Monday, March 31, 2008

For those writing and deploying AIR applications, you probably dig the most the ability write once and deploy for Mac and PC. You don't need to worry about wrappers and custom APIs per operating system because the player and the wrapper takes care of that for you.

You can do quite a bit with the AIR APIs that are presently available to you, but some would like more hooks, deeper hooks, and you can get some of that with Shu. However, you'll be taking your AIR application and deploying a standalone executable for Mac and/or Windows separately.

I assume the write-once and deploy for both holds up... the wrapper will take care of the extras.

One one hand this is really cool. If you have a specific need and AIR alone presents most of it & you only need a little extra... Shu seems like a perfect fit. You will lose the ability to distribute the application as a .air file though, but you might be distributing the application on CDRom, explicit download per OS, etc. so it wouldn't matter to you.

On the other hand, you'll have to manage two iterations of the application if you choose to support Mac and Windows. Again, this might not be a big deal to you.

What does Shu-Player offer you as a developer? You can read the command list here. You can even use the Shu Extensions API to author and add custom commands if you know some C/C++.

I have zero experience with this product. And its not cheap... £250 for both versions (about $500 US dollars). There is a demo for this. Anyone have any pointers about this product?

Today is Phillip Kerman's birthday.

You may know Phillip from his many books, teaching, presentations, or even from the slew of Why? videos he has produced lately.

Happy Birthday Phillip.

Friday, March 28, 2008

I finally got an Apple TV and after about two minutes of set up, I'm watching Diggnation (HD) from it. Amazing stuff. So easy to use & its crazy to see my picture watching a really old podcast of mine... chaptering included. Added my .Mac gallery easily, etc.

[2.0.1 for Apple TV has been released. I checked just for fun & it found it. No idea what it does yet.]

[Updating... restart. Apple logo. Yellow blinking LED on the front. Black screen with Apple logo. Grey behind the Apple logo now. Progress bar has appeared and is moving. Apple logo is web 2.0... kinda yuck. Restart again. Couple screen blinks (refreshes). Welcome video. Done.]

This thing is mostly easy to use. Text entry isn't very hot, and menus DO NOT WRAP. Not sure why that is, I suppose after user testing some might have found it confusing or something? Text entry isn't exactly fun, but hey... it never really is even on the 360, etc.

Also, for those cool people who know what it means, my birthday cake had these words on it:

"Lord Stanley, Lord Stanley, get me the brandy!"

I hope I didn't jinx anything there.

I like to keep a pretty lean IDE intact, but I ran into Krugle recently and I have found their free code-searching service to be pretty interesting so far. And they support ActionScript and Flex, so that's especially nice. 

I haven't co-authored for a long time, and a lot of the older books I did write for have yet to come close to covering the advances (one of the downsides of sharing royalties with other authors).

However one of them next quarter will actually pay me royalties, as the 4th Q 2007 = $0.00 instead of being in the "red". Even if its just a couple dollars, I'll be happy about it.

Maybe I should dust off the printer and start writing some stuff again... I've learned a TON since the previous endeavors. And the field is pretty wide-open as far as technologies go.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Apple has released a new version of the iPhone SDK, this time including an updated Interface Builder for use with the SDK.

Now, I can only hope that there is an updater and not the full download like there was last time, that was pretty brutal since I already have XCode installed. I did before the original SDK too...

So how many XCodes do I need to download?

It's incredible. The social aspects of it are what are most impressive. The tools are okay... just the bare bones, but I think its fine for most. Now, for one of my public albums, I did the copy link thing and when I navigate to it in Firefox 3b4 I get this:

Secure Connection Failed
edolecki.photoshop.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for www.photoshop.com. (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

Someone needs to fix that up on Adobe's end I think (could be wrong).

Now, Opera also got 99/100 after reporting it scored 100/100 - but that's close enough to call a tie. What makes all these nightly WebKit builds interesting is how/when/if Adobe rolls these improved WebKit drops into AIR. Will there be some kind of AIR updater coming that incorporates all the hard work done in the trunk branch, and merged into Adobe's branch? How does the whole WebKit scenario play out?

