Archive for December, 2006

sIFR 3b1: The Mo’ Betta Beta

posted December 18th, 2006, 118 comments, tagged ,

sIFR 3 Revision 278 has been released. Please upgrade to sIFR 3 Revision 278.

Just in time for Christmas, I present you a new sIFR release! It’s been a long time coming but with this release I feel sIFR 3 is ready for widespread deployment. If you’re unfamiliar with sIFR, the obligatory introduction paragraph goes like this:

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and Flash, which renders the font. It degrades gracefully if Flash is not present.

Compared to sIFR 2 the new version is radically different. Backwards compatibility has been broken, but that’s okay since deployment is now ridiculously easy. There’s great control over how the text is rendered inside the Flash movie: you can easily use bold and italics together, or use different colors. There’s support for leading, kerning and opacity, filters, blend modes and anti-aliasing.

The biggest changes from the alpha release are:

  • No more Flash 7 support. This led to a simplification of the code base and made sIFR easier to deploy.
  • No more compatibility mode. Supported browsers are Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 1.0+, Safari 2.0+, Opera 8+ and Konqueror 3.5.6 (due in Januari) .
  • Improved Flash detection.
  • Improved rendering in Internet Explorer.
  • Firefox and Internet Explorer will now replace the elements before the page has finished loading. No need to put JavaScript inside the body tag.
  • Fine-grained tuning of the text position inside the Flash movie.
  • Callback handlers to modify the content being replaced, the CSS, and the end result.
  • Support for text transformation, including capitalize.
  • Domain validation on the client side, useful for example to stop sIFR from running when the page is being translated by Google Translator.
  • Various bug fixes.

Documentation has improved, too. There’s now a simple introduction tutorial and the configuration settings and methods are properly documented. No doubt this still needs work, and that’s exactly why the documentation takes the form of a wiki. If you see improvements, feel free to make them.

As I said before, I really feel this version is fit for widespread use. However, it’s still a beta so please keep track of developments, for example by subscribing to the mailing list. If you’re using sIFR please consider making a donation, especially if you’re a company. Here’s a nice button to click:

sIFR 3 is open source and licensed under the CC-GNU LGPL. Check out the demo and go download it! If you want to keep track of newer developments, check out the nightlies. Anything from revision 199 is new. And finally, many, many thanks to everybody who filed bug reports, helped testing, responded on the mailing list, improved documentation, spread the word and made a donation.

sIFR 3 Revision 278 has been released. Please upgrade to sIFR 3 Revision 278.