I've got a few bugs/issues to document, so keep an eye on Known bugs in Sidebar RTM over on AeroXperience.  The first four were discovered last year, the rest are recent, some from fellow developers:

I've not spent any time checking these, or trying to create repros, so workarounds are unknown at the moment.

1. <g:text> quality.  g:text can produce very bad aliasing
2. <g:image/g:background>.softEdge doesn't work on an image at 45 degrees
3. Mouse events don't work on pixels where the opacity is <100%
4. Magenta in GIF's becomes transparent
5. [James Ross] System.Shell.Item.isFile is unusable
6. [David E. Craig] Changing the Settings page via location.replace(<filename>) causes the page to go blank
7. Desktop DPI affects Gadget text sizes (as mentioned in a previous article)
8. Overlaying <g:background> where opacity has been set <100%, with an image containing transparent pixels, causes the whole image to gain the <g:background> opacity when the Gadget loses focus (variation on bug#32)

An issue which I've overlooked in Gadgets until recently. What happens to the them when the Font DPI is changed from the default setting?

If the user changes the DPI from 96 to 120, all fonts become larger and consequently Gadget that have text often look a mess.

The workaround is actually quite simple. Firstly you need to specify the default font size, to ensure it's the same no matter what the DPI setting is. You can do this by adding an entry to your main Gadget, Settings and Flyout HTML files. This needs to be placed at the top of your STYLE section or CSS file:

* {font-size:12px;}

Secondly, all explicit font-size entries must be specified in px as above. Unlike other font units px is not linked to DPI size.


Another font issue in Gadgets is the inconsistent default font styles. INPUT and SELECT entries default to "Arial", body text, DIV's etc default to "Tahoma". If you want you Gadget to look consistent, specify the default font-family as well as the default size:

* {font-size:12px; font-family:Segoe UI;}