yellowgorilla.net

A new version of Image Zoom has been posted. This version has quite a number of bug fixes and is what I consider the first really stable version in the 0.2 series. Some of the bug fixes included are:

• When zoom with text was used and the text size was going from any size to 100%. The text would resize but the image would not get updated to their original size. This bug was introduced in around version 0.2.1 when I made improvements to the performance of this extension when a page zoom setting of 100% was used.
• Showing of the image zoom value in the status bar. This feature has been missing since everyone upgraded to Firefox 1.5. It was a case of Image Zoom using a security hole in Firefox 1.0 to update the status bar and that hole got plugged in 1.5. The funny thing is, I didn't notice it until very recently.
• I finally fixed the known conflicts with three major extensions, AIO Gestures, Mouse Gestures and Smooth Wheel. All these conflicts have been plagueing image zoom since mouse scrolling was introduced in version 0.1.7. All extensions are now mature enough that they are able to avoid each other if they are coded well. The conflict with the Answers extension still exists in this version but I have managed to track down that conflict and it will be fixed in version 0.2.6.
• I changed the shortcut key for the zoom with text function to ctrl-\ from ctrl-z for the english version after many people were complaining that it conflicted with the undo command in firefox.

Also new in this version but will be hidden until version 0.3 by when I will hopefully be able to iron out the performance issues is a feature called autofit. This feature does just what "Image Fit" does except it applies "Image Fit" to any images that exceeds the dimensions of the browser. To access this function you need to set imagezoom.showAutoFitInMenu in about:config to true. There will then be an option in the View -> Image Zoom menu to autofit images. Use this with caution as it can impact performance on sites with large numbers of images. This is very handy for use in thunderbird and can be used without much risk of it affecting your performance. This will automatically reduce any photo attachments that you receive in your emails to a size where the entire photo can be seen in the email window.

Thats about it. I will post this new version to addons.mozilla.org when I get (or dont get) enough feedback that this version is stable enough.

Posted by Jason at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, I have just finished redesigning the Image Zoom site. I was a bit tired of the look of the old site which started out as one of the default templates from an old version of movable type and I never really did much else to it in nearly 2 years. This new design was my first serious attempt at designing a template for movable type and I tried to stick to the standards as much as possible.

Some of the technical features of the new site include:

• the use of valid xhtml 1.1 and css2 throughout
• extensive use of em spacing on the stylesheets (change the browsers text size to see the whole site resize)
• Rounded corners on most of the box elements (this wasn't that easy to get working across the 3 main browser classes)
• Multiple stylesheets for user selection of the sites width and automatic initial selection based on the users screen resolution. (Controls available on the top left)
• gradient backgrounds

Overall the site took me a little over a week to design from start to finish.

Posted by Jason at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)