Monthly Archives: October 2006

Flash Switcher Extension for Firefox

Alessandro posted a cool extension for Firefox that allows a developer to swap out different versions of the Adobe Flash Player without installers or browser restarts. It’s a great tool for testing player compatibility, and you’ll be able to see instantly if your Flash version-checking script works correctly. Best of all, it comes with every player all the way back to Flash 2! How’s that for overkill? 😉

After I installed the extension, I immediately added the Flash 9 debug player to the list. Until now, I specifically ran the release player on Firefox and the debug player in IE. I didn’t want to limit my performance when checking out the cool AS3 experiments everyone has been making. Now, I can easily switch to debug mode to catch bugs when I’m working on my own cool experiments.

By the way, if you’re looking for something a little more arcane (I always a found it little difficult to use), you might want to check out Flash Plugin Switcher. It works for both IE and Firefox.

A new direction for me, and Flex developers needed!

On December 4, I will be joining Flash Platform team at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, CA. It should be an extremely exciting opportunity where I’ll get to influence the direction Yahoo! takes with Flash technology, and the team hopes to release some useful components and other code to benefit the whole Flash community. Stay tuned for more on that front.

As a result, my current employer, Business Objects needs a couple of talented Flex 2 developers ASAP to fill my shoes and further expand their component development team for Crystal Xcelsius in San Diego, CA. Xcelsius is a pretty cool application that lets business users create rich dashboards and presentations with Flash components, Excel spreadsheets, and other data sources. Ideally, you should be familiar with Adobe Flex 2, MXML, Actionscript 3, and you should have a strong understanding of the architecture behind the Flex framework and the creation of custom components. Please let me know if you’re interested in learning more about these positions.

MAX, CSS Reboot, etc.

I’ll be heading out for MAX in a couple hours. It’s my first MAX and my first trip to Vegas. In other words, a kick-ass good time! I’ll be at a bunch of Flex, Apollo, and other random sessions, so be on the lookout for me. Brown hair, black plastic glasses, and I’ll have my IFBIN-branded bag at my side. You may see me hanging out with with Flash rockstars like Jesse Warden or at the MAXUP unconference put together by Ted Patrick. Maybe you’ll catch me developing a cool project in some dark corner.

In other news, what’s up with the CSS Reboot? It has had virtually zero content for some time now, and the rebooters page gives a nice MySQL error. I’m unimpressed. I didn’t finish a new design for my blog, so it doesn’t bother me too much. Today, I found the Standards Reboot website. It seems to have some decent sponsors, so check it out if you want to reboot on November 1st. I have a lot of cool ideas to spruce up this old place, but I just didn’t have time to put them all together. I’ve barely found time to try out my new Nintendo DS because my day job, a little freelancing, and other top secret projects have kept my free time near zero.

Note to self: Write funnier code.

Google Code Search is pretty cool. Certainly, you’ll discover some oddities and troubling security issues, but I imagine that this might be helpful to a lot of folks looking for some quick fixes. I like that results will show the type of license if Google’s crawler can find it.

A funny query that someone on Slashdot pointed out makes me want to refactor some of my Actionscript code:

private static const POPE_IS_CATHOLIC:Boolean = true;

public function doSomething():void
{
	while(POPE_IS_CATHOLIC)
	{
		//do something
	}
}

It will be interesting to see if this and other code search engines help to discover GPL and other license violations. Obviously the code has to be accessible to the public for the crawler to find it, but I imagine that it’s still a useful tool in that realm.

Flex 2 UITextFields don't allow percentage dimensions

FYI, the documentation doesn’t say anything about it, but the percentWidth and percentHeight properties don’t work on UITextField instances in Flex 2. Here’s the spartan implementation of the percentWidth property:

/**
 *  @copy mx.core.UIComponent#percentWidth
 */
public function get percentWidth():Number
{
	return NaN;
}

/**
 *  @private
 */
public function set percentWidth(value:Number):void
{
}

The documentation states that these properties may be set to values from 0 to 100. I’ve submitted a bug report, but I thought I’d send out a warning.

I guess it’s time for a little subclassing. I’ve been having a lot of frustration with text-based components in Flex. Labels can only be a single line. UITextField seems to be the best bet for multiline text because the Text component is a horrible pain in the rear that doesn’t seem to like word-wrapping. Flex team developers, if you’re listening, I want better text-based components!