GoogleSuggest on PlayStationPortable

Web developers fear the PSP … and with good reason. The NetFront browser is well, how do I put this… “in need of improvements” to the point where it feels intentionally crippled.

Point in case: The support for iFrames. It’s surprisingly good, but for some reason you can’t change an iFrame’s content by setting the src Attribute. One might thing that this is because iFrames are not dynamic, but alas: No.

The reason why setting the src Attribute doesn’t work is because it’s been stripped of its setter which usually causes the document to change. The functionality is still there, you just have to address it differently:

window.frames[0].document.location.replace(newUrl);

What we do here is use the legacy frames API to dive down into the iframe’s content, then do a location.replace inside and voilĂ .

The net effect is that we can now do AJAX… well kind off: we can load different documents and if these reside on the same domain as the host document, we can let these documents trigger callbacks in our code to deliver data.

This for example, wraps GoogleSuggest in such a callback:

http://www.tapper-ware.net/devel/js/JS-PSPKeyboard/suggestEcho.php?q=moz

Add a few form elements, and you’ve got GoogleSuggest on the PSP (it’s not pretty yet, but it works). Note that this works, but won’t look good on a PC as font sizes are nonsensical and are meant to force the PSP browser to either use the big or the small font.

http://www.tapper-ware.net/devel/js/JS-PSPKeyboard/

Firefox with Direct2D: Speed you can feel

Firefox recently got hardware acceleration in its nightly builds via Vista’s and Win7’s Direct2D acceleration. And with the Layers project promising hardware acceleration across all platforms soon (as well as IE9 also providing hardware acceleration via Direct2D) for the first time there’s a reasonable chance that we will have good performance on all platforms, even default Windows systems with Internet Explorer.

When a Direct2D supporting version of Firefox was first released last year I wrote a stupid little stresstest to see how much performance could be gained and I eventually compiled it into a video. It really does nothing but scale and rotate a bunch of image elements, but apparently the bright colors make people excited.

http://www.tapper-ware.net/stable/web.dom.stresstest.transform/

You can see it running side-by-side in recent versions of Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox with and without Direct2D here: