IE MAC and the inability to rely on others.

So it's 9 pm on a Thursday evening and I know my wife is wondering where the hell I am. "Where are you?", is the first thing going to be said when she finally runs out of patience and calls. (side note, I'm not good at calling first especially when I'm pissed at the world.) **** She just called. OMG right? ****

Why am I at the office you may ask? Am I a workaholic? Well that's another post, but no. Basically it boils down to 1 thing. The inability to count on others when you need them to come through. I was launching a site today, everything was going well, proofing was done, approval was reached and the site actually launched. But because of moving the site files one directory up my CMS encountered some horrific PHP errors in my file upload script that was working one folder back.

I go through all the usual testing procedures, permissions, paths, variables and naming conventions, but yet nothing. So what do I do? I call the server admins, and the nice people that they are, go through my same testing steps. Nothing. Not a big surprise, right? So they move to their next steps, recompile. "Oh, that sounds a little serious, how long should it take"? "No more then an hour.", well then I say let's try it.

So here it is going on 4 hours later and still nothing, but not only nothing but the site is completely down. "Hell yeah!!! Let's honky-tonk like it's Saturday night in the Ozarks!!!"

While all this is going on and I can't touch the server, what do I decide to do? Well, continue learning Cocoa programming. That's a good calming thing to do while you can't do anything else and it's past work hours so you don't want to do anything billable. Well, that lasted an hour before I was at my ends with it, but good news is, I finally started getting some of it.

I've pretty much understand how to define outlets, actions, variables, strings and update an interface based on buttons pushed. The basics. Finally.

At this point in my book, let me give props to MAC for there sweet applications for development. Interface builder is probably one of the easiest layout programs I've ever used. And XCode, well, while it needs it work, it actually is very impressive. With all that's integrated in it, you could fill up 3 monitors with the tools used for testing, building, debugging apps and the integrated document window. Use beginners need that. One day I'll post on how shitty their documentation is.

Now that I've given up on trying to learn how to detect a CD burner using the DRDevice.h class and functions in Cocoa, I turn to something I know headway can be made at. Fixing an AJAX interface in IE MAC. "Say what?!?!" That's right. A webpage that not only requires MAC IE to fully understand the CSS, which is close to impossible in it's self, but to have a full set of functions that modify that CSS.

Now at this point if you have any experience with web development you are asking the question "why the hell you would do such a thing?". Believe me, I'm asking the same question. But there is only one answer when a question like that is asked. "The client made me do it." Damn those clients and their ridiculous requests.

It turns out that this client's audience base is the biggest MAC base on any website I've ever seen and 90% of them are using MAC IE!!!! The issue is there is this software that their clients us that hit it's peak on OS9 and they refuse to upgrade or it's not made for OSX, which i don't believe.

Is that not the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard? So these people are almost 6 years behind in technology. That's got to be the equivalent of living in Antarctica or something.

Well, I going through my coding problem solving process, which I have to say I think I have one of the best there is, or at least in the people I know/met. The function hides and shows a floated right subnav div that gets dynamically updated depending on the main nav you click.

Nothing to complicated but for some reason that sub nav would jump out of place and fill across the screen in MAC IE. Strange. So I go through my steps and find out, oh, MAC IE doesn't support innerHTML style attributes, which is used all across my interface. Thus starts the rebuilding process.

I decide to, because there weren't that menu sub menus, to load them during the page load and set their divs to 1 px, then wrap them in one div that will never change. Totally fixed the problem, but now look like shit in IE 7. Of course.

At this point I've decided that 1) we don't officially support IE 7 cause it's in beta; 2) we shouldn't have to support MAC IE; and 3) I hate anything Microsoft. ANYTHING!!!!!!!

My conclusion lead to a nice polite email telling the client 3 options. 1 & 2 you know and 3 being we stop using modern technologies that will trip out either MAC IE or IE 7. We'll see where it goes.

So 4.5 hours in and still nothing. I guess I'll go back to creating icons for my app and if I'm brave enough try to tackling this Cocoa CD burner detection.