In my talks on user experience, I mention the importance of focus (in the context of user experience being the central focus-point of the development process). It's time to apply the same principle to my life in general. My interests, the technologies I work with, my various projects, and activities have somewhat accumulated to the [...]

If you are using the same icon file in your app.xml file in AIR and embedding it to set it dynamically at runtime (for example if you have several icons that you switch between) then you'll most likely get the following error: Error creating AIR file: YourApp-app.xml(94): error 303: Icon assets/icon.png is missing from the [...]

If you're storing information in the encrypted data store in your AIR app, you'll probably want to nuke that data on occasion while testing. You'll find the app-specific files for your application (on OS X) under: ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Adobe/AIR/ELS/yourApplication Update: As David pointed out in the comments, there's also a reset() method if you want to nuke the ELS [...]

I just dusted off my old Acer TravelMate to play with Songsmith (it doesn't work well under VMWare) and I remembered why I was so happy to switch to my Mac. My Acer developed, among other things, an annoying screen flickering issue before we parted ways. I realized this time around that the flickering only occurs [...]

You're in Germany... no I'm not! Google's country autodetection is borked. Whenever I access the Internet through a T-Mobile WiFi Hotspot in the UK, it thinks that I'm in Germany. I get a lovely German interface for Google services that I don't understand a word of and, here's the worst bit, there's no option for me [...]