IE6 filter alpha loader png24 freezing context - internet-explorer-6

This is really unknown issue to many people. I would raise a question for it and make it easily accessible for other, and maybe someone of you know the solution for this problem.
All of us probably know that there is problem with alpha transparency in PNG24 in IE6 (still used by many people on web..). There are at least few known solutions how to solve that, but all of them got their problem that I would like to describe there:
1.Using progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader:
This is most common trick to make images shown in IE6. Problem is that it uses DirectX to show it. So basically DX firstly need to download file from Net, then render it. This downloading block browser context for a while. But if you have alot of images - that means that you page can be freezed for even... few minutes (it happens to mine one project at least once).
http://blogs.cozi.com/tech/2008/03/transparent-pngs-can-deadlock-ie6.html
http://www.stum.de/2008/12/01/do-not-use-alphaimageloader-to-fix-transparent-pngs-in-ie6/
2.Using VML.
You can also use this workaround. However this has a nasty effect of rendering gray box in background, then a proper image, also causing to download image files twice - this however might be because of bad implementation so need to be checked.
3.Using PNG8.
Just forget about solutions and try use PNG8, if prepared correctly can still be looking good.
If anyone knows any other solution please give answer here!

You should definitely have a look at http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_belatedPNG/

Related

How to format the terminal window node is using to be in sections

I'm wanting to make an application with node have a cli interface, as it needs to be ran in a terminal. I want to split the terminal into several sections, one with some identification as to who is viewing the application, another with some other random info, a menu on the side that you can use the arrow keys to move up and down the options, a main logs section, and another that you can type, and press enter to send text in. I've drawn up a little diagram of how I want to make it: (I know this looks awful, it was made in mspaint)
I've gotten the console input part working by using the readline module, but I don't even know where to really start with designing the terminal how I want it, setting text in certain sections, etc. I've looked around at things like terminal-kit, and clci, but either they didn't seem like what I wanted, or their docs/examples were a mess.
I would prefer to do this with node only, not using another application in another language, as all of the stuff going to the console sections will be from the same node application.
I found the blessed library at https://github.com/chjj/blessed. It is based on the ncurses library (written in C, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses) and it allows you to create different sections with specified heights, widths, etc. in different areas of the terminal. Very useful in theory, and you can follow the advice on the github page, clone the repo into your desktop, look into the test folder, and then run the different files ie. node test/widget-form.js to see the different types of interfaces that you can create in your terminal.
It hasn't really worked for me, because it keeps crashing on my end, but I see that there are a lot of open pull requests and that people are still trying, so it might be working for some, although I think that the usage for some "widgets" is limited. The next best thing I can recommend is either blessed-contrib or neo-blessed, the former being developed by some dude from Facebook. Blessed-contrib is newer so you might have more luck with it, but it's essentially made for visual output, so you'd be able to create a section for a log, a selection menu, a paragraph section, etc. but nothing to create an area where you can input text (so 4/5 of what you need), based on my reading of the documentation, which you'll find here https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib.
I personally think it's dope. Good luck with it, I'm going through the motions of understanding the documentation better myself, and I've delved pretty deeply in it, so feel free to reach out if you need any help.
On another note, let me know if you've found anything else other than the resources I mentioned, which would be very helpful for me, as the alternative right now is for me to code the text user interface myself using C and the ncurses library, which I'm trying to avoid if it's unnecessary :)
EDIT:
I found something for you and for me that might send us in the right direction. Good news. This is the gitter-cli. It uses the library I mentioned above blessed. If you clone the gitter-cli's repo, follow the instructions to get a token and create an account, and join one of the rooms (you can find the name of the rooms like 'gitterHQ/javascript' on the gitter.im website), you'll see that the chat works. There might be some optimizations I'm not aware of, but I recommend just delving into their code while also delving into the blessed documentation to understand how it works. It should give you an idea of what to do next.
It took me a lot of hours to find all these different resources and connect the dots so you should definitely check them out.

