Releases

I wanted to post something about several releases of different products, but I didn't have the time until now.

Let's start from oldest to the most recent.

CKFinder 1.3

This release fixes all the problems (at least for asp) known in previous versions, it's the work of several months trying to debug each and every report from the users.

Adding over that, it also includes some enhancements like ability to select the thumbnails themselves and remember the last selected folder.

ImageMap 2.1

I still need some time to update the demo page (and zip) in my server. This is update is just the job of Adam, and the parts related to the FCKeditor plugin are the ability to use Zoom and general bug-fixes and memory leaks. I'll try to really test it asap but I'm a little busy :-(

Internet Explorer 8 RC1

It seems that this release can be really tested, they have fixed lots of bug (included the two that I reported related to FCKeditor), improved performance, and I guess that we all really should test it to avoid finding two months after release that we didn't test it and it did include some regression that makes us suffer again. I don't expect any other releases shortly, just like IE7 I guess that we will have to wait a lot for something new, so this is the time for us to test it and check that it's really getting closer to the rest of the browsers. Let's hope that hopefully IE8 along the release of Windows 7 (I guess that it will be released much sooner than most of the people expects it) makes IE6 fade away.

FCKeditor 2.64

This is one of the last releases of the 2.x series of FCKeditor. It includes lots of bug fixes, I would had included even more little fixes but time is finite and it isn't possible to do everything that one would like to. This release isn't just bug fixes, it also includes support for table headers and a zero-configuration online spellchecker. If you are using any 2.6x version it's a no-brainer to update, your users will be pleased if they ever faced any of the bugs and you shouldn't have any problem to use it.

Let's remember also, that the 3.x versions are called CKEditor and you can start taking a look at it right now with the first beta that has been released, the online demo of the nightlies is available here. Almost everything is being rewritten, it isn't an easy task but the results so far are looking great.

 

GoogleMaps v2.1 finished (including user docs and bug fixes)

Finally I've updated the documentation for the end user regarding the new features available in the Google Maps plugin version 2.1, but I've fixed also some little details that did appear after the initial testing period.

All the current customers of the v2 will receive shortly a mail with the new zip.

Some clarifications regarding the plugin:

If you want to use the plugin for free, then you must use the v1 code. It's free to use wherever you want, you can test it in that page and then download it and install it in your server to use with FCKeditor.

If you appreciate the work involved to make that version work, or if you want to use all the new features and want to use the v2 plugin, then you must contact me (until I setup an automatic system), the license for a single site is 15€, if you are any kind of OEM or company that want to use it for several sites, you can get a general license for 50€.

Of course, you should really test the free version before trying to use the v2, as the requirements and setup procedure are just the same. If you have the v1 working, to upgrade to the v2 you just need to replace the plugin folder and that's all, no extra job. There's no online demo or download trial of the v2 plugin, this is all javascript, so it's not worth for me trying to implement any kind of security to avoid the people that want to get everything for free.

Text markers and static maps with GoogleMaps plugin

I've finished the coding of the new 2.1 version of the GoogleMaps plugin, the main highlights for this new version are:

Text markers.

You can add your text on the map, aimed at providing an always visible caption for the details that you want to remark.

The title field of normal markers now it's shown as a text besides the marker, and you can add any other text in the map using the Text tool.

This feature is based on the ELabels script provided by Mike Williams, I have simplify it a little to remove unwanted features and decrease its size.

Static images generation.

Ok, the previous version did generate a static image and then loaded the map, but this version does provide an option to not generate any script at all, and most important: it's able to edit again those images.

In the previous versions you were able to copy the image around or manually remove the script from source code, but if you tried to edit it again, it didn't recognize any of its data, so it wasn't very useful. Now it can generate the image without any scripts and then recover all the data that it's used on that image (I mean: data as text labels, areas, kml overlays... won't be recovered because they aren't used in the static maps).

This can be useful if you want to provide the option in a kind of forum where anybody can create data, but you don't want them to use any script due to obvious security reasons.

The scripts now are precompressed using YUICompressor in order to improve loading time, if you want to use the original files in order to make any adjustment or debug anything you just have to rename the files.

Now I need to update the docs and then it will be send to the current users. If you want the script and until I set up an automated system you can mail me at amla70 at gmail dot com and I'll provide you the PayPal info.

Optimizing the generation of gifs in .Net

While debugging some problems that a client had with CKFinder I found out that the thumbnails that were generated using the asp.net code of gif files were in reality png files, just a little oversight and should be easy to fix. Previously the code did test only for jpg files in order to adjust the quality, and the rest of extensions did were saved with

oResampled.Save( targetFile );

But as I said, the .Net framework doesn't check the extension of the file that you want to generate, instead it uses the png format.

So the new code just needed to do a switch:

switch ( extension )
{
    case ".gif":
        oResampled.Save( targetFile, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Gif );
        break ;
    case ".png":
        oResampled.Save( targetFile, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png );
        break ;
    case ".bmp":
        oResampled.Save( targetFile, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp );
        break ;
}
easy fix, isn't it?

