This is in Internet Explorer 8 when set to IE7 mode, but this is very faithful to the original as I’ve tested it on a real IE7 and it behaves the same. What happens here is that when you scroll the page down, all absolutely positioned elements (the two “combo boxes” which are a custom UI widget and the text “Dimensions:… at the top right corner”) get pulled down a few pixels. When you scroll up, they get put back in the correct place.

I would (maybe) understand if that would have happened only for the custom UI widgets (as there is a lot of Javascript code in place to support these, and I would understand if it behaves funny on broken browsers), but it affects the absolutely positioned text exactly the same, and there is nothing funky with that – its simply a block of text that is absolutely positioned.

On a slightly different subject, here is a useful tip for doing using Javascript to manipulate elements in IE7: if you have some Javascript that acts immediately after the page loads and put more content on the page and moves some elements around, if any of these elements are absolutely positioned then IE7 will ignore any changes to their layout, such as setting margins (especially negative margins) and such. This happens if you both change the element’s layout implictly (by adding content, for example) and explicitly (by setting style attributes) in the same Javascript call – the style attributes are ignored.

What you should do is to change the content in one Javascript call, then let the layout settle by exiting back to the rendering engine and then coming back to Javascript to change the layout. I do it like this:


$('block').innerHTML = 'Some text that should be updated';
window.setTimeout(function() {
$('block').style.marginTop = '-20px';
},0);


The window.setTimeout() with a zero miliseconds timeout will cause the code to stop executing without doing the style manipulation, the Javascript machine hands the execution back to the browser which then lets the rendering engine repaint the screen with the updated content – the problem with IE7 is that the rendering engine fails to take into account style changes that were made after content changes were done in the same Javascript execution, so we don’t do that. As soon as the rendering engine is done – less then one milisecond later – the timeout kicks in and adjusts the style, and finally handing the execution back to the rendering engine to adjust that as well.

It again boggles the mind, how Apple takes on a well known feature of existing products, tacks a bastardized version of it on a new revision of their product, and everyone hails at how innovative they are…

Here’s the Wired quote:

iPhone 4 includes a front-facing camera and support for videoconferencing with other iPhone 4 users, via a feature called FaceTime.

Here’s what I can do today with my 3 years old Ericsson P1i, my Nokia E-whatever or my fiance’s $20 Nokia (as well as about half of Nokia phones released in the last 8 years or so), and many other phones from other manufacturers:

• Above mentioned phones include a front-facing camera and support video conferencing with any other phone that supports standard 3G video calls, on any 3G network.

Also, apple announced their own video conferencing protocol (the so called “FaceTime”), as discussed in ReadWriteWeb:

That’s what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

There is only one problem with that statement: there is already a standard protocol for video calls – as mandated by the cellular industry’s leading standard body, 3GPP: the 3G-324M protocol, was developed jointly with ITU (the telecom industry governing body for standardization) and is implemented in virtually all video call capable cellular telecom devices.

Now here’s a video:

(you can also watch this video on Youtube)

I apologize for the directing instructions in Hebrew (the guy operating the calling phone had trouble locating the “Dial” button on the phone) and for the lousy focus of the camera when closing in on the phone (but you should be able to make out that the calling phone is showing me videoing Sagi – the guy that takes the call).

Thanks to Sagi and Alon for taking a time out of their busy schedule to help me rant about stuff like that.

[Update:]

I still can’t get over how stupid Americans are – here’s a direct quote from Apple’s presentation:

Steve Jobs: “This is amazing, I grew up here in America with Jetsons, Star Trek and communicators — just dreaming about video calling. And it’s real now.”

Yes, but it was real 8 years ago as well – a long time before even the first iPhone came out!

Related articles by Zemanta

• FaceTime video conferencing coming to the iPhone (tuaw.com)
• Will iPhone 4 usher in era of video calls? (cnn.com)

זהירות ספויילרים (קראו אחרי הסרט)
חומרה מדהימה – כנראה שהיא עדיין עובדת בגלל שהיא לא דיגיטלית או אפילו אלקטרונית.