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Since we have the powerful WebKit at our beck and call, and we can create our own tabs for the TabNavigator, etc. I am wondering when we might see someone build their own UI flavor of a browser built in AIR.

Bookmarks, History, Tabs, etc. would all be there for the taking, and someone might develop some new UI paradigms using the flexible (no pun intended) developing environment we have. Kuler-based themes, different bookmarking schemes (using relationship data), browser widgets, etc. would be cool things to play with.

Anyone know of anyone taking on this kind of challenge?

Rush - Snakes & Arrows Live
This item is available for pre-order now! Snakes & Arrows Live will be released on April 15th, 2008. If you pre-order this item, it will be shipped to you on the release date. If you order other items along with this cd-set, the entire package will be sent at the same time.

Snakes & Arrows Live is a 2-disc set of the 2007 Live Concert Tour. Fans can now enjoy the sound of the tour in which the band played 64 shows, spanning over five months of 2007. The set features favorites like Tom Sawyer, Limelight, and YYZ as well as new songs Far Cry, Spindrift, and The Larger Bowl. The 2008 Grammy-nominated song Mailgnant Narcissism is highlighted by a drum solo from Neil Peart. Catch the energy of the live concert with this great new cd set!

Monday, March 24, 2008

I am very thankful for the explanation in this error dialog box (I never was the recipient of this one before). I am wondering what the actual limit of nesting is within folders since I've actually hit it. Anyway, kudos for the nice dialog box - its better than most I encounter.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

A most blessed Easter to you and yours! Barscz time here in our family. God bless.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Youtube has added a sweet feature. Check out a video & go full-screen. If you see that icon next to the play/pause button that looks like three spheres, one connected to two others, then you'll like what you see when you click on it. It shows related videos, and you can expand the network. Color coding will appear top left, so you can view those quickly. One thing I'd like to see is varying sizes of items based on relevancy. Showing a navigator pane would be cool, as well as titles in a list. This relevancy graphing is a nice step for now, but its limited in its usefulness. Some more work on it and it will rock. I get why its only available full-screen (needs space and also hardware acceleration is a big plus).

Since Flex Builder 3 and AIR are so much fun and generally pretty easy to use, I am whipping up a sample application that merely serves up various URLs to an HTML control via List and you can also type in your own URLs to go to.

I listen to music all day long at work & I constantly seek out new material to plug into my library of stuff. A search took me to Milla Jovovich's demo MP3s. Of note here is the awful "Take Me To Mars". Milla, you starred in one of my favorite films (The Fifth Element), I never got a chance to book you, you look fantastic, but I think your talents lie elsewhere. The one album you have released (The Divine Comedy) was actually pretty good. It was more straight-forward and folky... "In A Glade" is a Ukranian folk song and its pretty incredible. Big badda boom. Everything since then seems weird and bad. Off to find something else... perhaps using Finetune or something.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

I'm curious to know how many people use Kuler, even if its only once in a while. I think its pretty useful for playing around, but I'm not sure if its a tool that I would ever make much use of. However, with the new version out now, I think I'll play with it more and perhaps save off palettes I use a lot in various projects. I wonder if a group feature might be cool... something people can join and be part of and have its own RSS feed for.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Hey Cadillac Deval Patrick, whatcha gonna do now? How are you going to lower my property tax like you promised? Up the tolls (ie. not cut spending)?

Adobe on Wednesday announced the release of the Flash Media Rights Management Server software.

Aimed at large media outlets and broadcasters that are looking to protect their content, the rights management server protects video content created for Adobe Flash against “misuse,” according to Adobe. The video being viewed does not have to be online when being viewed — Adobe explained that the software will cache a copy of the license locally, so the video can be viewed without an internet connection.

Adobe said the new server integrates into existing and emerging media delivery workflows, including Adobe Media Player and video applications that run on Adobe AIR software.

