A bit of technology

Guys at Engadget has found a video which looks like Android 2.0 Donut. A new shiny user interface is coming our way! Actually this video is taken from HTC Hero, so maybe it is just a skinning by HTC - they are very good at it (:

Today I was fighting with IE8 for a few hours because this stupid browser enjoys torturing web-developers. There is a method in JavaScript in IE called window.showModalDialog which opens modal popup. This method returns value which was set by page opened in such popup. This is done by setting window.returnValue inside popup, but guess what? It does not work! There are a lot of reasons for this feature not to work and a lot of local workarounds, but that all suck, so I killed a lot of time to find An Ultimate Solution to situations when returnValue is undefined. And it is quite simple (: As always!

On caller page create a callback function which will be called from popup to update data:

function modalCallback(newData) {
    globalVar = newData;
    // globalVar is some external variable you would like to update.
    // Actually you may place any code here!
}

Then prepare dialogArguments on a caller page and execute showModalDialog:

var args = {'callback': modalCallback};
window.showModalDialog('popup.html', args);
// Put the code to process recieved data here!

And now for a modal popup. When you ready to send data back to parent window just call your callback function!

window.dialogArguments.callback(dataFromPopup);

That's it!

P.S. I hope people using this tip do know JavaScript and programming in general.

Looks like US wants everyone in the world to implement DMCA analogues, so they made a special report listing countries with poor, as US thinks, copyright protection laws. Canada, Europe and Asia does not like that one at all. Me too. Read more on Slashdot: post #1, post #2.

P.S. I really hope Europe will not listen to US, as a developer I don't want to live in a world with stupid patents and copyrights which slow down progress and innovation and force developers to become lawyers.

If you are a web-developer then you definitely should know about CSS sprites. This thingie is quite old and highly used by experienced web-developers. I used this trick for the first time somewhere back in 2003-2004 when developing JavaScript game prototype for my own pleasure. No one knew the term those days, but some people already used CSS sprites in some projects, because they, like me, had a PC gaming background. And then many web-devs realized that CSS sprites do really increase application performance, so they started to write frameworks and helpful libraries to support "new" technology.

Oh, nostalgy...

Anyway, if you are not yet familiar with the topic, then do not hesitate to visit Smashing Magazine and read everything you need to know about CSS sprites!

New ReactOS version is released! Memory requirements were lowered, memory management was made faster and efficient, overall perfrormance improved and new features added. It is good to see that these guys still doing their best to open-source Windows (: