Archive for July, 2006

My design for Dreamweaver’s Quick Tag Editor feature

Published on July 24, 2006 in General. 4 Comments

Quick Tag Editor redesign for Dreamweaver

I'm working in Dreamweaver quite a bit these days as I write the Quick Start tutorials for Flex 2 and there's one feature in particular that I keep wishing worked differently: the Quick Tag Editor.

Since I'm mainly writing content, I spend most of my time in the design view but sometimes I do have to switch to code view to make changes (especially as Dreamweaver randomly has trouble in changing the format of certain tags in design view -- for example, from H2 to Paragraph formatting.) If it's a small change, I prefer to use the Quick Tag Editor which you currently have to enable by right-clicking the tag in the toolbar above the Property Inspector and selecting Quick Tag Editor... from the context menu. Every time I use it, I wish that the Quick Tag Editor just displayed by default in that toolbar. It would save me two clicks and I could spend nearly all my time in design view.

The picture, above, shows my redesign of the feature. If anyone from the Dreamweaver team is listening, please consider this as an enhancement request! :)

I might as well air my two other pet peeves while I'm at it. These are just bug reports, really:

  1. Selecting some text and then hitting the context menu key on my keyboard under Windows brings up the context menu but loses my selection. You can't imagine how many times I've been caught out by this one as it's something I usually do without even thinking.
  2. Regular text editing shortcuts do not work in text boxes in the Property Inspector. Pressing Ctrl+A when you're in the Link text box, for example, doesn't select all the text in the Link text box. It instead selects all the text in the currently open document. The same focus issue occurs when using Shift+Ctrl+Arrow keys to select whole words to either side of the cursor.

Mac: No audio in Flash? Trash your preferences!

Published on July 22, 2006 in General. 17 Comments

I was trying to play a YouTube video on a Mac and wasn't getting any sound. After Googling around, I found that I wasn't the only one running into this problem and that the solution is to trash your Flash Player preferences under the ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia folder.

[Update] After trashing preferences, the video was still stuttering. Apparently the problem was with the Flip4Mac WMV Internet plug-in. The solution was to disable it from System Preferences.

The Adventures of B.Violet

Published on July 19, 2006 in Brighton and Music. 4 Comments

The Adventures of B.VioletI love Brighton. No, it's not because two very hot chicks just walked in front of my house, hand-in-hand. (OK, so I'm not compaining) I just love the vibe of this town; the people.

Case in point: I went down to the coffee shop at Borders to do a little work and ended up talking to B. (Finally, someone else who wants a pair of Heelys!) Of course, B.'s not her real name but I couldn't see her name on her band's MySpace page so I'm thinking maybe it's a mystery thing and I shouldn't ruin it. Anyway, so B. has a band and they do electric hip-hop (or "electric-ironica", according to their band's website.)

Check out her songs. "Polaroid" is the best thing I've heard in a while.

I can't help thinking how cool it would be to have them perform at Flash on the Beach. John, you listening? :)

Watch Flash Player 9 penetration soar thanks to MySpace!

Published on July 19, 2006 in Flash. 26 Comments

In response to last week's MySpace hack, which used a redirect from Flash to hijack people's pages, MySpace recently announced that they will be upgrading all Flash widgets to Flash Player 9. The security updates in Flash Player 9 apparently prevent this sort of attack.

A message regarding the upgrade was sent from Tom to all MySpace accounts and reads as follows:

hey folks - we are moving myspace music players and video players to flash 9.0. flash 9 has security fixes so that people can't mess with you on myspace. if your 'about me' got screwed up this weekend, you could have been safe if you had flash 9 installed. here's an easy way to install it, go watch this dashboard video i posted last week. if you don't like dashboard, just watch any video in our video section, and you'll be prompted to install flash 9.

(It appears that having a couple of million in the bank doesn't necessarily mean that you know grammar and punctuation rules.)

Given the huge audience that MySpace has, I predict that we will be seeing a spike in Flash Player 9 adoption in the coming days.

Do not send DVDs or CDs via FedEx in the UK

Published on July 13, 2006 in General. 8 Comments

The MPAA and their friends have reportedly trained dogs to sniff out bags or packages that contain CDs or DVDs. Apparently, these dogs are being used as we speak at Standsted airport, in the UK, to sniff packages being sent by FedEx.

For the time being, Lucky and Flo are working at a FedEx shipping center at Stansted Airport where they are sniffing packages that are shipped around the world. Trainers say the dogs have been notifying customs agents of packages with discs in them. The packages have been opened but so far no pirated movies have been found.

What sick group of people trains dogs so they can victimize people that buy their products? These people are nuts. I'd have to insane to support their business model.

Also, unless you're all right with having your package opened, I guess you should not send DVDs or CDs via FedEx in the UK.

Not procedural coding but spiking

Published on July 13, 2006 in Development Process, Flash and eXtreme Programming (XP). 4 Comments

Spikes aren't painful at all... in the software world!Intoxo Poxed has a post on procedural coding in AS3 in which the author states:

OOP is swell and all, but I feel procedural coding still has its place. This is particularly true when you’re not entirely sure what you’re about to make, or when you have a problem to which you haven’t yet worked out a full solution but are ready to stab at it one bite at a time.

The post goes on to give an example of a procedural bit of code that creates shapes with the Drawing API.

Although the author calls it "procedural coding", and although the example does contain procedural code, there is a better name for the process that the author is describing here. In eXtreme Programming (XP), we call it spiking.

Spiking refers to creating a throw-away experiment during development. Spiking is useful both at the very beginning of a project, where there may be technical issues that you are not sure exactly how to handle and throughout the lifetime of the project. It becomes especially useful as a project grows and where experimenting within the actual codebase becomes slow enough to be deemed impractical.

