-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
As it turns out, testing your pages for functionality with and without JavaScript
is pretty easy if you're just using Selenium IDE in Firefox.
Create a user-extensions.js file containing the following commands (and
tell the IDE its location):
Selenium.prototype.doDisableJavascript = function() {
setJavascriptPref(false);
};
Selenium.prototype.doEnableJavascript = function() {
setJavascriptPref(true);
};
function setJavascriptPref(bool) {
prefs = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIPrefBranch);
prefs.setBoolPref("javascript.enabled", bool);
}
And now you've got disableJavascript and enableJavascript commands
at your disposal.
This takes advantage of the fact the Selenium IDE's test runner is running inside
of the Firefox chrome, so you have access to Firefox's innards. If you try to do this
from the normal, pure HTML + JavaScript test runner, you'll get security errors. There
may well be a way to tell Firefox to trust the test runner, so the security's more
lax. I've not seen it yet.
Obviously, it's horrible to have to run an entire test suite from Selenium IDE (and
it'll be important to be able to use other browsers too), so I'm still looking into
this and the other problems I mentioned before.
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
Here's the problem and the solution.
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
So it's done. This morning Mr. Budd and I presented How To Be A Web Design Superhero at SXSWi. For budding superheroes, our presentation slides are now online (PDF 13.5Mb).
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
I showed the Get Firefox page to my wife, as I thought it was kind of funny. She did not get the joke. I wonder if others of a more litigous bent will see the humour?
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
There wasn't much on in the day yesterday; I went to a couple of the "screen burn" sessions, which were about gaming - a subject I studiously avoid, due to my addictive personality. As I know very little about it, I learned loads. The first session was about "red vs. blue", a series of machinema videos. Machinema is basically making films by recording action in games. Very clever, and extremely interesting.
The second session was about "lag" in online gaming, and a guy who started a company and got funding for researching and (hopefully) fixing the problems that cause lag. Lag is the thing that makes the characters jump about randomly, and other annoying things like that.
After that I met Jason Whitmore, who works for Apple, is a freelance photographer, and books bands for a new club in Austin. I hung out with him for a while, and we went to a party in a bar with free beer and food. I met up with Christopher Pollard, who I sat with on the plane. I met Erik Haugo at the party, and spent a couple of hours with him discussing tagging, the future of computers, and all manner of other stuff, before heading to Stubbs to the BlogHer party.
We met Kaliya Hamlin, who is working with inames. i-names seems to be like Microsoft passport, only better, and open-source. I'll check it out more when I get back.
Erik left about midnight, and I stayed to watch a really cool band who were playing downstairs.
This morning I went to a couple of panels - the first one was about how traditional media (newspapers, print etc.) and design is affected by the web. The questions from the floor were the longest I've ever heard. They were more like proposing a theory for a couple of minutes, and then asking a brief question about it. I think a couple of them would have preferred to be panelists themselves.
The second one was brilliant. It was about web design superheroes, and was presented by two Brits - Andy Clarke and Andy Budd, whose book I won recently. They had the best presentation slides I've ever seen - with cartoon superheroes on them.
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
…or is Dave Winer paranoid? Every second post of his these days seems to be about how the tech world is doing him down. Someone of his standing doesn’t have to do so much whining. When he complains of Microsoft not paying him for work he’s done, it makes me think what was the agreement [...]
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
Digg links to this year's Vincent Flanders Awards for the worst-designed web pages, and there's no contest for my personal favorite - the Association of International Glaucoma Societies. It's hard to know where to start: the fact that the page takes nearly twenty seconds to load even with my 6MB broadband connection, the Pythonesque heads that pop up from above the menu bar, the spinning globe reminiscent of some Austin Powers evil mega-corporation, the animated Flash medical image that's over 4.5MB in size (might hit 50K at the outside as an animated GIF), and of course the operatic Glaucoma Hymn ("Glaucoma! Glaucoma!"). What's not to like? I'm almost ready to join the society right now just to save it from bankruptcy due to bandwidth charges when Digg and Slashdot have finished their maulings.
Still, they look like they have a good time at their meetings...
My only serious point in a vague attempt to make this posting somehow relevant to the general subject matter of this blog is that user experience matters. The introduction of WPF brings great power to allow you to build almost any kind of user interface, but with that power comes responsibility.
