Monday, June 23, 2008

Facelift and new buttons

Before leaving for the midsummer night's long weekend in the countryside (we had friday off from work in Finland) I did a little facelift for the main map view. After a little testing and bug fixing during sunday I'm installing this upgrade on the production servers.

I added a full screen mode (well, almost...) - click on the new "collapse" button in the top right corner to hide the menu bar. Thanks to Kauto (OH2LFM) and others for requesting this one. The new button is sometimes slightly misplaced when running MSIE6 - please upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 to get rid of that IE6 rendering bug.

I also added 'search' buttons for the callsign and address lookup input fields. They should enable Tony (VE3TK) and others to use aprs.fi on the Nintendo Wii (lacking an 'enter' key on the virtual keyboard), it'll probably help other embedded devices too. They also fix the problem of quick typists - pressing the (real) 'enter' key while the last key used in the callsign entry was still depressed failed to trigger the form submission, and you needed to press enter again. I'll add submit buttons on the rest of the forms later! Usability before coolness!

The facelift part consisted of removing the unnecessary "fieldset" box around the menu bar and adding a background image with a nice blue colour blend. Thanks to Gimp for help with the icon and background graphics!

I also added a workaround for a bug in the latest Google Maps API code, which partially broke address search. A javascript error broke the map view after about half of the address searches.

Firefox 3 was released last week, and it still seems to contain the bug which makes it break with aprs.fi every now and then. Less often, but still. Not recommended.

7 comments:

SM0HXB said...

Hi Hessu
Just want to say that I really like the new collapse button. Thakns for that.

Göran

kacos2000 said...

Yep, I agree. Very handy indeed!
Thanks :)

Anonymous said...

Yes, indeed very nice. I had planned to ask for this for a long time, but never got around to it. Thanks a lot.

LA9ULA

Phil said...

Hi Hessu,
You are doing a great job.. Just wondering if there is a possibility to have a PHG button that would cover a town / city. This would be a great tool to see what coverage is like etc..

73 Phil

Hessu said...

Phil,

Yeah, I've been planning to do PHG in the near future, but haven't gotten there yet.

Anonymous said...

I like the new look. Is it possible to display APRS transmission times in one's local time instead of GMT?

Thanks,
N4LW

Hessu said...

Yes, just select local time from the Options. It usually works right and guesses your correct timezone. :)