Pavel Donchev's blog on Software Technologies: Google

Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Aug 2, 2009

W3C Zoom CSS property. I really want this feature included!!!

Lot's of people are discussing this.
And the designers are often saying something like:
"I cannot imagine a scenario where you will need to use the Zoom CSS property."
To the readers that haven't yet hit this problem - the CSS Zoom property seems to be proprietary and to be working for IE (I think version 6 and above).

To all those designers - there ARE scenarios where you will want to let the user zoom everything proportionally without using the browser buttons / sliders / shortcuts, but with CSS / JS only.
I will give you few examples:

1. I needed to create an overview control of page. It should represent the page in a smaller percentage and, upon scroll, the page should scroll proportinally. I can have a div with the same DOM tree (or even an IFrame loading the same page or something). In this case I URGENTLY need the CSS Zoom property.
2. Telerik radReporting - the ReportViewer has a dropdown to let the user choose a zoom level to preview the page (web based and not after clicking print preview or something). Actually the Print Preview browser command isn't an option as the report viewer may be on the page with other controls and the user SHOULD BE ABLE to zoom in and out only the portion of the page where the report is (it is an IFrame with the data rendered as HTML, I believe). In telerik case - there seems to be some browser detection and when the browser isn't capable of zooming in / out - the dropdown with the zooming levels is simply hidden (they have no other choice unfortunatelly and I support them for this decision).

Now, as you may expect - in my scenario I cannot simply hide the overview control as the page heavilly depends on it.
Should I now have my revenge now? I've seen all those messages accross the web telling you that there are better browsers to use than IE.
Should I now display a message like:
"Sorry, your browser isn't capable of zooming in and out, only IE supports this, so please switch to IE."

I really hate those browser wars and if you really want to know my opinion - yes, IE may be harder to design. It may be messing up the containers, it may not be passing the ACID N test.
But it is the only browser that is suitable for my scenario (at least from my search in IE all the posts were following the same line - "zoom is IE proprietary, it won't work under other browsers").
Why are all other browsers sleeping then?

P.S. I have found something like -moz-zoom or something but wasn't able to make it work under FireFox (if it works under Firefox it should also probably work under Google Chrome as they are using the same engine I think).
P.P.S. - haven't tested but I think the zoom CSS property should also be available under Opera as they (as far as I know) use the IE core.

P.P.P.S - if anyone know how can we ask W3C to reconsider this for at least the next revision of CSS I would be glad to give my vote. I also advice telerik to do the same. Not only the reporting will work in all browsers but they may be able to do some other great controls using this property.

Really annoying ...

Jan 13, 2008

Another 5 minutes with C# to post to Google Blogs (Blogger.com) using Google Blogs SDK (2)

I revised the tool a bit, here is how it looks now:

Also I made some refactoring to the code and it looks better now (no more richTextBox1 names ;).
I plan to release this tool in order to help developers blog code to their blogger accounts easier. The next secret I am going to reveal is that I started a toolkit to help you create blog related programs with C# / .NET / Google Blogs API.

For now I am planning to release the program for free, as a Lite version and I plan to spend some more time to create a better looking version with SEO features in it and distribute it for a small fee (something like 10 EU).
The Toolkit will released for free now.

Well that's it. I am looking forward when I will have some more time to develop those

controls and programs to help the Blogger community grow ;)

Jun 30, 2007

Skype API (Skype4COM) + Google MAPS API = ? [3]

As a part of my Google Maps and Skype API I wanted to add custom icons to represent different objects on the map (currently I made it for the bus stations).

The picture bellow is the result :

It was again easy - we simply create GIcon object. Then we assign the URL of the image to be used, size of the icon and point, where the info window will appear :

Code

icon = new GIcon();
icon.image = 'BusFine.gif';
icon.iconSize = new GSize(39, 60);
icon.iconAnchor = new GPoint(5, 34);
icon.infoWindowAnchor = new GPoint(5, 2);

Then we only need to add this object as a second parameter in the GMarker object constructor.

Code

// point is a GPoint object, representing the location the marker

should be
// displayed.
marker = new GMarker(point, icon);

Note : Some browsers may need some more settings in order to display the custom icon correctly, the example above is for IE.

Jun 18, 2007

Skype API (Skype4COM) + Google MAPS API = ? [2]

The last few days I played a bit more with this little thing and made it a bit more stable. First of all there were some strange silver rectangles in the map (which I suspect is becouse I use IE) another struggle was to force the map not to resize (pretty strange, huh?). I solved both issues at once by adding overflow="hidden" style attribute to the div, containing the map. It is quite strange. I also added the stnadard map types controls (Map, Satellite and Hybrid), that wasn't hard but took a lot of search in the net, I had the feeling that I need to define my layer, I don't know why but in the end I understood I only need to call : map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl()); it simply cannot be more easier. After the lesson with

the map type control it was a line of code to add the large zoom control : map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl()); the guys from Google really rule the world :). They made it as easy as possible. After I got the map types and the zoom control I wanted some challenge. I decided to add a tabbed info window, only for the test the first tab I wanted was : "User Info" and I wanted the second to be "Date of birth" that was again as easy as possible ! Nice work, googlers !

Finally here is what I have so far :

I will try to add custom layers and lines these days only to test how it works and is it hard to implement.

Jun 9, 2007

Skype API (Skype4COM) + Google MAPS API = ?

I've played a bit last few days. I was interested in mixing the Skype4COM library (Official Skype API) with the Google Maps API (Google's Geocoding Service). It was quite tricky to make them both work properly, but finally I got some "results". Screenshots of the results will be published in this post the next few days, since I have some difficulties using the blogger upload utility (probably it is becouse my ISP, not blogger itself).

And this is what I have done with Skype (Skype4COM) and Google Maps Api. I am thinking on how to incorporate this program into skype (probably as plugin or something) so it can be easier to use.