Category Archives: ammado

ammado v1.0 launch

Ammado v1 launch

My former colleagues have done a great job with the v1.0 release of ammado. I was briefly involved at the beginning of the redesign before I wandered back over to Wales. They’ve got a blog that is updated frequently and a podcast too. It’s a great redesign with plenty of very nice aspects to it. They’ve also had a lot of feature updates such as videos. Good work guys.

Visual Studio 2008 upgrade

Visual Studio 2008 review - Team ExplorerWell this will be a short one………………. it’s very disappointing.

  • You can’t CTRL+F or CTRL+SHIFT+F will crash the IDE.
  • Editing any CSS file will crash your IDE….ANY CSS file.
  • Teeam explorer’s ‘Queue New Build’ doesn’t queue them at all. It’s the exact same as it used to be (see screenshot below).
  • It’s slow even on a dual core XEON with 4GB Ram

In conclusion – don’t bother upgrading, even if you do get javascript autocompletion.

Thursday night Karting

Myself and the Prague team went Karting last night and then out for dinner and drinks. It was a great night – So far, Prague is awesome and the I’m afraid to say that the rumours are true – the ladies here are strikingly hot.

Prague team out boozing

Me and the Prague team (minus Filip who was ill). From left to right: Me, Yauhen (Eugene), Viktoria (Vika) and Frank.

IE – why oh why do you taunt me so??

I’ve been working on a couple of plugins for the YUI editor to allow insertion of Flash Movies (YouTube and Google Video). It’s all working swimmingly well in Firefox and Safari but in IE – it just would not work. Why? because of IE’s JS engine bastarding implementation of innerHTML and pasteHTML. I know that innerHTML is not part of the ECMA spec but it is well supported across browsers and is alot quicker than document.createElement. The YUI editor uses it extensively too. I’ve also never encountered problems with it before.

My JS plugin for the editor takes and parses a Google Video URL and inserts it into the editor content area using the appropriate YUI editor action “inserthtml”. In Firefox – I get the alternate image as it doesn’t render the markup in the editor’s iframe properly and as such does not know to load the Flash plugin (this is fine and I have no problems with it). Internet Explorer inserts the HTML and then displays a broken flashmovie icon (white with red x in top left indicating it can’t find the movie specified), which is not fine. This is the markup I insert.

Correct markup

IE (6 and 7), in all it’s wisdom decides that that is not what I really want to insert -in fact what I really want is –

Incorrect markup

Hmmmmm….. No that’s not what I fucking well want – you piece of shit(or so I was shouting late last night). This is due to the JS engine’s HTML normalization – excuse me what?????. Very annoying. To get the editor to display the movie I had to (“shock horror”) add the deprecated embed element.

Another problem was that when submitted server side – we use a HTML parser and IE’s version of the markup would not parse correctly as the attribute values were not quoted. So I have one momma of a regex to fix the object element.It all works now and works well but it’s so disappointing that it happens like this.

In summary – firstly: beware of innerHTML especially when inserting an object element and finally: I hate internet explorer more than I ever did.

What’s Ammado?

Ammado Logo

Well the veil has been lifted a little and I can reveal what it is I have been working on.

Ammado is a social network targetted at charities and people interacting with charities.We’ve got all the usual stuff like communities, comments, image pools, message broadcasts etc etc.

I’ve been working on all sorts but mainly the Ajax stuff and trying to get the CSS in shape.The system is still in “Beta” so go easy on your bug listings.

In a few weeks you’ll be able to see the snazzy YUI editor integration I’ve done with YouTube and Google Video plugins, as well as an ajax image gallery and upload feature. Awesome!!! I hear you say.

If you’d like an invite email me