Out of the Office this Weekend
26/04/09 11:35 Filed in: Support
I’m going out of town this weekend to attend a memorial service for my wife’s grandfather. As such, I’ll be away from the office, and my responses to support requests will take longer than usual. Thanks for understanding!
Theme Development Hurdles
22/04/09 21:15 Filed in: RapidWeaver Themes Web Design
It’s now been almost a year since we started developing themes for RapidWeaver. As many of you are aware, we focused on making mobile themes first, as there were no RapidWeaver themes specifically designed to be viewed on mobile devices at the time. There’s no doubt that everything is trending towards the mobile web.
Mobile web design is a different animal than your typical desktop variety. There are so many different and limiting factors that you really can’t compare the two at all, but I always thought the mobile space would remain the most challenging by far....
That was before we started working on desktop themes and had to build in compatibility for IE 6. I can now say, without pause or even the slightest bit of doubt, that developing with IE 6 compatibility in mind is a nightmare.
Take, for instance, our newest theme (which is currently out to our beta group). We were having a incredibly frustrating problem I’d never seen before. When hovering over one of the split level navigation menus, IE 6 (and 7, in this case) cut off the bottom portion of the content area. After hours of testing, applying various hacks, and googling until my eyes bled, we still hadn’t figured out what the problem was.
Next day we start afresh. Checked to see if any other coding gurus out there had come across similar problems...and just by chance stumbled across what is called the Guillotine bug. Bingo! The fix was simple, and IE 6/7 now play nice.
Mobile web design is a different animal than your typical desktop variety. There are so many different and limiting factors that you really can’t compare the two at all, but I always thought the mobile space would remain the most challenging by far....
That was before we started working on desktop themes and had to build in compatibility for IE 6. I can now say, without pause or even the slightest bit of doubt, that developing with IE 6 compatibility in mind is a nightmare.
Take, for instance, our newest theme (which is currently out to our beta group). We were having a incredibly frustrating problem I’d never seen before. When hovering over one of the split level navigation menus, IE 6 (and 7, in this case) cut off the bottom portion of the content area. After hours of testing, applying various hacks, and googling until my eyes bled, we still hadn’t figured out what the problem was.
Next day we start afresh. Checked to see if any other coding gurus out there had come across similar problems...and just by chance stumbled across what is called the Guillotine bug. Bingo! The fix was simple, and IE 6/7 now play nice.
New Theme Nearing Release
16/04/09 14:06 Filed in: RapidWeaver Themes Web Design
I’m not going to spills the beans just yet, but we have a theme under development that, frankly, absolutely rocks! We’ll be pushing out a beta version to our testers within the next week or two, and barring any major bugs we’ll have our standard pre-launch release just for our current customers and mailing list members shortly afterwards.
What can you look forward to in this new theme? Ultimate customization for one. An iPhone/Android mobile version, as with our Unity theme. 7 ExtraContent areas. And another RapidWeaver theme first (at least as far as we know) - an easy way to insert Flash and BannerZest headers into the page header.
Stay tuned for more!
What can you look forward to in this new theme? Ultimate customization for one. An iPhone/Android mobile version, as with our Unity theme. 7 ExtraContent areas. And another RapidWeaver theme first (at least as far as we know) - an easy way to insert Flash and BannerZest headers into the page header.
Stay tuned for more!