You Can Call Me Al

Morning. I've just spent most of Saturday night giving my site a facelift with my new design. It's nothing wonderful, but it's better than the yellow default one BlogCFC comes with. I'm no designer, but that's a good thing it seems. There's still lots to do, a lot doesn't work (single entries don't get styled, alan.pennell-smith.co.uk doesn't actually work yet as I haven't sorted my DNS bits, etc. but I'll sort them out after some sleep).

Couple of extra bits to note - flickr and last.fm stuff on the right. Ooooh... get me and my API's :)

Night all *yawn* (oh - it's 2.24am by the way - forgot I removed time of posting) :)

Adobe seem to be busy bunnies of late. Their labs site seems to be updated with goodies every couple of weeks. A little round-up:

• Photoshop CS3 Beta
  The first public Photoshop beta that I can remember (Requires a CS2 Key)
• Kuler
  A cool flash-based colour palette selector.
• Spry 1.4
  Framework for AJAX goodness
• CSS Advisor
  The beginnings of the handiest CSS resource ever.
• JSEclipse
  A JavaScript plugin for Eclipse.

Plus other bits like Lightroom, Southbooth and Flash 9.

Just been reading an article on the official IE blog. Which related to my post a few weeks ago about development of websites and being able to test on older versions of IE. It seems the demand has made the IE team release a Virtual Machine image with a pre-activated XP SP2 with IE6, and even though it expires on April Fools Day 2006 they are hoping to be able to provide a new image to replace it. Very handy indeed. As they say:

Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2004 a free download; we've taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007. We hope to continue to provide these images in the future as a service to web developers.

And they're looking into providing images of even older IE versions. Not the most convenient of solutions, but damn handy all the same and about time!

Yesterday I was asked to amend a stylesheet I had created for our company's main website. Not an unusual request. I began tweaking and, as usual, occasionally checked it in both IE and Firefox to make sure I was getting consistent results, and to my surprise they looked almost identical.

Anyway, went to show off the changes on another PC and it looked all broken in IE... IE6. Dammit, forgot I had upgraded to 7.

I can see the logic of integrating the browser into the OS, as Windows does with IE, but for developers, especially CSS'ers like me, not being able to install or emulate an older version for testing (without hacks, tweaks and limited functionality) is a real pain in the arse.

Do Microsoft just expect us to all upgrade and deny all knowledge of past versions? (Actually, that would suit me, IE7's CSS support is a lot better.)