New Products - Europe and UK last again

Every now and again some great new technology comes along. The new concept Google glasses for instance. If you would like to be a beta tester then please be lucky enough to win the opportunity to buy a part of the development process ($1500) and of course live in America. The glasses look like a product without a market, or at least that is the way that I see Google looking at it. They have taken this existing technology and put it into a pair of glasses. There have been the cameras like the GO Pro doing this for years in the sports arena and mobile phones doing this for everyone else like you and me. I will admit that now cameras are available all the time with me I take more photos.

I have an Novus View-i-Pro Ruby twin camera fitted in my car.It goes everywhere I go in the car recording where I go, what I do and how I drive. Two cameras one on the road and one on me and GPS and acceleration data collection. I am conscious of this and drive better because of it - keeping strictly to the speed limits. It records all those incidents that happen all the time and I suppose that some people would enjoy watching them on You Tube if I had the time to scan through the footage and put it up. How is this different from the Google glasses - I am not really sure apart from the fact you would get an image of what I was looking at rather than being a useful product. This is really a great product - simply install and forget and in the care of an accident - there is the evidence.

It is similar with the announcement new PS4. I have now seen the new controller and like most people I have yet to see what the console looks like. The launch is set for Holiday 2013 and the place - you guessed it USA. I sometimes wonder how big the US market really is - or is it that if they don't get this first they refuse to buy the goods. Why is Europe and the UK sidelined in this way. How about some of the rest of the world.
I sometimes get the feeling, especially when I talk to a few American friends of mine that they don't really know about the rest of the world, which I suppose is rather sad.
I suppose it also relates that although we the Brits and our friends next door will get the goods later than the Americans we will probably do more with it, as we have done with so many other toys that have come and gone.

Artisteer Moodle header image problems with IE8 Solved

The new template creator with Artisteer works really well created custom templates for Moodle . These work really well with IE9 and 10, Chrome and Firefox. Unfortunately my client still uses Windows XP and IE8.  The header doesn't work in IE8 so, I am greeted with a whole host of problems. in the way that the image is displayed. In some cases since this moodle template has a left and a right column  the centre one with all the information disappears. So the problem is no header, and sometimes no content. The template of course works ok in IE9 an Chrome etc.

This is the same website in the same browser but in IE9 mode.
I switch from on ie version to another using F12 an then in the code window clicking on the Browser Mode. This gives a fairly faithful representation of IE8.

It is necessary to change the Standards as well.


So the problem is that in IE 8  The headers display for a second and then disappear,

Solving the problem.

After playing around with this a a few hours the solution is quite simple..

In Artisteer create the template as normal.

Here there is a simple header and a plain background. IE 8 can only cope with plain backgrounds. It cannot render gradients. These need to be done with images.
Using a screen capture program such as snagit, capture the header graphic from Artisteer and then put it back into the background as a centred background. Add a file image to the background. This background image disappears under the current header, but after it is exported it now looks the same in IE8 and IE9