Libraries for text manipulation

So...
I plan on doing an animation that pulls all the text from the screen to the middle and lets it pulse like a heart. For that I checked if I'm able to manipulate whole Strings and Chars the way I'm able to manipulate circles, for example. I found the libraries Nexttext and Fontastic, but those seem to be outdated, therefore I can't use them with Processing 3.0. Than there is the library Geomerative, which I manged to install through Processings library manager, but this one yields the error "duplicate libraries", which I can't find a , for me understandable, workaround for. I'm also using minim, since I combine the pulse with music input, minim works fine though.
Thus I'm asking if anyone here has an idea on how to fix this error, make the outdated libraries run or maybe someone has an alternative way/library to manipulate text.
Apparently the processing forum is not that active, hence I'm asking here, there was one suggestions tho, that I should search for similar Java libraries, which I yet have to do.
What exactly do you mean when you say you want to pull text from the screen? Do you mean you want to get text from another application and copy it into Processing? Or are you just talking about doing something inside the Processing window?
If you're just talking about manipulating text within the Processing window, then I'm not sure why you need a library for this. Processing has several functions that allow you to draw text, change its font, size, positioning, etc.
Anyway, the issue you've encountered is a known bug. Looks like the only solution for now is to use an old version of Processing. You can download them from the same place you downloaded Processing 3.
Both Geomerative and Fontastic work with Processing 3.2.3
Bare in mind is the bug Kevin mentioned.
However, the only issue I had was compiling examples that had this line:
import processing.opengl.*;
Simply remove or comment this line and the example should compile

Google closure on CouchDB

My goog dependencies are working 100% on a regular server, but I'm moving to CouchDB, which as you might know, sort of destroys the file hierarchy. Some of my dependencies aren't loading, but I am not sure why. Does anyone know of a good way of finding out where it thinks the dependency files are, which ones its successfully getting versus not...
Basically, what's the best way to debug this? Or is there a way in CouchDB to make it so I don't have to change the locations of the files.
EDIT: It seems to be working about 50% of the time (it should show some musical notation.) In FF it seems to work more often. Thoughts?
http://fullscore.iriscouch.com/fullscore/_design/API%20Tests/public%2fpublic%2fscore-library%2ftests%2f01a-Pitches-Pitches.html

OpenGL 3.2 Core Sprite Batch Example?

I have been tearing my hair out for a while over this. I need an OpenGL 3.2 Core (no deprecated stuff!) way to efficiently render many sprites, using batching (no instancing).
I've seen examples that do this with geometry alone, but mine also needs to send textures to it, I don't know how to do this.
I need a well done example of it working in action. And looking at how other libs like monogame and such do it isn't much help, because all I'm interested in is the GL code, and it has to have no deprecated stuff in it.
Basically I want to be able to efficiently render thousands+ of sprites, all having textures. The texture is just a spritesheet, so I just need to tell it to render a region of that spritesheet.
I'm disappointed in the amount of material available for programmable pipeline. To the point where it seems like it'd be so much easier to just say screw it and use fixed pipeline, even though I definitely don't want to do that.
So yeah, any full examples that do what I want? Or could somebody more knowledgable write one up? :)
A lot of the examples are "oh, here's how you render 1 triangle". Well that's great, except nobody needs to render only 1 triangle/quad. And they need to be textured in addition to that!
An example that uses VBOs/VAOs/EBOs
ALSO: this means the code can't use glTexPointer and that stuff, but just in raw VBOs/VAOs...
I saw this question and decided to write a little program that does some "sprite" rendering using points and gl_PointSize. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "batching" as opposed to "instancing," but my program uses the glDrawArraysInstanced() call so that I can render multiple points without needing my VBO to be variable sized. My code also doesn't texture the sprites, but that's easy enough to add in (upload the active texture index (the one that was active during your call to glTexSubImage), to a GLSL sampler2D using glUniform1i).
Anyway, here's the program I wrote: http://litherum.blogspot.com/2013/02/sprites-in-opengl-programmable-pipeline.html Hope you can learn from it!

Anyone seen good embedded help in a web application?

I have a pretty simple app on the web (written in Flex) which is very straightforward to use once it has data inside it. The steps to get data inside it are themselves also pretty simple, but not at all obvious to my audience when they first log into my app.
I have been wrestling with how to communicate the data setup process to my users without referring them to a separate help. I also don't want to clog my lovely, elegant UI (which has uniformly been praised for its clarity from my current users and matches their processes very well) with wizards, or worse still an annoying animated paperclip.
I have a very rich set of tools available for the web UI but I am looking for inspiration and wondered if anyone had experienced good web-based, intuitive, unobtrusive, genuinely helpful process/usage instructions embedded in an application and could point me to a link so I can take a look for myself.
Failing that anyone got any bright ideas? There are about 5 steps involved each one visiting a different page of the existing app to enter/upload data.
Have you taken a look at:
http://www.askthecssguy.com/2007/03/form_field_hints_with_css_and.html
I believe there is a jquery or prototype or mootools or whatever framework that goes a couple steps beyond the above and walks a user through what to do. My google-fu isn't coming through right now so I can't seem to find it.
You could display the links to the data setup pages in a small strip on your main page like this (pardon the ugliness - this is just a usability idea):
alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/052b13acb7.jpg
The steps they've already completed are greyed out (I assume they don't have to complete these steps in sequence). When they mouse over a step they get a brief description, and then full details when they click through to the actual step page. You could have descriptive icons for each step instead of hyperlinks, of course.

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