Even before I knew the term, I would always start a new FLA and do a quick test whenever there was something I wasn't sure of when developing a Flash application. Although I call them throwaways, I do keep these experiments in a separate folder and don't really throw them away. They can sometimes be useful to come back to later.

If you don't already do it, I highly recommend adding spiking to your development process. Just remember that the spikes are for you, not for the client or your boss or to impress your girlfriend with (OK, you may use them to impress your girlfriend but I wouldn't bet your whole strategy on it!)

Finally, on a related note, you should check out Keith Peters' Brevity as it is the perfect environment in which to spike out visual algorithms. If you haven't heard of it yet, Brevity is basically Processing for Flash.

Photo credit: Copyright sh0dan. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Need an advanced Flash/Flex developer? Mike’s available!

Published on July 11, 2006 in General. 11 Comments

I just read that the company Mike Britton was working for just fired their entire staff. I haven't met Mike in real life but I do know him from the Arp mailing list, where he is very active. He's also built his blog using Arp and is now reworking it in Flex 2 and ActionScript 3. One of my main criteria when hiring developers is how active they are in the community and how passionate they are about what they do. Mike appears to have those bases covered.

If you're looking for a Flash/Flex developer with advanced ActionScript knowledge and with experience in pattern-based development, take a look at Mike's resume (direct PDF link) and get in touch with him.

New “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads

Published on July 11, 2006 in General. 10 Comments

You need the Flash Player to view this video.

ROTFL -- these aren't the official ones! :)

Love to heel

Published on July 10, 2006 in General. 25 Comments

Oooh what a feeeeling... Aral on his Heelys

My latest obsession is a shoe. Not just any shoe, but a Heelys. On paper, it's a shoe with a wheel in its heel. In practice, it's the most fun I've had since I first learned to skateboard!

In fact, rolling on Heelys is very much like skateboarding. Your feet become the skateboard almost. It's difficult to explain but I had no trouble whatsoever picking it up (after a ten-year-old in the skate shop gave me a few initial pointers!) The pictures, above, were taken down at the beach over the weekend and I was practicing switching from one foot to the other (I picked that up very quickly too -- I am soooo loving this!)

Aral's Heelys: Flash!

To give you an idea how quickly you can pick it up (especially if you skate), I went from almost falling on my ass to jumping off small pavements and stepping onto pavements from the road in about an hour or so of continuous use over two days. Learning to switch feet took about another half-hour and I'm still not as confident starting out with my left leg in front but I can switch back and forth between the two quite easily.

What I love most about Heelys is that you don't have to carry them around like a skateboard or take them off to walk like you do with inline skates. I can walk, roll, go back to walking, etc. (Warning: You must be comfortable with attracting attention and talking to strangers because this happens *a lot* when you're wearing these! Get ready for puzzled looks and amazed faces!) It's also a great workout. Oh yeah, and guess what my model is called... yep, you guessed it, Flash!

If you've seen them around and thought they were just for little kids, think again. This big kid loves them too! :)

What’s wrong with Adobe Max? A speaker’s perspective.

Published on July 10, 2006 in General. 41 Comments

I read on Ben's blog that registration for the Adobe Max 2006 conference is now open. I was approached earlier this year to give a talk at Max on Flex and PHP -- a topic that I would have loved to cover, especially considering that Arp now has migration classes to handle AMF0 via the open source AMFPHP remoting gateway. However, I had to sadly turn Adobe down. Why? Because Adobe Max has a policy of not paying for speaker's travel expenses or accomodation for the event. Instead, as a thank-you, speakers receive free entrace to the conference. That's a good thing as otherwise they would have to pay at the door so they could enter to present their sessions.

I don't know about you, but this is not what I expect from a professional conference and this is not an industry norm when you look at other professional conferences like FlashForward, FITC, Spark Europe, Multi-Mania and Flash on the Beach. The problem is not that I cannot afford to pay for a flight to the US or for a few nights accomodation at the Venetian (a lovely hotel that Microsoft kindly put us up in for Mix '06 earlier this year and one that I will definitely be visiting again in any case.) It's just that I refuse to do so as a matter of principle. Here's why:

People attend conferences primarily to listen to the sessions given by the speakers who present there. If it wasn't for the speakers, there wouldn't be a conference. This being the case, it gets my goat when a conference like Max charges over $1,000 a ticket for entrance to the event and then is too cheap to pay the expenses of their speakers. This is the least I would expect as a show of respect for the time and effort speakers put into presenting at an event. And I believe that this is the least that any speaker should expect. Conferences that make a profit off of the backs of speakers without meeting this minimum standard should not be rewarded for their exploitative policies. (The other conference that comes to mind that doesn't pay speaker's expenses is WebDU.) If nothing else, it's not fair to other conferences that do respect their speakers.

The wide discrepancy in how various conferences treat their speakers can be seen if you look at the upcoming Flash on the Beach conference that John Davey is organizing here in Brighton. Beyond paying for speaker's expenses, John is actually considering alternative models of profit sharing for the conference.

I need to stress again that this is not a monetary issue at all. In fact, anyone who knows me knows that I donate a very large portion of my time and quite a sizable amount of resources to my various community projects, including the London MMUG and OSFlash. It all comes down to whether or not conferences respect the time and effort of their speakers. In my book, charging over $1,000 for a ticket and then not paying for the expenses of your speakers is just plain wrong.

I hope Adobe Max will, in the future, join the ranks of other professional conferences like FlashForward, FITC, Spark Europe, Multi-Mania and Flash on the Beach -- all of which are organized by groups and individuals that have far less in terms of resources than Adobe does and yet, apparently, have a far greater respect for their speakers.

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