Phil Hawthorne's Blog

Mozilla Foundation releases Firefox 5 three months after the release of Firefox 4, but is the upgrade worth it?

Mozilla, the creators of the revolution against Microsoft Internet Explorer, (please don’t tell me you’re still using the crud of a thing) released the next version of the Firefox web-browser this week: Firefox 5. For those of you who are using Firefox 3.x, you’ll find this as a massive upgrade, and a very awesome one indeed. The design is much slimmer, the menu bar is gone in favour of a chrome like “Give the web-page more screen realestate” approach. But if you’re upgrading from Firefox 4… well let’s just say I haven’t found any new features of Firefox 5 yet that I’ve used, let alone noticed.

Back in the day, new version numbers meant something. The minor bug fixes didn’t mean a product went from version 1 to version 2, no, it was more like v1.0.1. And if there were new features added in, but it wasn’t really a major upgeade to the product, then you’d get v1.1. Firefox 5, in my opinion, is more like a 4.1. But why has Mozilla taken this approach? The answer is Google Chrome.

Now before I go ahead and put my sinical hat on (perhaps it’s too late for that), I have to applaud Firefox for changing their internal processes, to have a new release verison out and stable within 3 months. Well done. But we need to get a few things in order first. Yes, you’ve done what you planned to do. But you’ve released a brand new verison of your software, which is really no different to the previous version, and yet it’s a major milestone? I don’t think so.

Recently at the WWDC in the US, Apple announced the release and some of the features for its new operating system, iOS. (continue reading…)

Cooliris is a plugin available for Firefox that allows you to view photos from the web on an interactive 3D wall. The application also has a web-based flash application that allows you to display a 3D wall to your website visitors – even if they don’t have Cooliris installed.

I was recently introduced to Cooliris by my friend Gary, who was very impressed with the features of the Firefox Plugin. After finding out there’s an API for the app, we began investigating ways to use it on the web.

The API is pretty easy to use. Cooliris have an awesome set of documentation articles over on their website, and you can choose whether to use JavaScript or a flash object to embed the 3D wall on your site.

Because of Adobe’s tight security when it comes to cross domain scripting, you have to place a file called crossdomain.xml in your domains root directory. For example. http://philhawthorne.com/crossdomain.xml would be my domains root directory. You’ll also need to make sure that your MediaRSS validates as XML correctly. I suggest you check your MediaRSS is valid by using the tool at www.feedvalidator.org.

I setup the Cooliris wall on the website, and it loaded fine, three boxes appeared for the three test images, and hovering over the images showed me the image title. That was all good. But for some reason, the images wouldn’t load. Looking in the status bar of the browser, I can see the images being loaded, but they just wouldn’t appear. A lot of support posts on the Cooliris website about this issue all pointed to the crossdomain.xml file being the issue. But I had already checked that.

What’s strange about the Cooliris plugin is that when you press the slideshow button, the images would actually display. This made me think that the issue was something to do with Cooliris, and I had done everything correctly. I re-checked my MediaRSS to make sure it was valid XML. I changed the <media:thumbnail> tags from self closing (XHTML style) tags to <media:thumbnail> </media:thumbnail> tags. Still nothing.

Eventually I discovered the issue. It was actually a crossdomain.xml issue. The images I was serving to the Cooliris were stored on a subdomain. After copying the crossdomain.xml file to the subdomains root directory, the images appeared in the 3D wall.

Hopefully this can save someone hours of headaches.

The other day, a friend of mine asked me for some help in trying to find out the host of a client he had just picked up. Which got me thinking,  although I would still consider myself new to the trade, I could at least post up some tools that I have used in the past, and still use today for various tasks.

Whois

When you register a domain on the internet, no matter what the extension, you need to give your contact details to your domain registrar. These details can be publicly viewed by doing a whois search on your domain. Doing a whois will allow people to know who owns the domain, and how to get in contact with them.

(continue reading…)