On the one hand, it makes me very happy to see people are actually using it for professional purposes. On the other hand, at the time I slapped it together in a few hours total, building on some old experience. As it turned out, users were/are having quite some issues to properly customize their organization charts. I even received some code contributions to improve the functionality.
Now, a few days ago, I finally found some time to address the major issues. But something grave changed in the mean while. When I first created and released the widget, I was a windows user, and used to create stuff that would work on Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then modify it to work on Mozilla/Firefox. Now, it has been about a year since I replaced Microsoft Windows for (K)Ubuntu Linux. Meaning, I am without Internet Explorer....or am I ;)
Enter IEs4Linux:
The IE4sLinux project offers the real, genuine Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer as a Wine emulation:
One of the compelling things about the IE4Linux project is that it allows you to run several versions of MS Internet Explorer on the same machine - something I never got to work on my native windows machine.
Obviously, web developers that need to test their pages on several browsers and browser versions are better off on Linux + Wine than native Windows, as Linux + Wine + IEs4Linux allows them to test their pages on several versions of Internet Explorer.
Thanks to the people from IEs4Linux and Wine!
6 comments:
Although I am a Linux supporter I thought that you should know that you can use different versions of IE on Windows, see http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE.
Some guys hacked the dlls to allow them all to be installed at once, right back to 4.somehting.
Anyway, nice blog.
Hi Josh!
What can I say...the title of the blog is a bit tongue in cheek as far as I am concerned ;)
I am no hardcore webdeveloper but I was quite heavily involved in intranet application development, and at the time I struggled a lot with testing different IE versions. One of decisive momemnts was when I installed a IE7 beta only to find out that a lot of stuff would not work anymore.
Anyway, thanks for this tip!
Hi Roland
Personally I don't trust a browser unless it has been tested on the actual OS it is intended before.
The little qwirks are often so obscure they can sometimes be a problem only on a minor version of a browser.
I tend to let the users pick up the cross platform stuff, I only ever open IE if they report a specific problem I'm not getting in FF.
Andy..
Hi Andy,
Thanks for you comments ;)
Yeah, I see your point. That said, it is amazing to see how well wine runs other apps. So I tend to trust it at least while developing. But I agree, the final test should always be as close as possible to the actual environment.
Hi Roland !
About the organization chart : this widget is really amazing ! Thanks a lot for this tool.
May I suggest this feature : a function that collapses or expands every nodes ?
Alban,
I'm glad you like it!
Yeah, a collapse/expand all feature would be a good addition. I'll put it on my todo.
That said, if you come up with an implementation, I can take a look at it and maybe incorporate it into the code. And you'll be credited of course ;)
regards,
Roland
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