Beyond Coding

It’s funny how a company the size of Telstra can have such bad usability on such a basic part of their web site. Take for example, where users can log in to pay their bills or check their account:

Tabbing through the form takes you from Username to Forgot your username, instead of going from Username to Password. When choosing your tab sequence, always go for the order that the majority of users will be using the majority of the time.

To make matters worse on the Telstra login, when you hit enter after typing your Username and Password, it doesn’t submit the form. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve waited a few seconds before realising.

Not as serious, but why have the Register button the same size and style as the Login button…?

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I came across an ad for Sumo Salad the other day (a “healthy fast food” chain here in Australia):

www.sumosalad.com/sumo_ad.html

It’s a good play on words making Mac a Big Mac, but overall very unoriginal and rather boring after the first “hello” lines. How can they blatantly copy the Mac ads so much (especially the music) – I know it’s a parody but you have to draw the line somewhere.

The Mac versus PC debate has been going on for a long time. Ultimately, it comes down to personal preference; what you like and what you want to do with your system.

When trying to decide between a Mac and a PC, one thing to consider is the other devices you have, such as; mobile phones, tablets, gaming consoles, Apple TV®, and other computers. Although it is possible to have a mix of operating systems, Apple® products are designed to work together, and Windows and Android™ products are designed to work together, along with PlayStation® and Xbox®. Some people dislike the extra work to get the different devices to talk to each other.

In the hardware area, PCs also have an advantage of offering more connection ports and types of ports on any one system and the ability to select a system based on the number and type connections. If a particular kind of port is important to you, you can find just the right system with that port.

It’s certainly possible to run games on a Mac, but PCs are generally considered better for hard-core gaming. Read more about Mac computers and gaming, and in my opinion this is true and has been very positive and taken a lot of anxiety I had before, my gaming has improve and the Exhale Wellness delta 9 has me hooked to reduce my anxiety and also focus on my gaming strategy !

I don’t know if Apple would be happy having “Mac” in this ad as the bloated, fat, slow kid… they wouldn’t want people to associate actual Macs with bloat and slowness would they? :)

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If you ever have an HTML select that doesn’t want to default to the option you’ve added selected=”selected” to, it may not be a problem in your code. It may be due to Firefox’s behaviour.

Firefox seems to always default to the option selected by a user instead of the option that has the selected=”selected” tag – even on a page refresh (without even first POSTing the data)! Copy and paste the URL into another browser tab/window and it’ll most likely work fine… :)

Internet Explorer doesn’t have this problem (surprisingly).

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Ok, I’ve spent a whole friggin day on this problem so hopefully this post will help save some people some time…

We’ve been working on a video site recently that uses the fantastic JW Player to play the .flv flash files. For some reason, there were some issues with using a tabbed interface we’d made in conjunction with the JW Player.

After changing from a tab with a text page back to the video page, the following error was coming up:

Error: $("#player1")[0].sendEvent is not a function

The code causing this error was a little routine to load a different video into the player when someone clicks on a different tab:

$('#player1')[0].sendEvent('LOAD',obj);

After a whole day of trial and error and putting alerts all over my JS code, I finally worked out what the hell was going on.

Even though my JS code was waiting until the document had been loaded (through jQuery’s $(document).ready(function() { blah..blah), the JW Player wasn’t loading in that time. It turns out even though our tabbed pages were powered by simple show/hide CSS, going from the video tab to a non-video tab and back made the JW Player have to load again.

The sendEvent is not a function error was simply because the JW Player hadn’t loaded yet, so the player1 object didn’t exist yet!

The solution? A simple delay:

setTimeout(function() { $('#player1')[0].sendEvent('LOAD',obj); }, 200);

Now this is not a pretty solution at all. Maybe 200 ms is enough time for the player to load on my computer, but what about on another set up? Newer versions of the JW Player automatically call a particular function when it finishes loading (playerReady()), but I wasn’t able to find a quick and easy way to check the player was loaded.

If anyone knows how to get playerReady() working nicely with jQuery’s $(document).ready() I’d love to hear about it. From the comments on the JW Player site, it seems the playerReady() function is a little flakey in any case. But is a setTimeout any better? Hmm…

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So your jQuery/JavaScript code doesn’t have any errors, yet your site isn’t working as expected in Internet Explorer? It could be that you have some SWFObject code interfering with your jQuery code (if for example, you’re using a Flash video player or something along those lines). The solution is very simple. Simply enclose your SWFObject code in a jQuery $(document).ready() as so:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function(){
        var so = new SWFObject("movie.swf", "mymovie", "400", "100%", "8", "#336699");
        so.addParam("quality", "low");
        so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
        so.addParam("salign", "t");
        so.write("flashcontent");
    });
</script>

The only downside to this is that if you have some alternate HTML to show when Flash isn’t present, this text will be shown until the document is fully loaded and the player(s) start to render (even if the user does in fact have Flash installed).

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Since my previous post on this topic, Kohana has evolved and changed quite a bit, to the point that the instructions provided are no longer applicable.

So here are the updated instructions for those who would like to integrate Zend Framework into Kohana.

1) Put the ‘Zend’ folder in your application’s ‘vendors’ directory.

2) Put the following code into an appropriate place in your application, it could be in the base controller.

if ($path = Kohana::find_file('vendors', 'Zend/Exception'))
{
	ini_set('include_path',
	ini_get('include_path').PATH_SEPARATOR.dirname(dirname($path)));
}

3) Instanciate the Zend library with the following code:

require_once 'Zend/Mail.php';
$mail = new Zend_Mail;

That’s it! How simple is that? :)

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