Adobe is clearly targeting the movie and television market as they struggle to find a way to protect their content in a new age of distribution. Using the media rights server, content owners can set usage controls to specify a range of parameters for user access and media expiration, while dynamic rights management lets them change usage rights even after a file has been distributed. In addition, the protection capabilities in Adobe Media Player help ensure content is not reused or remixed without consent from the media publisher, the company said.

Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server is now available for Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Linux at $40,000 per CPU. Content protection capabilities can be leveraged on the client side in the recently released Adobe AIR runtime or in the upcoming Adobe Media Player, which both run on Mac OS and Windows.

Link.

Adobe has started development of a Flash player suitable for use on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, company chief executive Shantanu Narayen said Tuesday.

"We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone," he said. "We have evaluated (the software developer tools) and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves."

Narayen's comments are the latest in an ongoing saga between the two companies largely played out by the media. It all began last month following claims on the part of one gadget blog that Flash on the iPhone was finally imminent.

That surprised Adobe spokesman Ryan Stewart, who quickly noted in an official company blog post that: "No one aside from [Apple chief executive] Steve Jobs has any idea if or when it's coming. Everyone I talk to doesn’t know anything."

For his part, Jobs would later claim that technological limitations were to blame for the absence of the media player, which has grown in recent years to become a staple of the modern web experience, fueling everything from media-intensive advertisements to full-fledged websites.

The version of Flash player that runs on Macs and PCs is "too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, he said during the March 4th Apple shareholders meeting, while the mobile version known as Flash Lite is "not capable of being used with the Web."

"There's this missing product in the middle," Jobs added. "It just doesn't exist."

Narayen and his team now appear poised to alter that notion. They hope to deliver their missing product via Apple's new App Store, set to open in June alongside the release of iPhone software version 2.0.

Still, several unanswered questions remain, such as how the Flash player would function within websites given Apple's current iPhone developer guidelines which seem to require that all third-party software be released as standalone applications rather than as plug-ins.

Okay, kick ass. I am glad to see wheels in motion.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Wow. Its super fast. I like the tabs better than FF. In Prefs, turn on the Develop Menu item and go to town! The Network Timeline is awesome, Error Console handy, Web Inspector phenomenal, switching User Agents is extremely useful, etc. It's EXCELLENT. I wish RSS items would display headlines like in FF instead of rendering a list by selection, but thats the only thing I miss from FF at the moment. That and Better GMail.

Back in my Applied Messaging/Convoq days, one of the things we wrestled with was how much CPU the Flash Plugin consumed when the application was doing nothing. That was AS2 and the redraw of mc elements, etc. would consume a lot as we had contact nodes that contained many nested movieclip elements, etc. Even when cacheAsBitmap was used, we had problems. Now that we have Sprites, it would have been a lot better.

Now that we can set the fps of a Flash application, has anyone used this in regards to VM ramping? For instance, when doing nothing, set the fps to 1. Just before looping through an object or animation, etc. ramp the fps back up to 31 or so... so that when you application NEEDS to be fast it is, and when its waiting user-input or socket data, its as resting as much as possible? I haven't seen any posts about using this often-requested feature. Now that we have it, who is using it? I am planning on playing with this. It will take a bunch of extra work on our part (developers), but I think its the responsible thing to do (if it works and is indeed beneficial).

Link.
New York, March 13 (IANS) Amar Bose, a pioneer in modern acoustics who is known for the high-end audio products bearing his name, has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the US, which has previously honoured Thomas Edison, Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Besides Windows, there are lots of Office installs out there. The 12.0.1 updater for Mac Office 2008 installs Silverlight. Just thought I would throw that out there for any who care.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

This is weird, but ever since installing the iPhone SDK (which required a restart), when I encounter Flash in FF or S, I get the beachball of death. I'm not saying the two are related, or wait... perhaps they are. Because after that restart & doing nothing else, this is happening pretty consistently (YouTube, ESPN, etc.) UPDATE: Flash seems to hang the page its in (can't tab around). If I open two window instances, the one instance without Flash running in a page or tab seems fine.

