29 August 2007
In the kerfuffle of the Swedish ISO vote on Microsofts Office Open XML having been bought by Microsoft Sweden and their partners, I found a great page explaining what is wrong with the Microsoft specification.
There seems to be plenty wrong with it. Also, in section four of that page, there is a very telling letter written by Bill Gates in 1998 that indicates how Microsoft operates.
To me it seems crazy that ISO are even considering OOXML since they already have one standardized document format, ODF.
Here's to using OpenOffice for $0 (that is £0, or €0) instead of Microsoft Office 2007 for around $399 (that is £198, or €292)!
Labels: openoffice
28 August 2007
Ever since I started working at Eskilstuna-Kuriren I've been annoyed about not being able to use the tab key to jump between form elements in web pages.
Well, no more, because yesterday I found out how to make the tab key work as it should.
So, here's what you do:
- Go to [System Preferences]
- Click [Keyboard and Mouse]
- Select the [Keyboard Shortcuts] tab
- At the bottom of the window, choose [All controls] as opposed to [Text boxes and lists only]
- Close the window, and you're done!
It is wonderful to be able to use the tab key in the web administration system we use at
ekuriren.se.
Labels: browsers
25 August 2007
A lot of nice features are being added to what will become Firefox 3. The final release will probably be out sometime in November or December.
Here are some of the many improvements that have landed recently in the Firefox code:
- Colour management. Previously, if you saved a colour profile in a JPEG picture, only Safari would be able to interpret that information. Now Firefox will be able to as well.
- Improved Bookmarks and History: Places. Searchable, taggable bookmarks and history. To bookmark a page, just click the star in the URL bar.
- Plug-in manager. The add-ons manager gets a new tab for plug-ins. (Flash, Java, Acrobat Reader, etc.) Makes it easier to see which plug-ins are installed.
- Full page zoom. Together with bicubic interpolation of images, this can be quite useful. A website can for instance have a 800 pixel wide image and display it as 400 pixels wide. Then, if you like, you can zoom in to 200% and see more detail in the picture.
- Native audio and video support. Firefox 3 will support the new <audio> and <video> tags, which will make it much easier for website creators to include video and audio in their pages.
- Support for soft hyphens! All scandinavian web editors say yay!
I've downloaded a nightly build of Minefield and it is looking pretty good, even if the Places interface needs a bit of polish IMNSHO.
Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla
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