CES Frontend Woes
Oct. 23rd, 2006 02:37 pmAbout a year ago I started doing a redesign of my Console Emulation Station frontend. Being the dork that I am I wrote the original frontend in DHTML and used Firefox. I wanted instead to redesign it for Safari since it was much easier to do the same thing. Or at least it was easier.
Turns out Apple added some security tweak to one of it's OS updates since then and turned off the ability for the user to decide which applications were "safe" for launching when you download stuff from the web. Thus there's no way for me to open up an emu and play a game from Safari, it just shows me the local file instead and does nothing.
Oh well, I could just use Firefox again I figured. Except, it too got rid of launching safe file apps. I used to use an extension in the old version that does not work in the new one. Damn.
So I tried Camino, which is the FF rewrite for OS X. Hey it works! Well, almost. It will open the file alright, but it also "re-downloads" it, meaning every time I click a link it puts another copy on my desktop. Gah.
I figured I was screwed, until I remembered Opera. The last time I tested it out was 2 years ago. The big kicker back then was it wouldn't save "safe" file types from session to session. After downloading it, apparently that's fixed! It works the way I want, no redownloading, and true fullscreen (the other browsers needed to be hacked to get fullscreen to work)! So far so good. This may be a winner. Looks like my target platform has now shifted.
I really really wanted to use Processing, because it's so much more robust than a damn website, and much less complicated than going all out using XCode, but alas, it's fullscreen implementation hogs the foreground, meaning emus play *behind* the frontend. No good! And apparently there's no way to fix it. It's Java after all. Bah.
So it looks like if I really want this update to happen, Opera is where it's at. Lets hope it stays that way.
Turns out Apple added some security tweak to one of it's OS updates since then and turned off the ability for the user to decide which applications were "safe" for launching when you download stuff from the web. Thus there's no way for me to open up an emu and play a game from Safari, it just shows me the local file instead and does nothing.
Oh well, I could just use Firefox again I figured. Except, it too got rid of launching safe file apps. I used to use an extension in the old version that does not work in the new one. Damn.
So I tried Camino, which is the FF rewrite for OS X. Hey it works! Well, almost. It will open the file alright, but it also "re-downloads" it, meaning every time I click a link it puts another copy on my desktop. Gah.
I figured I was screwed, until I remembered Opera. The last time I tested it out was 2 years ago. The big kicker back then was it wouldn't save "safe" file types from session to session. After downloading it, apparently that's fixed! It works the way I want, no redownloading, and true fullscreen (the other browsers needed to be hacked to get fullscreen to work)! So far so good. This may be a winner. Looks like my target platform has now shifted.
I really really wanted to use Processing, because it's so much more robust than a damn website, and much less complicated than going all out using XCode, but alas, it's fullscreen implementation hogs the foreground, meaning emus play *behind* the frontend. No good! And apparently there's no way to fix it. It's Java after all. Bah.
So it looks like if I really want this update to happen, Opera is where it's at. Lets hope it stays that way.