xulexplorer -- getting your xml gui on

So in my never ending, what project should I start this week,
even though I haven't finished the other twenty I've started
in the last year, I decided to look at Mozilla's xulrunner
and xul interface for a cross platform program.

Having built a never completed help extension for Thunderbird
a few years back, I was familiar with the general concepts.
I looked around to see if anyone had created any kind of GUI
based application that would help create the xul files needed
for an xulrunner based application. I found XULExplorer. It's
still a young program, but had a wizard feature that would
set up your basic application structure and needed files.
Unfortunately the latest version has an bug introduced by
going from a flat file structure to using jar files to hold
it's internal files (see bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462561). This broke the application build wizard.

A quick fix to get this feature working on your local copy of the application:

1. move to the xulexplorer/chrome/ directory
2. extract en-US/ directory structure from the en-US.jar file
   (using your favorite archive manager) to the chrome/ directory.
   (you should have an en-US/ directory in the chrome directory when finished extracting.)
3. edit the en-US.manifest file in the chrome/ directory to read:
   locale explorer en-US file:en-US/
   

Now I have two projects to hack for the price of one. Fix issues I find with XULExplorer as I work on my application -- an even better guarantee that I won't finish anything.

swfobject 2 tweaking for firefox

Generally I avoid flash if I can, but I found what I thought would be a quick side job (yea craigslist computer gigs category), fixing a flash embedding problem with a website.

The site used swfobject version 1.4, and it wasn't loading files in Internet Explorer. After a little searching I found the swfobject website, saw there was version 2 out. I emailed the person with the problem, and told them I could fix it. I figured a quick upgrade and the problem would be solved.

4 hours later.

So it turns out the Firefox 3.5 has a display issue which is trigger when using version 2 of swfobject. After reading many forums complaining about this or similar problems, I finally found two potential answers to the problem. See comments 6, 33, & 37 at url http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/issues/detail?id=327

After using the code generator at
http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/swfobject/generator/index.html

I added the following code to the javascript in the header of the html page:

swfobject.switchOffAutoHideShow();  /*line added to help fix firefox issue*/
swfobject.embedSWF("example.swf", "flashContent", "100%", "100%", "8.0.0", "expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes);

and added the following html tag to the body of the page:

<div id="wrapper"> generated flash content html code </div>

CSS code must also be added to this page for the code to work with Firefox 3.5. I put the code in a linked css file, but it can be placed within the generated code if desired:

html, body, div#wrapper {
border: none;
height: 100%;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
width: 100%;
}
div#wrapper {
background: none;
}
body {
border: 0px; /* IE MUST have a border set for slideshow to work */
}

the div#wrapper tag and corresponding css make sure that the area of the content block in which the flash file is inserted is not zero. This is necessary when using percentages to set the height and width of the flash object.