[sIFR3-announce] sIFR 3 Beta 2: Fire Cracker

[Mark Wubben]

As years end nears, neighbourhood kids are playing with fireworks  
around the house. A nice homage to the second beta of sIFR 3 I’d like  
to imagine. Feature wise sIFR 3 is now complete, and I think it’s  
gotten pretty awesome. If you’re trying to decide between sIFR 2 and  
sIFR 3, sIFR 3 is definitely the better choice.

What’s new?

Here are the major changes since the last beta:

     * The Flash movie and the JavaScript must be of the same version.
     * Added ratios, which make the loading of the Flash movies less  
jumpy.
     * sIFR does not work when opened straight from the local  
filesystem. You must load sIFR from a web server.
     * sIFR movies no longer steal user input focus.
     * When the Flash movie is opened directly, it shows its revision  
in a bold, italic and normal font.
     * The Flash movie insertion code is equivalent to SWFObject 2.
     * sIFR now supports window resizing.
     * Page zoom in Firefox 3 and IE7 is supported!
     * A workaround has been added for transparent or opaque Flash  
movies in Firefox/Windows, whose ancestor is floated.
     * A workaround has been added for the loss of Flash variables in  
Internet Explorer if the innerHTML of an ancestor of a Flash movie is  
changed.
     * Hover effects tend to get stuck in Flash, added a workaround.
     * Added a custom context menu for links when the hover effect is  
used.
     * In Internet Explorer, the sIFR Flash movies are hidden when the  
page unloads. This works around rendering glitches where the old and  
new movies are briefly shown at the same time.
     * You can specify the font size in pixels, directly from  
sIFR.replace().
     * You can specify different font sizes within the Flash movie,  
and they will be relative to the main font size if you specify them  
with a percentage unit.
     * Added support for bitmap fonts, by rounding the font size to  
the nearest power-of-eight value.
     * You can now force the text to be displayed on one line.
     * You can disable the pointer cursor (the ‘hand’) inside sIFR.
     * Multiple fonts are supported.
     * You can replace the text inside the sIFR Flash movie.
     * You can change some of the CSS that was applied to the Flash  
movie.
     * You can get mouse events from the Flash movie.
     * You can tell sIFR to check if the CSS has been applied to the  
document. This will speed up initialization in Safari and Opera.
     * Opera and Konqueror support has been disabled, because these  
browsers do not support communication between JavaScript and Flash code.

And there have been many, many more minor improvements. Really, this  
version rocks!

Find out more at:

<http://novemberborn.net/sifr3/beta2>

Happy '08!

--
Mark