March 27th, 2008 by Marc Edwards

With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering. Details of the bugs we fixed will follow. Indeed, we found a critical bug in the test itself that would have forced a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass, so until a few hours ago it was not possible to get a valid 100/100. Acid3 test editor Ian Hickson has the details.

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build.

Good things for WebKit mean good things for Safari and Dashboard. Thank you Dave Hyatt and anyone who’s helped on the project. Go WebKit!

March 17th, 2008 by Marc Edwards

We’ve just passed 10 million downloads! It’s been a very big few years, but the work doesn’t stop here… we need to alter the design of our stats pages as the extra digit in the download total has caused some wrapping. Success comes at a price I guess.

To celebrate we’ll be releasing another widget in the next week or so. Stay tuned, it’s a good one.

Updated: Crisis averted. We’re good for another 90 mil or so now. Please take it easy people.

March 14th, 2008 by Marc Edwards

iStat pro 4.6 is out. It addresses some important bugs and adds a purple skin. Yes, purple.

What’s new in version 4.6

• Improved support for Santa Rosa based MacBook Pro’s
• Improved support for MacBook Airs
• New Purple skin (aka iStat Grimace!)
• Improved support for Mac OS X 10.5
• Updated network code
• CPU temp support for MDD G4s
• Better support for LaunchCFM app names in processes section
• Improved naming for some temperature and fan sensors
• Added process count to uptime section
• UI bug fixes
• Other minor bug fixes

Gimme gimme!

February 25th, 2008 by Marc Edwards

For those outside Australia (ie. can’t use the IceTV Remote widget), I thought I’d post a video of it in action.

February 17th, 2008 by Marc Edwards

I thought it might be nice to document the design changes between the old IceTV version 1 widget, and the new version 2 widget we’ve been working on for a while now. The first version of the IceTV widget was derived from one of the first widgets we ever made, AusTV, so there’s no surprise that it’s beginning to show its age a little now. I think we’ve given it the facelift it deserved, and then some.

Far from a simple TV guide, version 2 includes remote TV record scheduling (via IceTV Remote), live searching, Most Popular (a list of the most recorded programs via IceTV Remote) and methods for managing all your recordings and tagging your favourite shows. It’s been a bit of a challenge fitting what probably should be a full application into something compact enough to live happily in Dashboard. It’s been a joint project with the IceTV development team from the outset and required the creation of a full server side API. The great news is that the API is going to be made public, so other developers can create IceTV Remote powered applications, websites and widgets. Read the rest of this entry »

February 12th, 2008 by Marc Edwards

Mac OS X 10.5.2 has introduced some differences in the way the CSS properties in text-shadow are rendered. I assume this is due to a more recent WebKit build being included in the update. I believe this brings WebKit more in line with the way Gecko renders text-shadow.

Fixing your current web and widget projects is easy: simply reduce the x and y offset by 1px. 0px offsets remain as is.

We will include this change in all future widget updates.

Edit: The change seems to be because of a system wide bug fix to NSShadow (thanks Dustin). The bug appeared in 10.5.0 (it wasn’t in 10.4.x). What I’ve written about WebKit and fixes to websites and widgets still remains true. I’ll post more info as it becomes available.

Edit #2: Results for 10.4.11 are in and they look different to 10.5.1 and 10.5.2. It does seem like the most frequently used shadows (the 1px variety) are identical or almost identical in 10.4.11 and 10.5.2. The HTML and CSS used can be found here.

February 10th, 2008 by Marc Edwards

It’s old news now, but Yahoo! Widget Engine 4.5 now includes WebKit (yes, WebKit, everyone’s favourite web browser engine). I’m not sure how we missed that one!

It’s now possible to develop Y!WE widgets using the existing XML methods or using HTML and CSS, similar to the way Dashboard widgets are built. Converting Dashboard widgets to Y!WE widgets should be a lot easier now (please hold off the iStat pro requests though).

Well done Y!WE team. That’s a very welcome enhancement. Notice how I glossed over the inclusion of Flash… not sure it deserved to be there, but hey, I’m sure some people will use it.

December 20th, 2007 by Marc Edwards

We’ve received quite a bit of email regarding two issues with the latest iStat pro widget, which thankfully seem to be both solvable and not an issue with iStat pro itself.

Can’t open the ZIP archive

Problem: Stuffit Expander seems to have trouble unarchiving some ZIP files. Not all Stuffit Expander users have had this issue, but quite a few have.

Solution: Try unarchiving using OS X’s built-in unarchiver. This can be done by right-clicking or control-clicking the file in Finder and selecting Open With>Archive Utility.

Fonts appear too big

Problem: If the text in iStat pro and other widgets appears too large, then there’s a good chance you’ve used Leopard’s Web Clip widget and Safari’s “never use font sizes smaller than” preference.

Solution: Remove all Web Clip widgets from Dashboard, then delete these two files in your user’s home folder:

Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.client.plist
Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plist

Once you’ve done that, restart your Mac (or restart the Dock from the terminal). Dashboard will be reset and everything should be good again.

Please let us know in the comments below if you had either of these issues and the suggestions helped.

December 17th, 2007 by iSlayer

iStat pro 4.5 new features

• Updated network section with new details & controls for PPP/PPPoE connections
• Improved PPC temperature and fan support
• Improved Intel temperature support
• Improved S.M.A.R.T. drive temperature monitoring
• Fixed bugs with battery section and 10.5
• Clicking on a disc icon will now open the drive in finder
• New keyboard shortcuts (”g” - Update external IP, 1-8 - Change skin color)
• Added button to launch Activity Monitor
• Other various bug fixes
• Various UI tweaks

The first thing you may notice with this update is there are more network interfaces shown. Previously only active interfaces were shown, but now all PPP/PPPoE connections are displayed, regardless of their state. Each PPP/PPPoE connection has new controls attached to it that let you connect and disconnect. The time connected is also shown where possible.

You can choose which network interfaces are shown by selecting the Network section in the Displays tab on the back of the widget.

Enjoy!

December 17th, 2007 by Marc Edwards

We thought now might be a good time to thank all the companies that have advertised with iSlayer recently. Their contributions help keep our software free for all to enjoy.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Path Analyzer Pro - Graphical traceroute, whois, ping and more.
Greenphone - Get paid to recycle your cell phones.
1password - The ultimate OS X password manager.
Gadgetino - iPod, MP3, console PDA and phone gadgets.
Sector3 Games - Incredible 3D casual games for the Mac & PC (Stunt Mania is a LOT of fun!).
Handetta - cases and accessories for iPods, iPhones and more.
CrashPlan - automatic offsite backup (you can never have too much backup!).
Empressr - Create and share rich media presentations on the web.
iRADIOmast - More iTunes radio stations.