Amy Alice Dolecki
born 4:16PM Friday, March 7, 2008. Eight pounds, two ounces. Length unknown for the moment (wanted to measure her today... something about "uncoiling").

Once labor started, things went quickly. Deanna only had to push about six times. Amy is a cuddler. Slept from 1AM to 6AM today which was really nice. Many more photos to come (Flickr/Shutterfly) when I collect them all and upload them. I think she looks a lot like her brother when he was a newborn.

Friday, March 7, 2008

WTF.

Interface Builder (Coming Soon)

Future releases of the iPhone SDK will include Interface Builder to make designing a user interface as easy as drag and drop.

In the meantime, what are we supposed to do? Only do web-based SDK development? Also, to remote debug (see the app debug on your own real iPhone tethered) will cost you $99. Thats fair I guess, this weeds out some hobbyist developers.

The news of which I last posted has been postponed for a few hours. That is all :/

Thursday, March 6, 2008

I don't know what Apple was thinking slapping a 2.1GB SDK on the web (http) for download instead of doing FTP. And what is with the size? Why do we need to download the whole of XCode if we already have it installed? Why not offer an updater along with the extra bits we need? Unless this is the updater somehow. I'd be amazed. Anyway, I am surprised at the girth of this SDK and I won't know more until its finished downloading. I keep screen-sharing to my dev Mac in the office to see the status of the download. Time for bed though me thinks, a big day tomorrow... more on that when I get a chance. BTW, IB is the UI builder for the iPhone, I was worried we'd be forced to use Dashcode for that, although you can still use Dashcode for other iPhone dev if you want. No Flash? Thats okay for me at the moment. Games was a concern, looks like the SDK handled that bigtime (EA, Sega, etc.) and video has already been kind of addressed via YouTube H.264, although stuff like ESPN, etc. may need to offer up their own apps or something now? Lots for those of us with Intel Macs to play with. Debug and Simulator look amazing.

While I wait for the Apple Developer Connection to wake back up I thought I would quickly post about a Boston Flex Application Incubator Group logo idea. Incubators are normally conceptualized using eggs... incubate and hatch eggs.

I took this idea of an egg shape, and merged two together to show a kind of coming together (group of people). It also uses the "X" shape in the product name "Flex". Its a little generic looking at the moment & I thought about carving little notches in the bottoms to form arrows pointing up part of the way through the shapes, akin to the "<" in MXML markup, but then it might look like a juice squeezer upside down or something.

Anyway, I have another idea that uses actual eggs, but they are semi-transparent, contain tags or mini-light sources, and are squarish eggs (think RealBasic logo sort of, but more boxes (with radius edges), containing ideas/code.

The idea being all those things come together to form something greater, or in fact each one is an idea ready to spring to life. I dunno. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on these as life has me busy with other exciting developments ;)

It took a ton of page timeouts and errors, but I managed to sign up as an iPhone Developer. I won't try downloading the SDK for some time as the servers are going bonkers... yes, I said bonkers.

My take on the announcements: awesome! I am glad Apple took their time whipping all of this together. I wish we heard a little more about Notes (its not great but they use it where my wife works and if the iPhone can do Notes well, she's signed on), but this is all really exciting. Objective-C isn't too bad (although the language in my opinion is quite ugly... bracing), and the tools look awesome. Watching some SDK video for now. Build/Simulate looks awesome. Gonna dust off my XCode this evening :) AND my copy of Cocoa Programming (Anguish, Buck, Yacktman). And look up the APIs.

Update
Well, good thing I managed to download the 11 iPhone Developer videos before the world caved in on Apple IT. The iPhone SDK site is down and I can almost never get into the Developer Connection at all. The videos are extremely well done. I am unsure if Dashcode is supposed to be the IB for iPhone applications, or if IB was updated with iPhone components. I **think** that Dashcode is the interface builder, but I am really unsure at the moment. I'd hope that IB was updated, as I like to work in IB/XCode more than worrying about having Dashcode foot the UI... unless its really well integrated somehow. Exciting times. I wonder if the simulator can fake phone calls on it or not. I imagine yes.

