Scott Boms

Our October 2006 Back Catalogue

IE Background Image Flicker Fix

Internet Explorer 6 has a lot of “quirks”. Some might call them bugs. Some might trade their soul for all users of said browser to give it up and just move to Firefox, skipping the just-released IE7 entirely. The web design community at large might get to keep more of their hair on their heads if that were the case. Sadly, not much chance of that.

One “bug” is an annoying flickering problem when images are specified as a background on links. The fix has been around for some time but I’ve seen very little mention of it anywhere. I came across it a few weeks back and finally had an opportunity to try it out in a real-world test. And guess what? It bloody well works!

So, here’s what you need to do.

In your site/app/blog/whatever — either encapsulate the bit of code below as a piece of inline Javascript or drop it into a linked JS file and you’re all set. No need to worry about onload handlers and the like. It just works.


// Fix for IE background image flickering
try {
  document.execCommand('BackgroundImageCache', false, true);
}
catch(e) {}

That’s it. No more image flickering. One bug down. Now back to cursing at the others…

And Now a Month Later…

Oh, how time flies when you’re having fun…

So, what’s new? Glad you asked.

The renovations are done. The new Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. office looks great although we’re still not completely done with it yet. Everything turned out really well and we’re exceedingly happy to finally have an end to the dust, piles of 2×4’s and plastic sheets.

The newest Wishingliner seen here is now less than two weeks away. A big congrats to my buds Luke and Mathew on their latest additions.

On the business front, things have been a bit crazy. Work is good. Too much work all at once is also good, but in a painful kind of way.

Toronto Life teaser
Toronto Life redesign teaser

We recently completed some additional work for Toronto Life although it hasn’t gone live yet. We’ve also been working with some new and some old clients on identity design, web application and site designs and redesigns with more on the way.

Some of this work literally just wrapped so it’s still a bit early to really say much, but when it’s time you’ll hear about it. Until then, here’s a bit of a tease.

Wishingline project teaser
Hivelogic identity concepts

The Darns were nominated for a Toronto Independent Music Award for “Best Alternative Act”, but sadly did not win. Maybe next year. And the band is finally celebrating the release of ‘What It All Turns Into’ on November 18th with a big CD release bash in Toronto. Next up — something that hopefully resembles a tour.

There’s also been a few small changes and tweaks made to the site such as the newish homepage graphic, the little availability info on the homepage (also repeated elsewhere through the site), and an upgrade of Movable Type and the newly released phpFlickr 2.0 scripts which use Flickr’s new serialized API. I only had to modify one line of code to update my scripts to work with the new release which was a nice surprise.

That all aside, there’s still a boatload of work piled up and I should probably start in on it now. I’ll try not to let another month slip by…

Canadian Thanksgiving

Today is an official national holiday here in Canada as we celebrate Thanksgiving a bit earlier than the US. As you might expect, the Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. office is closed. We’ll be back online tomorrow morning.

Happy turkey day to all our clients and friends in Canada.

« September 2006November 2006 »