Month: November 2003

Spellchecker for Firebird Browser

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

The Mozilla Suite and Mozilla Thunderbird have had a built-in spellchecker for a little while now. And someone came up with the idea of using the spellchecker for with form fields (input boxes and textareas). But, for the most part, the feature request languished.

However, a guy named Torisugari has come up with a workable setup (for both Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Suite). As mentioned in the Firebird forums, he’s created an XPI browser extension that makes use of the existing spellchecker libraries adds a spellcheck option to context menus for input fields and textareas.

The links to download are included in Torisugari’s forum posts and, if this feature interests you, I’d recommend reading the whole thread (or at least skipping to the end) since the later posts point to more recent versions of the extension.

And, as a bonus for Torisugari, he may end up with some money from this — there's a SourceSupport bounty for adding this feature (SourceSupport is a site where users can pledge towards feature requests and new software). It currently stands at $42.84 and I’m tempted to chip in myself.

15 Trends in Logo Design

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Zeldman points to this article on upcoming trends in logo design (that link points to an introduction while the list itself is on the second page). Most people probably remember the overuse of the swoosh from the late 90s, but most of the trends cited don't annoy me at all.

Though I recognize that many new logos have common themes, the only one that actually gets to me is the “slinky” — and that’s probably because it looks like a designer started with a swoosh and hit Ctrl-V a few too many times. And while the photo-logos are cute (I especially like that orange), I would be concerned with their reproducibility in black-and-white, such as via memo or fax.

My favorite of the categories may be the trend in punctuation (trend #11). But, that could just be the ASCII-art fan in me ;). And, of the punctuation logos, I quite like the one for Workplace Answers — the punctuation there is rather sneaky and I didn’t even notice it at first.

Multiple IE Versions on One Box!!

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Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs has discovered a method of running multiple versions of IE on one box! He made the discovery when he noticed that a developer’ edition of IE was able to run concurrently with his installed version.

Working backwards, he discovered which files the developer’s edition used and applied that knowledge towards older IE versions — he downloaded their respective CAB files and extracted bits as needed. A few tweaks later, and he had stand-alone versions (screenshot). (The tweaks, involving IEXPLORE.exe.local, are further explained in the article.)

Of course, Joe outlines the steps he used to create the stand-alone versions and you could follow along with those. Or — even easier — QuicksMode.org has links to the ready-to-run stand-alone versions of IE download.

I’ve tested this on my XP machine here at work, and it works great! When running multiple versions of IE, it can be easy to confuse which version is which; so, QuicksMode wrote a small script to dynamically prepend the IE version number to the page’s title (so that it’s easily visible in the taskbar).

Joe also includes a link for PayPal donations at the bottom of his page to cover bandwidth costs and the like. And, considering how much time this discovery will save me, I was happy to contribute.

PS As you may have noticed, I’m not one to use exclamation points gratuitously. It could have been two years or more since I last typed two consecutive exclamation points. But, I was so excited about this discovery that I included two in the title of this blog entry ;).

Mozilla Firebird — Now with DOM Inspector!

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

The DOM Inspector was checked in to the Mozilla Firebird trunk today and it should appear in tomorrow’s nightly builds. For those not aware, the DOM Inspector is the ultra-useful browser extension for — among other things — analyzing CSS within a webpage. For instance, you can select an element on a page and the DOM Inspector can tell you how the document’s CSS rules cascaded to produce that element’s styling.

I’m really stoked about this check-in since the missing DOM Inspector was one of the few things holding me back from Mozilla Firebird. Now if I can just get URLs from Thunderbird to open in a new Firebird tab, I’ll be all set :). And, some say that there’s a solution to the open-new-tabs issue as well.

I don't doubt that switching to Firebird/Thunderbird is a Good Idea(tm), but I'm still unsure when the development team will officially make the switch. Reading over the roadmap, they say that “[it’s] clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone” — but they don't elaborate on when they expect that switch might be :-/.

Update 11-13: I’ve discovered that Firebird still doesn’t have inline autocomplete in the location bar (URL bar). Bummer.

Microsoft Jargon

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In the comments for this Slashdot review of the book “Microsoft in the Mirror”, Prostoalex linked to his lexicon of Microsoft Jaron. It’s similar (but unrelated) to the Jargon File, but it’s specific to Jargon within Microsoft.

Some of the entries have since crept into widespread corporate use, such as bandwidth (as in “time”), but most of them were new to me. And, one of my favorites is probably “ask” as a noun:

Ask: Used as a noun, preceded by “the,” as in “What’s the ask?”, which basically means “What are you asking?”, or “What’s the bottom line?”, or, more simply, “What’s the question?” Essentially, then, a gratuitous verb-to-noun transmogrification, creating a useless synonym for question.

I can almost understand its purpose, but I still find it amusing — I almost feel like adopting it as my exclamation-of-choice (as in “What the ask?!”). Of course, that usage wouldn’t make sense in real life or even in the context of Microsoft jargon ;).