It seems that Opera 9 finally supports functionality required for WYSIWYG editors like SPAW to work. I’ll try to modfiy our browser detection code so that O9 is recognized as a compatible browser and see what happens.

I just hope that all of the Gecko-targeted code works on Opera (seriously doubt about IE code). If this is the case next release of SPAW will come with Opera support, otherwise we’ll leave this for SPAW2.

Thanks to bcreswell on our forums for the hint (we should monitor situation with browser closer)

Update: unfortunatelly it’s not as simple as I wish it would be. So I thought I better spend those couple of days working on SPAW 2 rather than creating a separate fork for Opera in SPAW 1.x.

OOP in JavaScript is something not so obvious to normal people. I mean if you know the basics of OOP in Java, C# or C++ this doesn’t help you alot in JavaScript. When I started development of SPAW2 (actually when I started thinking about it) I’ve read some articles on object-oriented JavaScript and the one that gave me a quick and understandable idea about all of this was the article called JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming by Ryan Frishberg.

Solmetra Maps is a tiny class I developed while working on just another of my personal sites - trippingshoes.com. Mainly because I wanted to play with Google Maps API. It is a simple Google Maps API wrapper that utilizes third party geocoding webservice to relate real life queries to a physical location on a map and display them. The functionality Google Maps API does not provide.

Despite the fact that I’m geting a decent amount of positive feedback about this class, I don’t consider it to be truly useful utility. At least not until it has address search support.

So in the upcoming months — whenever I will have spare time (from gaming and handling my kids) — I will be researching into recently released Google AJAX Search API. It, among other miraculously cool things, is said to support address search. I’m already getting wet about all the things that can be done combining power of Google and AJAX.

Just trying to post from Windows Live Writer and see if it works ok with WordPress. If you can read this then it works just fine. And if you can see a picture below then it can insert it and is totally recommended

For the past couple of years I’ve been developing in C# under .NET (most of the time) which is [almost] classic object-oriented programming. During that period I had to do some PHP4 development from time to time which is very simplistic and a little strange OOP. Now I’m working on SPAW 2 and do some JavaScript OOP which is even crazier. And at this moment I have to switch among the three a couple of times each day. I’m scared my brain is going to explo!%%^*

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Just installed the final version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. The best part so far is that SPAW seems to work ok under it. Phew. This was a frequent nightmare lately: IE7 comes out and I have to write and maintain separate handlers for SPAW to work. But thanks god this is not the case.

In general it looks and feels ok. So far the most disappointing thing for me is absence of mouse gestures. By searching ieaddons.com I was able to find this plugin only and I don’t like what I see in comments.

I’m going to try using it as my default browser for some time. You can hate me all you want but I don’t like Firefox for some reason (actually the main reason is that I found out it sucks from the inside when making SPAW Gecko compatible) but I used it as my default browser for a couple of months since my beloved Maxthon showed no love for Google Notebook (or probably the other way around) and I wanted it badly at that time (not actually using it alot now)

P.S.: this post was made using IE7

We’ve been members of Microsoft Empower ISV program for couple of years and now when our membership is over we needed to buy a copy of Visual C# 2003 Standard Edition. It wasn’t a surprise that you can’t buy 2003 editions of VS .NET these days but fortunately you can downgrade 2005 editions. So we bought VS 2005 Standard Edition and called Microsoft Lithuania to get a disk kit for 2003.

First of all the call was answered by some latvian or estonian guy (I couldn’t distinguish the accent for sure) and he offered to speak in Russian or English. Kind of strange but not a problem. After I have explained the issue he said that we do have a right for downgrade but Microsoft can’t help us get the disk kit and he could only suggest that we “get it somewhere”. I wanted to ask if it’s okay to download it from bittorrent or edonkey network but you know you most likely can’t get such a “low-end” version over there. It’s always “Enterprise architect” cause you know if you steal anyway why steal sh*t?

I’m sort of lost here. Where do we get that disk kit?

Don’t forget that you can subscribe to our RSS feed and never miss another post. The url for the feed is http://blog.solmetra.com/feed/

I personally read all my subscriptions through online feed reader called Bloglines. Before moving to bloglines I used a very good and free Windows feed reader RssBandit. In case you are on a single PC most of the time I highly recommend that you give RssBandit a try. In my case I read blogs from at least 2 computers every day so web based solution seemed like a better option.

I have just released SPAW Editor 1.2.2. As I mentioned previously this is mostly a service release. It fixes 2 small but ugly bugs

1. when xhtml mode is on, class attribute wasn’t rendered under IE;
2. changes made in code editing (html) mode were not saved under Gecko.

Download it through our download page. Upgrade package is also available.

Hi. We are working hard on SPAW2. It’s too early to tell but I’m quite excited about how it’s turning out. So it is obvious that we are putting all our efforts in this direction but we don’t forget about the issues you may have with 1.x also.

Since the last SPAW PHP release we’ve found (not without your help) and fixed a couple of pretty bad but small bugs. On one hand there are only a few changes and obviously not enough to justify a new version. On the other hand these bugs could be quite dealbreaking for many of you.

So I thought we should make a new release anyway, but I think we will release the only 2 files that changed as a separate download for your convenience.

I plan to do this tomorrow. So, if there’s some easily identifiable, recreatable and fixable bug you wanted to report, now is the last chance for the fix to make it into 1.2.2.