Starting with Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” (and continuing with 10.8 “Mountain Lion”), browsers based on Webkit often do not display scrollbars on elements such as divs that are overflowing. This is a “feature”, and there is a way to disable it.

The quick answer:
Use the psudo element -webkit-scrollbar  and set -webkit-appearance: none;

Sample:

<div class=”example”>
Content<br />
Goes<br />
Here
</div>

.example::-webkit-scrollbar {
-webkit-appearance: none;
}

Background:
I’ll try to walk the fine line between theorizing what Apple is thinking and what they have done. On Macs that don’t have a normal mouse (eg one with a scroll wheel), you won’t see scrollbars by default. Plug a mouse in, and instantly you’ll see your windows adapt and show scrollbars. Unplug it, and they go away.

Scroll bars will display when you scroll using, for example, the trackpad on a laptop. Essentially devices that “scroll” get scroll bars. And devices that provide more of a “swipe” don’t get scroll bars.

I’ve used TeamViewer in the past, and wanted to use it again. I launched it and was prompted to update, so I did. After installing version 7.0.11515 I used TeamViewer successfully and then the next day it wouldn’t work anymore.

“Access to the TeamViewer server has been denied!”

A dialog with that message would pop up over and over again. No amount of clicking “okay” would help. I kept thinking my password was being rejected, but it wasn’t.

What’s the problem? TeamViewer looks at your system’s serial number and tries to determine if it’s valid or not. If the app thinks it’s an invalid serial number, it will prompt that dialog, forever.

This can occur several different ways. For example, if you have been tweaking your Mac, you might have accidentally changed your serial number or erased it. It also happens if you’re running your own custom install of OS X, perhaps on PC hardware (aka a “hackintosh”.) Apps such as MultiBeast help one configure a hackintosh, but don’t provide a valid serial number. And to be clear, the number doesn’t have to come from Apple, it just has to follow a specific pattern.

What’s the solution? Get a valid serial number. How? You can use an app such as Lizard to generate a valid serial number. However, if you run this and apply it, it just might overwrite some other changes that it shouldn’t. So be prepared to fix your install if you go this route. For example, you might:

1. Make a backup of  the /Extra/smbios.plist file
2. Run Lizard
3. Copy the generated serial number into your backup of the smbios.plist file
4. Then replace the newly created smbios.plist file with your backup

There’s also another option. Others have also run into this issue and there’s a thread on InsanelyMac where a user has posted a copy of a smbios.plist file. You could grab the serial number out of it and use it, rather than using Lizard.

Recently I was working on a fairly large web project and we were dealing with some data grids that were very difficult to deal with. I browsed through the site’s analytics to see that IE7 usage had dropped below 5%, and after some discussions with some stakeholders, that was low enough to drop support for it.

Woot!

This allowed us to use CSS tables, which really helped us handle the data which needed to be displayed.

I’m really pleasantly surprised at how quickly IE7 usage has dropped off on some sites. Sadly, I still have to deal with IE8 shortcomings but they’re not as bad. I’m still disappointed in IE9 and sadly Microsoft is still failing to compete with other browsers with at least the IE10 preview. Hopefully they step up their game for the release version.

For your own sites, make sure you check our own data. Sometimes there are strong needs to still support IE7, and even IE6. But at least for some sites, the old versions of IE are going away faster than they used to.

One would think after all these years encoding video for web playback would actually be more simple than it was in the 90′s. Sadly, it’s more complex than ever. Even though Google will be removing H.264 support in Chrome, it does still support H.264. So for now it can be used for both iOS and Android apps.

That said, there are many ways to encode H.264 video. Even if you use traditional encoding methods and stick to common tools like QuickTime 7 Pro, Adobe Media Encoder, Compressor… you will quickly notice creating one H.264 file that works in both iOS and Android is not very easy.

If you use QuickTime X and export for the iPhone – something that seems obvious – the file extension will end in .m4v which may cause playback issues in web browsers and non-iOS devices.

The solution?

Go ahead and use that Save As… iPhone option from QuickTime X. Then change the file extension to .mp4.

If you need something to help you embed the video in a webpage and help with delivering the right format to the right browser (egg Ogg to Firefox and Flash to IE8), give VideoJS a try.

Support forums are nothing new. They exist for all sorts of projects, including just about every WordPress plugin. 99.9% of the time they are “users helping users” with the occasional response from a developer.

That’s how WooThemes handled their forum, until recently. Although their official responses were fairly common, users could still help users. Now WooThemes has overhauled their backend (dashboard), along with their support forum.

Users can no longer help users.

Why? Because WooThemes saw people were often posting to resolved threads trying to get answers. This is really common on forums. In fact, many forums will ban you if you start a new thread instead of reviving a recent one on the same topic. WooThemes thinks this doesn’t work well for them. (They also mentioned sometimes posts were creating confusion.)

WooThemes has gone and done two thing in opposition to the status quo. And you know what? It’s for the better.

Better WordPress Theme Support

The reason WooThemes has done this is because they want each and every forum question to get an official response. I don’t know of a single other product support forum that does this. Not even big companies like Intel offer this sort of support.

There are quite a few companies that promise quick response times from customer support. Really those are quite pointless. Often they’re canned responses that are sent simply to get back to you quickly. My least favorite are the one that ask you information you just provided them with like “What browser are you using?” And you already told them “Chrome 15.0.874.15, extensions off, cache flushed.”

WooThemes does things differently. Their responses are always useful. Sometimes they remind users they need more info, but sometimes that’s needed. They offer simply awesome support and not only that, but now they’ve streamlined it as well.

In the end my only complaint is that I can no longer give them a hand by answering questions or help confirm issues.