Having taken the plunge a couple of months back by removing anything ‘Windows’ from my desk and replacing it with a shiny new Apple iMac, I had one problem to resolve. I could no longer test any of my code in Internet Explorer.

Until that is, a few days back when I installed Parallels Desktop for Mac which allows me to run a virtual machine inside my iMac, in this case, running Windows XP. I have always been a little suspicious of VM technology but when you encounter a piece of software that does exactly what it says on the box, does it effortlessly, flawlessly and you actually witness XP screaming along faster than my old Dell ever made it happen, then it is easy to be convinced. One click of the mouse and I am in Windows. Another click of the mouse and I am back in OSX. This thing is just fantastic. And did I mention fast?

The first thing I did having IE6 to play with, is to make some long overdue adjustments to the CSS for this site as it didn’t play well on IE. I’ve resolved all of the issues except for the lack of background colour in the sidebar. It’s still looks like shit in IE but it has improved.

The next thing I did was overhaul my WordPress Admin Drop Down Menu plugins. They were overdue for a CSS cleanup and a little optimisation and I have taken this re-working to add a few things and make them generally more attractive. I have updated all three and if you use them, and are happy with them, then there is no great need to grab them. But I think they all look a bit cleaner with slightly altered colour arrangements, tighter fit and the inclusion of small icons to visually aid which items are core and which are plugins. You can download them, should you want one, here at my plugins page.

The bad news is that I have also now tried out, for the first time, IE7. It doesn’t fix the problem I have with my site – everything just looks the same, in other words (as I said above) like shit. And the drop down menus don’t behave properly either. This is a shame as I, like everyone else, was really hoping that with IE7 we could stop having two versions of everything but unless before release a lot more work gets done on it that dream will fade away fast.