Background Music for Firefox

To play a background sound in IE is simple, just 1 line of html below will do:

<bgsound src="mysong.wav" autostart="true" loop="-1"/>

Unfortunately, this doesn't work in Firefox. For Firefox, normally embed tag is use:

<embed src="mysong.wav" autostart="true" loop="true"/>

This will work if the user have QuickTime player installed. The drawback of this method is user can see the player in your page.

Here is the little trick, just add hidden="true", and the player will be hidden.

<embed src="mysong.wav" autostart="true" loop="true" hidden="true"/>

Now you just need to detect user-agent, and determine to use <bgsound> or <embed> to play your background sound.

GoogleTalk Gadget

After integrate GoogleTalk into GMail, Google had take another step by launch a gadget for the Google Personal Homepage (Google IG).

The most significant improvement from the embedded in GMail version is that the voice alert feature. This is essential for a web based instant messenger.

In this gadget, new chat windows is open in new tab. I prefer this instead of open a popup. (This is because in office I am not sure whether anyone behind my shoulder watching my screen :P)

One thing I don't like about this gadget is that I cant copy chat log from the conversation windows. If this is enhance then it will make itself a better product.

Technorati Tags: GoogleTalk

Goodbye, Google SOAP Search API

It is a bit sad to hear that Google had deprecate their SOAP Search API. It remind me of a project during my time in collleague that utilised Google SOAP API for building a meta search engine.

Since Google is so strong, people start wondering will this be a signal of the end of SOAP. Let see how things will go in coming years.

Stupid Idea that Works

I believe most of the developers had experience that sometime complicated trouble can be solve by a simple implemetation that sound stupid. Although I feel it is a stupid idea, but it simply works.

After reading this blog post from Techcrunch, it prove again stupid idea is more than stupid, especailly when it works.