So it sounds like Steve Jobs doesn't want to support Flash on the iPhone because Apple would like to use its own PDF rendering engine instead of Adobe's. Adobe might be saying we'll give you the Flash Player if you also take our PDF engine instead of your own. Now... Preview in OS X is FAST. Much prefer it to any Adobe Reader. I would hope that Adobe would see the value in getting Flash on as many devices as possible, so if this rumor over PDF is true, and I know PDF is huge, but let Apple use its PDF engine so we can all get Flash on the iPhone and rock the world even more with the experiences we create on that platform. It would be a huge win for Apple and also Adobe. But the largest win would be for iPhone users.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

I keep seeing Silverlight (spam?) on the aggregators, etc. and I go to check out links (keynote video, showcases, etc) and in OS X and XP proper, I cannot get Silverlight (any flavor) to actually install. When I go back to the URLs after installing, I still get the damned detection screen asking me to install Silverlight.

I don't care if many consider Silverlight internet gold, if I can't install it, it's simply a piece of shit to me. If you can't get the installer to work with Firfox, then I'll punt. I've tried so many freaking times now, its utterly annoying and I'm frustrated to the point where I almost don't care. Put up screenshots so we can at least see some of your Silverlight work, okay?

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

I am just a weekend snaps kind of photographer. I can frame stuff well and generally pick out a decent ISO, but it seems like you just about HAVE to shoot RAW to be able to do anything really meaningful with Lightroom or Aperture anymore. Granted, if you're good enough you don't need to make many adjustments... but that isn't me. So it looks like I should seriously consider getting a RAW shooting digital SLR. And another external drive. And a Time Machine. Lots of cash required. And some big ass memory cards for the SLR or something.

I certainly helped fund your wardrobe of tropical print lounge shirts by purchasing all the D&D (before it was called Basic) stuff I could. I then went AD&D.

I still remember the cover of the original box, and I remember starting it at The Baker's home in Fairview, PA during a Christmas party. The victim was a measly spider, but it was dark and damp and exciting. Thanks for all the memories Gary.

I finally managed to get a 20" x 48" roll print of the ActionScript 3.0 Class Diagram [reference] to print (updated with AIR APIs), and even at this size, its probably close to 50% of how large it actually needs to be printed. Combine this with the Flex posters (new and the old powder blue ones) and I could probably fully wallpaper a decently-sized bathroom.

I taped the AS3 one up on my locker so the department has full access to it. Very nice. That must be one huge ass Illustrator file someplace in bowels of Adobe. A lot of work went into these, thanks Adobe!

Labels: AIR, AS3

Running in a WindowSWF panel on buttons in the UI:

MMExecute( "fl.getDocumentDOM().publish();" );
MMExecute( "fl.getDocumentDOM().testMovie();" );

The Publish button comes in handy the most since I'm creating projectors a lot lately. Keyboard shortcuts work fine, but something about the lure of mashing a button down gives me satisfaction sometimes. I also have Save Output (for saving off traces) and the clear I mentioned in a previous blog post.

Back in the days of Central, Central showed you all the installed applications you had in the main interface. While this proved to be a despised approach, I was wondering if it would be possible to create an AIR application that is simply a launcher. There are many ways around this (making a Stack in OS X, etc.) but it might be cool if a simple list of available AIR applications was listed in an AIR application that you could use to launch/uninstall apps from. If Adobe decided to list applications via RSS (maybe they do and I am not aware of that yet), perhaps the app could also allow for search for apps, looking for highest rated, maybe even allow for submissions of our own AIR applications to be considered for listing in the service. I am thinking about an AIR Manager type thing. Just an idea, and if one exists, let me know about it because I think it would be lots of fun. Add this functionality to the ADC Desktop maybe even!

Monday, March 3, 2008

Tonight we took Ryan for a haircut after work, which this time he really hated for some reason. We then went to California Pizza Kitchen for some dinner (which he loved), and then took him to Stride Rite for some shoes.