אני חושב שהמציג, פריק-מונקי, קצת פישל בכך שהוא לא הריץ PPP על גבי החיבור וניגש עם דפדפן מקומי, אבל זה כנראה היה מאריך את הסרט בעוד 10 דקות ומעבר לגבול שיו-טיוב מרשים

הייתי אתמול במצעד זכויות האדם הראשון בארגון האגודה לזכויות האזרח בישראל. היה מאוד צבעוני. במיוחד למרות שאני לא מסכים עם הרבה מהדעות שהועלו על נס ודגל במצעד (שימו לב בוידאו) היה חשוב לצעוד על זכותם של אנשים להביע אותן (בפראפרזה על הציטוט הידוע של וולטייר).

חבל שהרבה אנשים שאני מכיר, ושאת דעותיהם אני מעריך ושאפשר לקרוא להם “הרוב הדומם”, לא חשבו שזה חשוב מספיק להגיע למצעד, אבל כן פגשתי שם את מני ליבנה (כל הכבוד!).

בכל מקרה, הינה וידאו קצר של המצעד חולף ברחובות תל אביב – כ-14 דקות (בסך הכל כן הגיעו הרבה אנשים). המיקרופון במצלמה היה מקולקל אבל לא שהיה יותר מדי מה לשמוע במהלך רוב המצעד. במקום זה שמתי פסקול קצת רועש של מוזיקה חופשית, אז אני ממליץ להתחיל בלהחליש את עוצמת הקול במחשב

קשה קצת לראות בוידאו את הטיפות, אבל תפסתי את זה כבר לקראת סוף הגשם הכבד ואפשר לראות איך הנוף מתבהר לאט.

והנה קישור לעמוד המקורי באתר של TED.

(Does that mean that Windows 7 is better then all previous Windows releases?)

Anyway – check out the video:

Although I don’t much care for the sickly transparent blue style they have going there, it has nice highlights and fade effects which are completely lost in the Flash video encoding… But as you can see, the new task bar works almost exactly like the Mac OS-X dock:

• Tasks are represented by icons.
• Multiple windows of the same application are represented by the same icon (a sub-menu similar to “window group” in XP/Vista allows one to access all the windows).
• You can “pin” a program to the task bar, so when the program closes, the task bar entry remains and acts as a shortcut buttons.

If only they would make the taskbar icons grow as the mouse moves over them and the background tilted in 3D and it would be exactly like the Mac dock. On the other hand this setup lets them dump the annoying “quick launch” toolbar. I’m not saying its not a good setup, its good – Apple has been using it for several years now successfully – its just not an innovation.

Other visual changes you can see is that they’ve taken the “web-style” thing they started with Vista to extreme and lots of things look like web pages with underlined links and there are much less shiny buttons and icons:

It kind of reminds me of all the “web styles” that were available for Linux a few years back, and they all sucked. The new UI does allow the incredibly large (and growing all the time) control panels that Windows sports to still be usable on small displays as the entire window content can be scrolled. They also put the “screen resolution” setting back into a useful place where people can find it.

To sum up – it looks like a nice update, but not what I was hoping for. It does feel slightly quicker then Vista that I had running on a similar setup, but it could very likely be the stronger computer and the better VM that I now use. I can’t really test it seriously on a VM, but from what I can see its slightly better then Vista in parts where Vista was OK, and just as bad as Vista in areas where Vista sucked.

Pictures from the trip are, as always, in my gallery – here is a direct link to the album. You can also see it in the “Latest Album” link in the sidebar below – its the one with the underwater motorcycle.

And in meta-posting, I’ve just noticed that the “Random Picture” widget (at the top of the sidebar) most often prefers to show more recent pictures – I need to check why is that, but in the mean time you can probably see underwater pictures from the Sinai dives there .

Update:

because my pictures from inside the Thislegorm could really would have been better, and so that you can see what you are missing by not diving in the Red Sea, here is a short video I stole from youTube with all kinds of stuff you can see on the most famous sunken ship in the Red Sea – the SS Thislegorm:

Video on Snotr

מצא חן בעיניי תנועות המצלמה – בהתחשב בכך שזה stop-motion קלאסי חובבני (לבחור יש עוד כמה כאלה) זה מושקע למדי.