Monday, 29 April 2002
Jim has a new design! Very nice looking! (Keep it!)
12:35 AMSunday, 28 April 2002
Weird, Radio seems not to be receiving receiving updates from Bill Bumgarner's weblog. He's posted a lot in the last few days and I hadn't seen a word of it. In particular, there's a very thorough developer's introduction to Mac OS X, full of lots of useful information. It's not often I read such a large amount of advice which I completely agree with, but in this case, I couldn't find a single point of argument.
Well, perhaps one. He doesn't mention Mozilla as a viable OS X browser. See below.
Mozilla weblogs: a nice index. Among those I hadn't seen before, Matt Judy wrote a concise statement on Chimera. I agree with everything he says. I don't want to see Mozilla on Mac OS X take a back seat to Chimera either, because currently Mozilla is ready for me to use as my primary browser, and Chimera isn't. I have used Mozilla as such for a month now. The number of annoying bugs I encounter on a daily basis in Mozilla is now very small (counting 'lack of speed in new window opening and general interface performance' as one bug), and otherwise are:
- keyboard shortcuts, especially the Return key, don't function in OS dialogs (save, print)
- naming of saved files is erratic, sometimes adding file extensions where inappropriate
- menus in the Personal Toolbar activate when dragging over them, even when Mozilla is not the active application
- history is poorly implemented (see Windows IE for a very nice implementation, and Mac IE/OmniWeb for tolerable ones).
- bookmarks are poorly implemented (same as above, but Mac IE far surpasses other browsers I've seen here)
- you can't Command-click on a bookmark to open it in a new tab
- if Mozilla can't load a page in a tab or window, it doesn't display the URL, making it impossible to know which page you wanted if you try to reload
On the other hand, I'm starting to miss many Mozilla features when I use other browsers, especially Mac IE. These include tabbed browsing, intelligent forms auto-fill, decently functional form fields, and rendering speed. Mozilla has also largely stopped crashing for me; CrashReporter's logs indicate that it hasn't crashed since Sunday the 21st, and I've been using it several hours a day since.
I've discovered the bottleneck I was looking for in instant outline rendering, and I should be able to fix all the problems I documented yesterday in one fell swoop.
Still need to convert the toDo icons with GraphicConverter… will do when I get frustrated when my code doesn't work. 
My instant outline rendering works! The link in the sidebar at left is broken, but you can see the result here. The scripts are based on opmlRender, although my stuff many times faster because it doesn't modify the outline in place. It includes to-do items. For once, CSS mostly cooperated.
Stuff to do with this later:
- release the new toDo.root including rendering scripts
- it seems setting #flRender to true stops my Instant Outline from updating in its OPML version… is there a workaround?
- fix the sidebar link in the rendered site; it's fine in the desktop website.
Several people emailed me regarding the icons not working on Windows. It seems Iconographer is not converting them properly, since GraphicConverter doesn't like the ICO files it produces either. I'll convert the icons with GraphicConverter tomorrow, and hopefully it'll work.
Friday, 26 April 2002
To Do for Radio: Want to include to-do lists in your Instant Outline? Or in any other outline in Radio 8 or Frontier? As promised, a small tool for Radio.
