) as web2.0. Basically, as you will notice when you browse the site it doesn’t keep reloading the pages when you click on a link etc. This is because I am using an embedded Javascript server on the web page that loads data from the database asynchronously, i.e. the page doesn’t have to reload all the data when a link is clicked, but just refreshes the bits of the page that need updating. As the process is asynchronous it also means that the page doesn’t have to wait whilst data is collected before it can be displayed, and can be displayed as soon as information becomes available.

This approach has also solved a major problem in the original approach which had was very ‘static’ web-pages and some pages were coming in at 80+ kb. This was putting a load on the server and would consume bandwidth at an alarming rate! For example, 20 or so clicks on resorts could use around 1 MB of data! Not good… With an AJAX approach sections are updated as needed, i.e. the page doesn’t have to keep reloading the list of ski areas etc. as information changes.

The new site can be seen at: http://www.thesnowsite.com

The theSnowSite domain and website is hosted at UK2.net