Monthly Archive for November, 2009

Havoc talks about litl’s webbook

Published on November 14, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So Havoc Pennington of former red hat and freedesktop.org glory has posted about his company litl’s latest product.

It’s an interesting concept, and could well take off, though the starting price of 700 USD seems a little steep to me. As Havoc mentions it’s all about build quality and attention to purpose when designing the thing and he does seem to have a point. I know I use several different PC’s and laptops around the house to do all the things the litl webbook is trying to wrap in one user friendly device.

More unflash Flash

Published on November 12, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Okay so it’s been a while, but here comes another rant about Flash. Recently we launched a decent mapping integrated content site at ninemsn, http://rateyourplace.com.au/.

In cross browser testing we found that the autocomplete on IE6 just wasn’t working. A whole day’s troubleshooting later and we found out it was the CPU intensive flash animation (which used some 3D rendering engine) that took out the  jQuery bindings on the text box.

Turns out, CPU intensive flash, in a transparent wmode embed will take out text boxes immediately around it, and this is a known issue.

There’s no fix, just a bunch of work-arounds, tone down the amount of CPU intensiveness, or try changing the wmode to window (no more html layered elements over the flash if you do this). We were lucky enough to be able to go to a window wmode, as there were no hovering html elements, but this is a real lame issue if you ask me.