I received a report that the Phonebook page wasn’t long enough to display all the entries when viewed using Internet Explorer. I was trying to use the “widget” feature in the new version of iWeb but it would seem that using it allowed the browser to select it’s own font to render the list and this combined with the javascript specifying the length of the widget resulted in the bottom part of the list going AWOL. Extending the length didn’t help overly, even after I was pointed at http://browsershots.org. Eventually I ditched the “widget” and added the contents to the web page but I’m not sure that has even fixed the problem with Explorer.

Some of the systems in browsershots also seem to cache pages which makes things difficult. I have been changing the image at the top of the page (now lavender) every time I change the page so I don’t get sucked into thinking the latest change didn’t do anything.

The new iLife arrived today so I thought I would give the new iWeb a spin. While the web widgets seem like a good idea and allow embedding of HTML easily enough the placement and formatting around it needs work.

I am also not so sure that the Photo Albums template is an improvement. It seems like a good idea except I can’t find a way to select the photograph it uses as an index (aside from reordering the photos so the one I want as an index is first) and then the resulting page takes an eternity to load (I only tried from local storage, it may work better from a web server but I find that hard to believe). The slideshow should cope better with photos in portrait format rather than scale them so they are the same height as the landscape ones. Also if you change the background colour then don’t make it white since that will make the captions “disappear”.

There are certainly more knobs to play with but having a preference panel with default values would be a fine idea if you want a consistent site.

As is usual I broke my journey home in Singapore. My visit nearly coincided with Singapore’s National Day holiday. Saturday turned out to be a rehearsal for the celebrations and naturally they were centered near where I was staying, around the Marina area. I got to see a few flyovers, especially a Chinook that continually passed over the city. People wanting a Duck Tour would have been disappointed since the water seemed to be out of bounds with the Navy playing with their boats.

Singapore’s answer to the London Eye, Singapore Flyer, is taking shape with one capsule attached. While it is still officially scheduled to be completed in March 2008 there is hope it will be ready for Valentine’s day.