What were MYOB thinking?
Wednesday, 22. November 2006, 15:11:43
The keyboard's smoking this month! 
MYOB is an Australian company that produces a very popular software accounting package, not just for Australia, but around the world.
Although they're currently up to v16 (which I expect I'll be upgrading to soon), yesterday I installed a copy of v15.
The help is made of web pages hosted on the local hard drive. They open in the default browser. My default browser is Opera.
The help pages don't work. 
First stop is to see what they look like in IE or Firefox. Hmmm, there's some menus there that aren't showing up in Opera? I wonder what they're using? Oh, OpenCube!
OpenCube in the past have created problems for Opera with their poor browser sniffing. That's the case here, with only Opera v7 being detected as "v7"; all other versions of Opera (8 and 9 included) being treated as pre-v7! Thankfully, Opera's browser.js comes to the rescue to trick the script into thinking it's dealing with v7 Opera. That means it will load the Opera 7 support code module. That's funny, Opera says it can't load it?
A quick look at the MYOB help file folder reveals the problem: MYOB have included the menu support files for IE, Netscape 6.x, and Netscape (Mozilla/Firefox), but left out the files for the other browsers OpenCube support: Opera, Konqueror, Escape, and ICE!
Now, MYOB is Windows-only, so no support for Konqueror (Linux) and Escape (set-top box) could be readily excused. ICE is a Java-based browser, rather unlikely to be used, but still... There's no excuse for dropping the Opera files, though!
And really, there's no reason for any of the files to be dropped! They're only 58K, the CD wasn't that full, and they're for sure not going to fill any hard drive I've seen recently!
Why would MYOB do such a thing? I don't see any up sides, only down sides?
Maybe they've changed things in v16? 
Anyway, I searched the 'net and eventually found a random website that happened to host an identical version of the OpenCube menus. I popped the missing support files into the MYOB help folder and the help files sprang to life! Not perfectly, but a whole lot better! i.e. I could use them in Opera.
Why, why, why? ...grumble...
MYOB is an Australian company that produces a very popular software accounting package, not just for Australia, but around the world.
Although they're currently up to v16 (which I expect I'll be upgrading to soon), yesterday I installed a copy of v15.
The help is made of web pages hosted on the local hard drive. They open in the default browser. My default browser is Opera.
The help pages don't work. First stop is to see what they look like in IE or Firefox. Hmmm, there's some menus there that aren't showing up in Opera? I wonder what they're using? Oh, OpenCube!
OpenCube in the past have created problems for Opera with their poor browser sniffing. That's the case here, with only Opera v7 being detected as "v7"; all other versions of Opera (8 and 9 included) being treated as pre-v7! Thankfully, Opera's browser.js comes to the rescue to trick the script into thinking it's dealing with v7 Opera. That means it will load the Opera 7 support code module. That's funny, Opera says it can't load it?
A quick look at the MYOB help file folder reveals the problem: MYOB have included the menu support files for IE, Netscape 6.x, and Netscape (Mozilla/Firefox), but left out the files for the other browsers OpenCube support: Opera, Konqueror, Escape, and ICE!
Now, MYOB is Windows-only, so no support for Konqueror (Linux) and Escape (set-top box) could be readily excused. ICE is a Java-based browser, rather unlikely to be used, but still... There's no excuse for dropping the Opera files, though!
And really, there's no reason for any of the files to be dropped! They're only 58K, the CD wasn't that full, and they're for sure not going to fill any hard drive I've seen recently!Why would MYOB do such a thing? I don't see any up sides, only down sides?
Maybe they've changed things in v16? Anyway, I searched the 'net and eventually found a random website that happened to host an identical version of the OpenCube menus. I popped the missing support files into the MYOB help folder and the help files sprang to life! Not perfectly, but a whole lot better! i.e. I could use them in Opera.
Why, why, why? ...grumble...
WIDGETIZE