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Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

IE 6 Must Die, But Which Browser For Me?

I am starting to develop some little and big projects, one inevitable question is: do I support IE6?

Well, my personal take is, I will *try* to make my sites and apps compatible with IE6, but only if the consequences (i.e. increased development time and code complexity) are negligible.

Naturally, I would want to direct my IE6 users to a “stop IE6 / save the developers” kind of site, encouraging them to upgrade their browser. After some quick Google searches, I can’t actually find one that is simple and pretty.

So, I reinvented the wheels. Meet WhichBrowserForMe.org!

Please spread the site around and tweet about it, so more and more web developers and designers can start using it, and hopefully more and more users will become aware of the fact that using IE6 is a bad thing.

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Sequel Pro: Time to Ditch CocoaMySQL (Almost!)

For a very very long time, a lot of MySQL developers are stuck with the abandoned CocoaMySQL. Even though there are a number of other products exist, such as the GUI Tools from MySQL, Navicat and YourSQL, many developers include myself still find CocoaMySQL more user friendly (not in terms of the features but the overall ‘feel’ of the application).

Today I have stumbled across a new application: Sequel Pro. It is a fork of CocoaMySQL just like CocoaMySQL SBG, but unlike the latter, Sequel Pro is actively under development and the latest stable version ( v0.9.2 ) was released on October 21, 2008.

The first thing I noticed is the performance boost. In CocoaMySQL, browsing a table with thousands of records could be a pain thing to do, Sequel Pro has fixed this issue and the performance matches most of other tools.

Interface wise there is not much difference between the two, I suspect the GUI will be refined in the future because there are some minor issues such as missing icons.

One feature I hope they will implement soon, is the ability to reorder table fields, the last thing I want to do is to fire up YourSQL (or PhpMyAdmin) just for reordering some fields.

One annoying bug I’ve discovered shortly after using it, is that the connection window (CMD + N) has some major issues accepting correct passwords. If I create two new connections with the same username, the two usernames are forced to have the same passwords, weird behaviour.

Having said that, Sequel Pro is still a welcoming product that holds a future. The performance increase along warrants the ‘migration’ from CocoaMySQL.

Let’s wait and see how the project goes. :)

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Internet Explorer 7 says no to sessions and cookies

People might think that IE6 is really slowing down the advancement of web design and development, which is true. What some people don’t realise is that IE7 is just about as evil as IE6.

Today we have noticed a nasty bug that only happens in IE7. We built a website and it is being framesetted by other websites. In IE7, sessions and cookies do not work at all for this website (which has a different domain to the parent website).

After lots of research and debugging, we’ve finally identified this bug: IE7 incorrectly sets privacy settings for the website that is contained with a frameset and is not part of the main (parent) website. All sessions and cookies are therefore blocked.

Fortunately, there is a fix:

header('P3P: CP="ALL ADM DEV PSAi COM OUR OTRo STP IND ONL"');

The above line will ‘magically’ fix this IE7 bug.

I wish the IE family was bought out by other vendors, or alternatively, died peacefully.

On a side note, let’s wait and see what Google has to offer with Google Chrome.

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