After picking out two pairs of shoes (he picked out a sweet pair of Geox by the way), he wanted to run around the mall with his new shoes. He ran outside and next door to Build A Bear.

The store was basically empty and he was walking and dancing to the music in there. So cute. He then went to the side of the store where they have all the terminals running Build A Bear software. He immediately ran to one of them and pointed at the screen.

"What's that?" he asked. He spotted a Microsoft Windows dialog box... the one with the "The system has recovered from a serious error." message. I told him it was "a Windows crash" and he said, "Yuk!" and then proceeded to the back of the store with the foot pedal thing that blows air for cleaning new stuffed animals. The only time I've heard him say that is when I am changing his diaper.

This kid cracks me up constantly.

Debugging Flash code normally begins with inspection and then then escalates to tracing before other techniques are employed. Very useful stuff the trace statement.



However sometimes your window becomes cluttered when debugging from within the Flash CS3 IDE, during each compile, and you might want to clear it out at times. If you're tracing in loops you feel this pain quite a bit.

Jesse Warden has a "ghetto solution" which works great. You can download the panel SWF right here.



How do I use this thing?



You need to locate your WindowSWF directory. On a PC you can find this someplace like this: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS3\en\Configuration\WindowSWF.



If you navigate to this location and no WindowSWF directory exists, go ahead and create one. On the Mac I’m not sure where this is, but it must be in a place pretty similar (within a Library).

• Copy the attached SWF to the WindowSWF directory
• Restart Flash
• After opening or creating a new FLA, Window > Other Panels > Trace Clear
• You can dock the panel someplace and save your workspace.
• The panel must be open (in the workspace, not necessarily showing) to work
  

In your code, call the panel by using the example code in the panel itself. You could wrap the thing in a method call if you’d like…

        //AS2:

var lc = new LocalConnection();
function clearTraces():Void
{
    lc.send( "JSFLBridge", "clearOutput");
};

        //AS3 Document Class, etc.:

import flash.net.LocalConnection;
...
var lc:LocalConnection = new LocalConnection();
...
private function clearTraces():void
{
    lc.send( “JSFLBridge”, “clearOutput” );
}

The panel SWF has a localConnection name of “JSFLBridge”, and a method called clearOutput. By using the localConnection and the method, you can call that method in the panel SWF, and that in turn fires off a line of JSFL that talks to the output panel in the IDE, telling it to clear itself. The code in the panel itself:

lc = new LocalConnection();
lc.owner = this;
lc.clearOutput = function()
{
    MMExecute("fl.outputPanel.clear()");
};
lc.connect("JSFLBridge");

So hopefully you’ll install this and find it useful. I slapped a button into my own panel so that I can use it instead of a right-click in the Output panel window itself. Using this technique isn't something I ever see come up very often, but with this tool available, it can make your life easier in the future.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

I haven't come across the need to use the ...rest parameter in any of my methods yet, and while I can see where this might sometimes come in handy, I'm not quite sure its a good approach or not.

It seems like a lazy thing to do. I realize having one method instead of two can make sense, especially if the code is nearly identical, however one could argue for three methods instead of the one then... one method per argument type and then a nested call to the third argument to apply logic. If you're going to pass variable amounts of data, wouldn't it be better to just pass an array or an object with properties than use an ambiguous ...rest parameter code loop to inspect it as it comes in? I am not saying that the technique shouldn't be available, as there are probably times when this comes in super-handy (I just haven't come down that road yet).

You won't admit it, but you've watched a little soap opera drama on television. Enough to know the interior sets are lavished with gorgeous, monumental floral arrangements. Its time... I am looking for something equivalent to the "Monthly Soap Opera Arrangement Club" where we get impressive arrangements delivered to our house once per month.

We have a real need for it in our kitchen and/or foyer. Probably the foyer. It would save a ton of money to have a subscription to something, but the size of our foyer necessitates something beyond a few dozen roses or smaller arrangements you normally see at a florist. Anyone seen something worthwhile?