It seems to be a rule that I am damned by constant crazy ideas popping into my head. Most of the time those are of the “white noise” category. However, some occasional idea triggers a spontaneous — as I call it — “3 hour challenge”, or “let’s see if I can do develop this interesting concept application in just 3 hours.”

It’s also a rule, that “3 hour challenges” almost always result in several days of actual work. Like it was with my latest experiment in AJAX - Image Search Slideshow. It’s a very basic idea - run a search against Google Image Search and display full result images as a slideshow. Basic functionality took 3 hours. Additional bells and whistles — navigation, optimization, Yahoo and live.com support — took another 30.

So here comes the ultimate image search engine for those special occasions when your hands absolutely positively have something better to do than keyclicking

http://slideshow.zmpgroup.com/

Oh and by the way, I honestly don’t recommend running a search for “playmate” on Google Images. And since you’re not gonna listen to me anyway, here comes “I warned you” in advance: I warned you!

We have just released the first SPAW Editor v.2 Plugin - Zoom. This plugin adds zoom dropdown to plugins toolbar allowing users to zoom in and out on editing area.

It can be downloaded via our new “Extend” page here.

Unfortunately the way it’s done is only supported in MSIE. In case you know how to achieve the same effect in other browsers (Opera has zoom in menu so it could have a way to do the same via code) drop a comment to this post. Thanks!

We’ve found a small bug in release candidate (it could be not that small for some users): all the attributes except style and class were stripped from span, div and font tags. While fixing this bug we’ve also added code to replace those deprecated font tags with their span equivalents.

Updated js/common/editor.js file could be downloaded from sourceforge.net SVN repository. Just overwrite the old file with this one.

We have just released SPAW Editor PHP Edition v.2.0.0 Release Candidate!

Thanks to everyone who downloaded and tried our first v.2 beta! Your feedback was extremely helpful to bring SPAW Editor v.2 closer to the stable release.

Thanks to you we have fixed quite some bugs, added a couple of small features like links to files, keyboard navigation in file manage, etc. (see changelog for details). We believe that in current state it is already mature enough to be used in production environment (we use it to edit our own site) so we encourage you to download, try it and let us know if you find something not working as it should and help us make it as solid as possible by the time of the final v.2.0.0 release in early January.

In the meantime we will concentrate on creating documentation for plugin developers, theme designers, etc., writing some plugins ourselves, fixing some small quirks that are not yet fixed and migrating language files.

Here’s a complete list of changes in this release:

• FEATURE ADDED: config variable ‘base_href’ added to specify protocol and domain part to be added to URLs returned from file manager (use in conjunction with strip_absolute_urls = false)
• FEATURE ADDED: SpawFm plugin returns full file URL if config variable
    ‘base_href’ is specified and is not empty
• FEATURE ADDED: browse button in hyperlink dialog to insert links to files
• FEATURE ADDED: SpawFm plugin keyboard navigation
• FEATURE ADDED: added setStaticConfigValueElement, getStaticConfigValueElement,  getConfigValueElement, setConfigValueElement methods to config and editor classes
• FEATURE ADDED/BUGFIX: editor/page names now can contain square brackets ([ and ])
• OPTIMIZATION: updateToolbar now only checks toolbar item status/value if it’s enabled
• CHANGE: changed default resizing direction in config file to “vertical”
• CHANGE: disabled file upload button is shown in SpawFm plugin if upload is not allowed
• BUGFIX: if submit() method was used on a submit type control (input type=submit or type=image) this often resulted in lost content
• BUGFIX: form onsubmit event handler was added multiple times if there were more than 1 editor instance resulting in unexpected HTML rendering results
• BUGFIX: editor was unusable in Internet Explorer when inserted into page with XHTML doctype declaration
• BUGFIX: editing area wasn’t editable in Mozilla (and probably older versions of Firefox)
• BUGFIX: custom_tbi_css_events used where custom_tbi_events was assumed
• BUGFIX: SpawLang->getLang was just a copy of setLang
• BUGFIX: when moving focus to other editor in Gecko active editor wasn’t set
• BUGFIX: javascript error was generated in Opera when inserting at the end of document
• BUGFIX: in xhtml beautification process br tag wasn’t generating new line and indentation
• BUGFIX: extra quote in one tag in SPAW2 theme templates
• BUGFIX: flash wasn’t properly rendered in html under IE
• BUGFIX: flash wasn’t replaced with placeholder images on initialization
• BUGFIX: in Gecko based browsers disabled buttons were still clickable
• BUGFIX: Javascript error on iframe focus in SpawFm Plugin
• BUGFIX: content wasn’t always correctly inserted under Gecko and Opera
• BUGFIX: php notice in SpawFm plugin
• BUGFIX: text wasn’t properly html encoded when rendered to HTML
• BUGFIX: updated xhtml rendering engine: empty paragraphs were rendered without   under IE, useless empty elements removed (b, i, etc.)
• BUGFIX: added indentation for ul, ol, li, thead, tfoot tags
• BUGFIX: added default_output_charset config variable, dialogs now use user specified output charset, modified setLanguage method to accept output charset as a second parameter
• BUGFIX: ‘.’ and ‘..’ directories were shown in SpawFm plugin
• BUGFIX: some execCommand related calls were throwing exceptions under Gecko
• LANGUAGE FILE ADDED: Hungarian (Szentgyörgyi Janos, www.dynamicart.hu)

Some time ago I wrote that I can crash Firefox with Javascript. Unfortunatelly I wasn’t able to build a simple test case to reproduce this to submit it as a bug.

This time I crashed Opera and now I can reproduce it with a simple script so I submitted a bug report. I’ve tried it on several Windows XP machines running Opera 9.02 or 9.00 and all of them crashed. In case you have some other Opera version or the latest version running on other OS you can try if this bug affects your browser (and let me or Opera know). To do this click here, press “Open popup” button and “Insert stuff” button in the popup. Keep in mind that your Opera will most likely crash so don’t do this in a browser with important tabs open.

As far as I understand the source of the problem is that I create image object in one document and try to insert it in the other document while closing the document in which that object was created.

Update: newly released Opera 9.1.0 still crashes.

SPAW Editor finally got a dedicated domain name spaweditor.com It points to the same SPAW’s page on Solmetra.com but could be easier to remember.

We have just released first beta of SPAW Editor v.2!

Check it out

I’m a little afraid to claim this cause I didn’t do extensive research but I think this is quite a unique feature in browser based WYSIWYG editor world. Correct me if I’m wrong.

If the picture doesn’t tell the whole story here it is. You can have several editing fields combined into one editor as tabs. Much like in tabbed browsing. This way, if you had like 20 WYSIWYG editors on a page occupying quite some “pagedowns”, now you can combine all of them into a single instance of SPAW Editor and get away with no scrollbars at all!