One of the greatest benefits of Windows in the early days was the harmonization it brought to different applications. I used to have all the WordStar command keystrokes memorized, but switching to another word processor or application meant starting from scratch. Every application had their own shortcuts and keys to bring up menus or command structures, and there was no consistency between them. The ability to take many of the basic memes in Word and apply them to Excel was a great step forward. Since WPF makes it easy to restyle and replace the visual template for any Windows control, the importance of good design and careful thought about usability applies even more than ever. There's plenty of scope for innovation, but great care needs to be taken to ensure that it doesn't come at the cost of ease of use or accessibility.
I'm sad to say that I expect to see some applications that go to far and become the "Glaucoma! Glaucoma!" of the Windows world - slow to load, hard to navigate, and full of unnecessary frippery that distracts from the purpose of the application itself. On the other hand, I look forward to seeing applications that apply these technologies wisely to allow far better navigation and visualization of data. I had the privilege to meet with Mary Czerwinski of the VIBE research team last week to see some of the amazing work they're doing in this area, and I'll share more about that in another post.
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
Discovered while Paul was trying to prove he was the second result for poo
obsession on eBay. Fingers crossed for that number one spot, eh?
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
If you would like to see me do a DDDIII talk at Developer Developer Developer in Reading in the summer then this is your chance to suggest a subject and title for me to talk on. Bear in mind it must be technical and ideally on a subject matter that I know well (or one that I could learn well in that time!)
Please post your suggestions. The one that I think will be most suitable I will put forward in a weeks time. (or the one that everyone says yes do that to I will put forward)
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
The future of the mobile phone in all its hi-tech glory is on full display at the Cebit technology fair.
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
TOCA Race Driver 3 has a couple of flaws but is otherwise a polished and detailed racing game.
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
Here's an OPMLish podcast for you, recorded tonight with me, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.
It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats.
We had Adam along today as he's been experimenting with OPML in recent months at his Darwinian Web blog. John Tropea also joined us...John runs the Library clips blog where he has been documenting, extensively, the various OPML experiments and tools that have emerged over the last year.
As usual, show notes below. Enjoy!
The podcast (.mp3, 58 min, 13mb) can be downloaded here, show notes below.
OPML 2.0 Podcast - Alex Barnett, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea
- Intros
- On the Dave Winer's announcement of the OPML 2.0 Draft - Good? bad? ugly?
- Data types within OPML (08:30)
- Namespaces in OPML (11:30)
- Attention, Attention.xml, namespaces and OPML (13:30)
- David on Adam, Adam on OPML and Annotated Reading Lists (19:45)
- Structured data within OPML, , Grazr, and Microsoft with OPML (24:15)
- OPML Tools: Bitty Browser, Grazr mini, Optimal OPML Browser, OPod and OPML Renderer (30:00)
- My Bio as an Outline, The Software I Use and Declarative Living (34:30)
- OPML, Structured Blogging and Microformats and Namespaces aren't mutually exclusive (36:45)
- What are biggest problems are technologies solving? (42:45)
- Michael Arrington's Edgeio, structured blogging, my data and distributed data (45:00)
- OPML Camp and who's coming (54:30)
-
Tags: OPML RSS, attention.xml, microformats, Attention, structured blogging, technology, web podcast,
-
Published on 11 Mar 2006 from
As the usage of Sharepoint increases, there is a profileration of Sharepoint sites. This makes it harder and harder to keep track of where your documents are located and also to see a unified view of your "stuff".
In 2007 Office Server, we are introducing a couple of new web parts that address this problem.
1. On MySite (personal roll-up)
The first one is the Sharepoint Sites (the name may change by RTM) webpart. This webpart is meant to be used in your personal site and it automatically rolls up all the documents created, modified, checked-out to you as well as tasks assigned to you in every site that you are a Member of.
Each site shows up as a "tab" and will show you the documents and tasks assigned to you. In addition, you can add another tab that points to any Sharepoint site.
How does it know what sites to show automatically?
In Office Server, there is an user and membership sync engine that figures out which sites you are a Member of. The engine requires that the user explicitly be in the Members group of that site. The sharepoint Create Site and User Management UI allow you to provision and manage this group by default.
2. On any Sharepoint Site (Generic Rollup)
A second webpart called Sites Rollup (name may change for RTM) part can be used on any Sharepoint site (Team, Document workspace, etc.). This part allows you to create tabs to each site you want to show and also allows you to specify a rollup page in those sites. It does not automatically populate the list of sites based on who is viewing the part.
Venky Veeraraghavan - PM
