Talkr takes a little bit of setting up but all you need to do then is offer a link to the feed on your blog and it will be updated whenever you publish a post. Talkr also offers many other text-to-speech and chat services. Check them out.

First of all I found the easiest way to migrate from the Powerbook to the MacBook Pro was copying directories from one to the other via my iPod.  Note to people doing this in future: get yourself a firewire cable for this, it will save you much grief!  It took me a few experiments via wireless, external HDD and USB disk before the bright idea of using the iPod, so I wasted some time. Especially since I have 20GB of photos and 12GB of music… But it wasn’t too painful.
Luckily my timing was such that I was able to download the recently-released Parallels 3 which includes support for Windows Vista.  After a quick trip to the city to purchase Visa (the cheapest Home Basic Edition because I need nothing more than browser installations) I proceeded to put 1 and 1 and 1 together – crossing my fingers that the laptop wouldn’t start smoking as soon as I inserted a Windows install disk .

The results were suprisingly sweet.  Parallels allows you to choose between optimising across Mac OS and other installed operating systems or optimise for better Mac OS performance and the other operating systems get what’s left over.  I chose the latter, because I’m only using Vista for IE, so Vista is a little slow, but the great thing is I can still use Photoshop and other resource-hungry apps without problem while Vista is running in Parallels.  Compliance mode is pretty cool too, you can see icons for the Windows apps that are running in the OSX toolbar.

The one drawback (and it’s a big one for me and my business!!) is that Vista doesn’t run IE6 – not even a standalone version.  That’s because it is tied too closely to the XP codebase (apparently!).  Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until after I had tried to install and run it.  Which means that one third of my reason for installing Windows (the other two were IE7 and Safari for Windows) fell through.  Luckily for me my husband has a laptop that runs IE6 and he leaves it at home during the day.  I’m hoping that saturation of IE6 will reduce drastically in the near future with the release of IE7 and Safari so then I can stop supporting it.

I’m loving my environment right now – on my desktop I have a good LCD monitor which I bought about a year ago for the PC, an Apple keyboard, mouse and speakers which I plug into my one machine when I’m working in my office.  Otherwise, I unplug everything and take the laptop to my lounge or to clients’ sites and still have everything I need.

If you’re thinking of installing Parallels + Vista on your Macbook Pro, I say go for it!!

Along with  a few other changes to the Spiral Designs site, I’ve added a page for Code that I create which I’d like to make available to the rest of the world.  The first script is based on Scriptaculous and allows you to have a “Splash” intro to a website without a separate page or Flash.  It can be used for alerting users to new features or news on the site or welcome them in.  Note that I’m not hugely keen on splash pages myself, I think they’re a waste of time, but there may be occasions where one is required.  This code can be used for other kinds of alerts or messages, not just splash pages, and is customisable.  Check it out: http://www.spiraldesigns.com.au/code.

In my research into it I saw that many people blame it on Google AdSense as it seems to occur with sites sporting those ads. However, it is actually due to the way browsers (for example, Safari) load pages and the use of Javascript.

It seems that the browser holds off on loading the stylesheets until it has finished processing any Javascripts (which nowadays often affect the way the page looks), then it loads and applies the stylesheet.  The  FOUC ugliness occurs when the site is script-heavy and it takes longer to run the initial scripts than it does to load the HTML – there is a short amount of time in which the HTML has loaded but the scripts are still running and the stylesheets haven’t yet been applied.

I found a few fixes for this problem, but the simplest was the following:

In the <head> tag of the page, before any of the script or stylesheet imports insert the following to hide the content:

<style type="text/css">body { display: none; }</style>

At the very end of the page, before the closing body tag add the following to show the content:

<script>
//show the page - gets around FOUC
document.body.style.display="block";
</script>

This is not only an easy fix but it also, unlike many others, validates correctly as semantic XHTML. You may argue against relying on a javascript tag to show the page content but there are two things to consider: if the page wasn’t heavy in javascript you wouldn’t get the problem and therefore require this script, and also you could add a “noscript” tag to this to inform users that javascript must be turned on for them to use the site, so the solution is useful in more ways than one.

http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=cccd4aa02a3993ab06e56af731346f78.1710507

If you’d like to use my notifier download it here. For instructions on how to install it, see Google Gadgets or wait for it to be added to their directory and add it directly.

One of the reasons for the site upgrade was to pull together my business, personal, wedding, travel and photo websites (hmmm.. think I have too many websites) and get rid of the irrelevant rubbish. There’s still more work to be done but that will come in time, I hope.

What I’m doing is working for a small software firm, working on (actually, rewriting) an application specifically designed for and marketed to the fashion industry. It is a Swing application and we are running the project as Agile as we can, which is so far going very well and has buy-in at all levels.

I’ve never worked on a Swing application before and at first it felt like I was playing . I’m over that now… When I started we were using JFCUnit for functional testing but it has a few fundamental problems so I’m now investigating the feasability of Jemmy. It’s actually a lot easier to use and more aligned with how a user would operate the application. But I have one problem still (which isn’t specific to Jemmy): Swing’s management of windows (at least in jdk1.4.2_08).

Destroyed windows from tests are still in memory for subsequent tests, making it confusing when searching for other windows. Why, oh why?! I have read others’ complaints about this, so I’m not the only one who thinks this is broken. Of course I can get around it by making sure anything that searches for windows ignores those that are not visible but it’s a pain. Testing Swing GUIs is already hard enough with having to wait for components to load, modal dialogs and handling multiple threads.

However, I do like Jemmy and apart from its lack of documentation I’m happy with it so far, as compared to JFCUnit. And I get a kick out of watching the tests run and seeing the application work.