Facelift and new buttons

Before leaving for the midsummer night's long weekend in the countryside (we had friday off from work in Finland) I did a little facelift for the main map view. After a little testing and bug fixing during sunday I'm installing this upgrade on the production servers.

I added a full screen mode (well, almost...) - click on the new "collapse" button in the top right corner to hide the menu bar. Thanks to Kauto (OH2LFM) and others for requesting this one. The new button is sometimes slightly misplaced when running MSIE6 - please upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 to get rid of that IE6 rendering bug.

I also added 'search' buttons for the callsign and address lookup input fields. They should enable Tony (VE3TK) and others to use aprs.fi on the Nintendo Wii (lacking an 'enter' key on the virtual keyboard), it'll probably help other embedded devices too. They also fix the problem of quick typists - pressing the (real) 'enter' key while the last key used in the callsign entry was still depressed failed to trigger the form submission, and you needed to press enter again. I'll add submit buttons on the rest of the forms later! Usability before coolness!

The facelift part consisted of removing the unnecessary "fieldset" box around the menu bar and adding a background image with a nice blue colour blend. Thanks to Gimp for help with the icon and background graphics!

I also added a workaround for a bug in the latest Google Maps API code, which partially broke address search. A javascript error broke the map view after about half of the address searches.

Firefox 3 was released last week, and it still seems to contain the bug which makes it break with aprs.fi every now and then. Less often, but still. Not recommended.

aprs.fi presentation webcast tomorrow at 0700 UTC

I'm giving a presentation on aprs.fi tomorrow morning at the 30th Nordic VHF/UHF/SHF-meeting in Sappee, Finland. The presentations are broadcasted live on the Internet and on the 1.2 GHz ATV repeaters in Helsinki and Tampere.

My presentation will be on tomorrow morning, 14th of June, at 0700 UTC (10 AM local time).

Sorry for the late notice!

Greek aprs.fi

Costas (SW2HUI) has contributed a complete translation of aprs.fi in Greek. ελληνική γλώσσα looks beautiful and reminds me of a few very nice holiday trips, too. Thank you, Costas!