You're wrong, for some strange design decision at MS, decreasing the palette from full color to 256 colors uses the infamous "web safe" palette, so your page will look again like those done at the start of the times, back when Nestcape was synonymous to Internet.

Why has the .Net team gone that way at this time and age?. I don't care, I didn't want to know why it's done that way, I just wanted to know how to do it the right way, how to specify a proper palette for the new file.

So searching a little you can find this very interesting article at MSDN that explains everything that you want to know about gifs and colors, it has links to other resources that try to explain the miracle that is a web safe palette, but it has been years since I saw a system that wasn't able to work with 24 bit-images.

That article does even include a sample that shows exactly how to do the quantization of images and provides also an implementation of an Octree palette generator. Too good to be true :-)

So there we go, add the class and quickly I see that there are some strange attributes on the classes. "unsafe", uh?

Let's recap: the article was written for the .Net Framework 1.1, and nowadays the servers in hosted providers are using mostly (AFAIK) Asp.net 2.0 in medium trust, so that code won't work at all.

Fortunately there was another nice blog by Brendan Tompkins that did found this same problem and does provide an explanation of the required changes in order to run properly. So I tested and now I didn't get the same compilation problems that I had with the original code, the unsafeness seemed to have gone away.

But when I tested really with medium trust, oh no!, a System.Security.SecurityException! Did I make something wrong?

I reviewed the changes and used directly the modified classes, nops, no way, it fails. Reading the comments I found that other people also reported the same problem but no one answered them. Could it be that initially the code did work in .Net 2.0 but some patch later the behavior was changed and now the calls to Marshal aren't allowed?

Searching to find the solution to this problem hasn't been successful, no one seems to know a solution and I spent one or two days reading everything that seemed interesting trying different combinations of search terms. Even trying to find another method to do the quantization hasn't been fruitful, there are questions posted in different places but no one has provided a positive answer.

Obviously I don't need to read the raw memory of the picture, using GetPixel seems that should be enough to create the palette, but this isn't the final solution because to generate the new picture with the specially created palette I need to specify the color/index of each pixel, and when you try to use SetPixel, you get:

"SetPixel is not supported for images with indexed pixel formats"

And again the solutions to this problem suggest to use the LockBits and then writing directly to memory, but that will fail in Medium Trust.

To recap:

• If you're running in High Trust, CKFinder 1.3 the asp.net or asp version (with asp.net handling) will create gif thumbnails correctly
• If you're in Medium Trust the call to create the 256-colors image will fail, and so far we haven't been able to find any solution. The GetPixel method is useful only for half of the process, it does still require direct memory access to create the new image so it hasn't been implemented. In this situation the "gif" image is really a 24-bit color png, not optimal and if someday the browsers stop sniffing the content of images they won't be shown, but hopefully before we reach that day MS would have released .Net v8 with some api to control the color-reduction method and/or SetPixel method expanded to handle indexed images.

Fixing bugs for Write Area

Finally I've started fixing the most annoying bug in Write Area, the lack of tooltips, and thanks to this post by Zoolcar9 I've been able to fix the problem by using  a xul file that embeds the html page instead of showing it directly.

It has lead to other code changes so now I have to review that everything keeps working.

Meanwhile I've added a save/load pair of buttons, so you can save your drafts on your computer. I've to review here that the encoding of the files is done properly as the docs state that it isn't utf safe by default.

For the moment it's saving just the content of the <body>, but I guess that I'll create some full html files just in case anyone wants to doubleclick them.

(for the new icons I've picked the load/save file in the Crystal pack by Emeraldo, but if anyone else has a good suggestion just drop a note here)

Write Area 0.7.5 available as experimental download

I've uploaded the xpi with the new version of Write Area. Until it's approved you need to go to the "all versions" page in order to see it, by default the AMO it's showing only the 0.7 version even if it's incompatible with the 3.1 betas due to the previoulsy mentioned bug 469203.

At the same time I upgraded the FCKeditor core, so now it includes all the new features and fixes since the 2.6.1 SVN that I grabbed months ago. That means this list for the officially released versions and this list for the current changes in SVN since 2.6.3

I'll leave a few days and if no one reports any special problem I'll request the approval to make it the official version.

The magic line

Thanks to Robert O'Callahan for providing an easy workaround, now I can start testing WriteArea in Firefox 3.1. All that was needed was a background-color:#FFF for the <html> and now it's working again :-)

Of course, using FCKeditor 2.6.1 is boring, so I've updated to the current SVN, and now some of the modifications aren't even needed anymore because the problem has been fixed directly in the FCKeditor main line. Anyway, working with SVN makes very easy the upgrade process and I had a script ready so it takes care of the packaging and removal of unnecessary files in order to re-package it as an extension for Firefox.

So very soon a new version will be ready, just some testing that nothing is too broken and I'll release it.

 

PD: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20081211 Minefield/3.2a1pre