Technocrank

Google Gears (0.5.29) has just been released and now works with Firefox 3.5.  I’ve only tested it so far with WordPress.

Given that Fluid is having this disagreement with Gears, I thought I’d try creating a Mozilla Prism-based SSB instance for Google Reader.  There’s a nifty theme for Reader called Helvetireader that I was using with Fluid.  It also works with Prism but the instructions on this page didn’t work for me.

I had to take the webapp.css file from the helvetireader.webapp (which is just a zip archive) and drop it into the Prism instance (at /Applications/Helvetireader/Contents/Resources/webapp/).  You could also just directly create this file – it’s contents are just a CSS import as described in that last link.

Unlike the Fluid-based SSB, Prism instances seem to require extensions, plugins and themes separately, i.e. per-instance.  I guess this is a good thing and avoids the kind of snarl that Gears and Fluid are having.

I found this a few months ago but forgot to post it:  Fluid, the OSX WebKit-based single-site browser application, floods your /var/log/system.log with errors regarding CGWindowContextCreate failing:

FluidInstance[3592]: Failed to create window context device
CGWindowContextCreate: failed to create context delegate.
_initWithWindowNumber: error creating graphics ctxt object for ctxt:0x18343, window:0xffffffff

The bug was being discussed here (in which commenters pointed their fingers at several plugins) but the discussion seems to have ceased.  The last suspected culprit is the Google Gears plugin (located in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins).  Indeed, when I removed every plugin and added them back, the Gears plugin was the one that caused the flooding.

Read the rest of this entry »

Firefox 3.1b2
Google Gears 0.5.4.2

You know what would be really faboo? If the devs for Google Gears figured out it was worthwhile looking at the non-compatibility issue with Firefox 3.1 and Google Gears. I know, I know, it’s free software and there are a million other things to get to. And they’ve said (unofficially) that by the time Firefox 3.1 gets out of beta they’ll be ready. The only reason I’m asking is this:

There are now a preponderance of sites out there now that are JavaScript heavy. All Google products, Facebook, MySpace, and yeah, WordPress – especially the admin backend which is now AJAX supercharged. So when you’re dealing with these sites a lot it really makes a big difference having a browser that can crank through the JS routines and render the damn page already. This is why I’m working with the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (actually, now the OSX optimized version, Shiretoko – there are Windows versions out there too) which has the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine enabled. It’s quite fast; incidentally I’m also testing WebKit, the Safari engine development version which is right up there too.

Anyway, FF 3.1 makes a big difference in shaving off my waiting time, especially here in WordPress-land. And incidentally, the kind folks at WordPress have incorporated Google Gears functionality to offload the download…load. Works great on WebKit/Safari, but since the Gears guys haven’t worked out the FF 3.1 compatibility yet, we’re still waiting.

Not a big rush, really…but it’s Valentine’s Day. Blow me a kiss, boys.