I was recently finishing up a kiosk project wherein a Flash projector would have to run fullscreen 24/7, and was having a terrible time pinpointing a memory leak that left the projector unresponsive after only a few hours. While I was able to improve memory usage, I couldn’t get the app to stay calm over an extended period. The end result was a workaround that had the projector restart itself after an inactive waiting period.

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I could be late to the party here, but I’ve just discovered IETester, a piece of software that’s been missing from my life for some time now. It’s a single (Windows) application that lets you test a given website in IE5.5, IE6, IE7, and even IE8. It’s in alpha right now, but I’ve tried it and so far I’m thrilled.

Stop reading and just go get it.

I’ve had a chance to check out MacRabbit’s Espresso, and I was really impressed by its autocomplete functionality–specifically with CodeIgniter and ActionScript. Its snippets, project panel, and Safari-like text search are also very attractive, but there are a few yet-to-be-implemented features that make it impossible for me to switch from TextMate.

In order of importance:

1. Project-wide search and replace with support for regular expressions.
2. The ability to duplicate a selection without copy and paste. (Command+D in TextMate)
3. Multi-line selection/edit tool (Alt+click/drag), and the related ‘Edit Each Line in Selection’ feature.

Espresso has been freshly released at version 1.0, and I realize that it needs time to mature. It’ll take a while to build up the enormous feature set that TextMate offers, and it’ll be amazing if it can stay as simple as TextMate at the same time. I’d make the switch in a heartbeat if I wasn’t so dependent on TextMate’s awesomeness.

This is one of those awesome bugs that wasted more of my time than I’d like to admit, so hopefully this post can help someone in the future.

The problem: I’m working on a site that uses the jQuery Cycle plugin. The chunk that gets rotated for the slideshow is an HTML list-item that contains another list with nested list items. (li -> ul -> li, li, li). The root li kept getting a background color applied to it, even though I specified that it should be transparent.

The solution: disabling the Cycle plugin’s default behavior of applying a background to the slideshow container element when using IE on a Windows machine with cleartype enabled. Add this little combo to your Cycle options and things should be fine:

cleartypeNoBg: true

The key was mention of this undocumented feature in this thread.

I stumbled across this recently when CocoaMySQL was having problems with a pretty basic SQL import. It’s a great piece of software (for the Mac, of course), it’s much sexier, and it’s free although I think it’s more than worth a donation! If you happen to be working with me on any projects, you may also be interested in checking this out.

Go get it!