AbsoluteB.com

I’ve gotten a lot done this week. I got down and dirty in the ActionScript of a Flash application which displays every city and location of every telephone area code in Holland; pretty nifty! I managed to build in functionality that displays every client in every region and whether or not they have an ad in the local phone book and if so, what the size the ad is. I also developed two site designs I’ve been working on in the past week. I should say that one of them is a little out of my style since its main design consists of a screen centered container, something I’m not a fan of because of 1. requiring a center screen container, which is ok depending on the browser you’re working with and 2. it constricts content display possibilities. In any case, the sites were designed and developed fairly quickly… on my Mac that is. This week I’ve discovered just how annoying Internet Explore (IE) really is. Seriously, it really has become a situation of one vs everyone else! I’ve got a lot of experience in cross browser/platform development, but the past few weeks, and especially this past one in particular, have taught me a whole bunch of new things concerning the differences, and frankly, the issues that IE brings forward for a designer/developer such as myself.

One of the reasons I’ve had so much difficulty lately is because since I started working at Bonobos, I’ve been given the freedom to design my way as much as possible. Which means I can take designs to as unique and conceptual as I’m willing, so long as approval is given by the rest of the team of course. As a result, I’ve spent a good two days or so, looking into and fixing the issues that basically broke and totaled my designs. And being that I have Windows 7 installed through Bootcamp, the only way to validate the sites was to either: 1. ask someone behind a PC to check out the site on their PC, 2. use Adobe BrowserLab to take screen shots or 3. boot into Windows and test directly on the Mac, which would normally be the worst choice, but since IE8 has Developer Tools, which is basically a complete ripoff of the Firefox plugin Firebug, it has made IE development slightly easier, except it’s nowhere near as good as Firebug is at this point. On a side note: Firebug is a developers life safer!

Both designs worked perfectly in Firefox and Chrome in OSX and Windows and in Safari on OSX but both designs were completely shot in IE7 and IE8. And all this while Microsoft promised to have IE8 up to par with other mainstream browsers! I’m on edge of saying that IE8 might as well be IE6 in my opinion; the issues that are left to be resolved in IE8 are so prominent that it makes me wonder how it still has 60% market share, though the silver lining is that that number is steadily dropping since the introduction of Chrome. Not that I want IE to fail, just that I think it will be incentive for Microsoft to get their act together and develop a great browser, rather than something they simply bundle with their OS… which isn’t the case anymore in many countries.

In any case, this week has given me the opportunity to look into various ways of testing for IE, something which I believe is a basic responsibility for me as a developer. I think the easiest way would be to have a PC running next to the Mac simply for testing purposes and then using a great IE based debugger, which I have yet to stumble across. I haven’t even figured out how to write new code or classes in IE’s Developer Tools, I can only turn existing code on and off, huh? That, or using a virtual machine to run IE directly on the Mac because dual booting every time is just too much of a hassle and time waster. Apple makes Safari available for Windows users, it’s about time Microsoft makes IE available for Mac users… actually no, that’s pointless, no Mac user in the right mind would bother downloading that, perhaps developing a better IE debugger then? please? pretty please?