The worst part about writing a book (which just arrived today – no, this is NOT an April Fools joke), is the fact that print is so damned permanent. And once the chapter leaves your word processor and heads off into editorial production land, there is no easy way to “fix” a mistake or update a topic. And just this very thing happened with the project in Chapter 6 of the book.

In that chapter, Stephanie and I wrote about using the Spry Framework for Ajax to create an art gallery. In approaching the project, we chose to use the “new” Sliding Panels widget which was added in the 1.6 release of Spry. Unfortunately, what I didn’t “notice” during the writing of the chapter was that the panel sort of stuttered when clicking upon the panel navigation the first time after the page load. Apparently this is something that others have seen as well, because I was recently asked about that very problem in an online seminar that Stephanie was presenting and in which I was frantically answering questions in the chat window. So, there’s the issue and, more importantly, here’s the fix. (more…)