Yesterday Hetty -my girlfriend- wanted to post some gardenlife photos to our website.
She used Picasa to generate the webpages and asked me to put them online. I clicked on the page to view the photos. The photos came up nicely but when I tried to navigate it was a no-go.
The story behind it is rather sad. This problem is caused by a Non-Security Update for Internet Explorer. It's not because of a bug or a security issue, no it's a workaround for a US-patent on interactive content. The patent is also known as the Eolas patent.
It affects all plug-ins for interactive content in webbrowsers. For now they are concentrating on Internet Explorer, demanding some amount of money but also demanding to stop the distribution of Internet Explorer.
I know some of you are thinking that this would be a good thing but let me remind you this patent also touches your favorite browser.
Currently I'm also working on some patents within our company but when I read about how it can influence the community, I really have second thoughts. Protection of Intelectual Property is one thing but I don't believe the main goal of inventions is to make money. Maybe it's a bit naive of me to think this way but inventions should mainly serve the community.
Well enough of this bla bla let's get pragmatic and try to find a way out of this mess. The Picasa templates from AirtightInteractive, SimpleViewer, PostcardViewer and the latest addition AutoViewer are also victims in this case.
To get Hetty's photo gallery working I googled a bit and found working solutions at PixelMill and at Microsoft. After examining the options I decided to make a function for loading the FlashPlayer object. The script contains only one function and that function does a document.write of the FlashPlayer object.
The script is loaded and the function is called in the index.html file. Not the most beatifull solution but it's a workaround and the photo gallery is working again.
I'm not sure what Felix from AirtightInteractive will do with the bits but for the time being you can download the changed Picasa templates here:
