Posts Tagged ‘sIFR’

Minor Updates to Naque

Monday, March 10th, 2014

We don’t often post about Naque, the site with a nack for creating unique names and words. So, even though today’s updates are relatively modest, it’s a good time to post about it.

What’s changed? The old Flash powered fonts, which broke a long time ago, are finally replaced with Google powered fonts. And we’ve decided to centre the site in the web browser – as screens have gotten much wider over the years, the site has started to feel lopsided, at least to us.

It’s crazy, Naque is over 10 years old now! And crazier still, hundreds of people use it every day!

sIFR (and Flash) is dead. Long live sIFR (and Flash)!

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

It’s hard to believe, but only a few years ago I eagerly looked for excuses to use Adobe Flash to make a website just a bit more interactive or fluid. Now, I have started the process of purging Flash from every site that we operate, and manage for clients. What changed?

iOS.

It’s truly astounding how much web browsing is done on iPhones and iPads where Flash does not exist (Flash is also on the outs in the Android world). One of our clients has the majority of their web traffic driven by their weekly email newsletter – and I’ve seen the numbers, a very large fraction of people read their email on their phones and tablets. Today, it is critical that your website does not depend on Flash. It’s also a good idea to slowly remove Flash from non-critical parts of your website too.

Which leads to today’s subject. On many of Perceptus’ websites we use sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, which 5 or 8 years ago, was a great way to use nicer fonts on your website for headers. sIFR uses Flash. For some reason the most recent Google Chrome web browser broke some, but not all, of the sIFR headlines on print-bingo.com, our popular bingo card generator. It might be related to a missing  attribute or something relatively minor. But, rather than debug it, it was time to move to Javascript based fonts. On print-bingo.com, we’re now using Google Web Fonts.

Bye bye sIFR. You were a good thing for your day.