February 5th, 2009
Well, they’ll save you tons of time and a couple of headaches anyway. There are some necessary extensions to Firefox that can make your development go so much smoother, especially in the QA phase or all the time for those of you that subscribe to Test Driven Development. When the Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick came out in June of 2003, it was a God send. Never before had the web browser been so handy. Previously I had only cursed it, especially IE, which I still do actually – mostly IE6, damn you!
Now there are tons of extensions, most of which are useless, but there are a few good ones worth mentioning. So that you don’t have to weed through the endless pages of add-ons to find the few good ones, here’s the Short List:
Web Developer
Exposes everything about your HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The best feature is by far the ability to disable your cache.
FireBug
The QA person’s best friend. Works a lot like the activity window in Safari, but on steroids. Great to see what your Flash app isn’t loading correctly.
FlashTracer
This one almost makes logging utilities obsolete. Get all your trace output, along with everyone else’s too, and always know what’s happening with your SWFs.
ShowIP
This one is really great when developing for a load balanced environment. Shows you the IP address of the current page in the status bar, nice!
Posted in Interactive | No Comments »
January 29th, 2009
Have you ever had this problem?
AIM screenshot
I’ve had this problem off and on over the past couple years and never figured out exactly what the issue was. Removing all my fonts always did the trick, but seemed a bit excessive. I finally came across this article that explains it all: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301245
Basically you need to remove Helvetica Fractions from your system and it clears up right away. You’d be surprised how many people have this issue. Since I figured it out I’ve helped quite a number of people with this, which has led me to post it here. Hope it helps.
Posted in Mac OS X | No Comments »
January 14th, 2009
The Flex Style Exporter is one of the best tools I’ve seen yet that support Flex development. Styles can be visually tricky, especially when your a developer styling your app on the fly. Colors don’t always work out the way you expect them to. This tool really makes it easy and fun to get your styling just right. I don’t know who wrote this, but I would like to shake their hand.
Flex 2 Style Exporter
Flex 3 Style Exporter
Posted in Flex | No Comments »
January 8th, 2009
Descriptions are from the Adobe Flex Help that can be accessed in Eclipse under Help->Help Contents.
The topic that this information can be found under is:
Building and Deploying Flex Applications > Building Flex Applications > Using the Flex Compilers > Using the application compiler
-defaults-css-url path-to-css-file/default.css
For ActionScript projects that use the sugarcookie AppLoader class.
-use-network=true|false
To allow local access
-benchmark=true|false
Prints detailed compile times to the standard output.
-default-frame-rate int
Sets the application’s frame rate.
-keep-generated-actionscript=true|false
Determines whether to keep the generated ActionScript class files.
-optimize=true|false
This one should always be set to true.
Enables the ActionScript optimizer. This optimizer reduces file size and increases performance by optimizing the SWF file’s bytecode.
For a complete list for all versions of Flex compilers check out this site. It also has some other good info on more advanced topics like Flex Internals.
Posted in Flex | No Comments »
December 20th, 2008
I never thought that I would care about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but having a blog has made me obsess over it a bit. One of the best tools is by far the Sitemap protocol. Making a sitemap.xml file is very easy especially if you use a generator of some kind, there are many, but I use the WordPress plug-in by Arne Brachhold.
The standard introduced by Google has also been adopted by Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com so it’s definitely worth your while. It basically describes the pages in your site that you want indexed and there is even a way to let search engines know when your sitemap file has been updated.
example link:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.pmko.net/sitemap.xml
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
December 12th, 2008
If you’re a Flash developer making the switch to start using Flex, then this class from Grant Skinner is for you. DisplayObjectWrapper makes life much easier by enabling developers to easily get anything that inherits from DisplayObject (Sprite, Loader and Bitmap to name a few) to become a display child of a Flex container (Canvas, ViewStack, Accordion, etc). Awesome, now here are some code examples of how to work with SWFs in Flex.
This mxml code example shows how to:
- load a Flash 9/10 SWF
- call a method within the document class of the SWF
- receive an event from the loaded SWF
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in AS3, Code Example, Flash/Flex | No Comments »
November 30th, 2008
⌘cmd+H hides just about everything except Adobe’s Illustrator. I’m not sure why “Hide Edges” is so much more important than having the program work in the most basic of ways as other programs do. Not supporting ⌘cmd+H is like making “Copy” ⌘cmd+U because you wanted to make ⌘cmd+C “Copy Filter”, it just doesn’t make since. At least there is an easy solution, here’s how.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Mac OS X | 2 Comments »
November 14th, 2008
At some point in your Flex career you have probably wanted to get rid of the generic Flex preloader that you always see when your application initially loads. It’s an easy way for people to spot a Flex app and quite frankly is a lack of attention to detail. If your application is fairly light weight there really is no need for it and it’s super easy to make a custom one. Luckily the answer is simple. All you have to do is set the usePreloader attribute to false.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" usePreloader="false">
</mx:Application>
Posted in Code Example, Flex | No Comments »
October 22nd, 2008
Sharing links to your content and some additional basic information about it is pretty easy. Most social web sites offer a straight forward way to do this through url params to a basic service. sugarcookie makes this even easier by providing functionality that takes care of the finer details for the following sites:
- Facebook
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
- Reddit
- DelIcioUs
- Twitter
- MySpace
Example usage for Facebook:
TextLink.Facebook("http://www.pmko.net","Professional Monkey Keyboard Operator");see the full source code behind the TextLink class.
Some sites, like Facebook, will scrape the HTML from the link and utilize the page title, meta description and certain images.
Sharing content with Facebook
Posted in AS3, Code Example, social, sugarcookie | No Comments »
October 10th, 2008
⌘ + Shift + G
Most Mac users don’t even realize that there is a Unix based underbelly on their Mac, so it’s probably good that those directories are not readily available in the Finder. For those of us that rock the Terminal on a regular basis, it can sometimes be frustrating that the only way to utilize the Unix side is through command line only.
Luckily God invented key command shortcuts! Press ⌘ cmd + 
shift + G with an open Finder window, open or save dialog box and you can navigate to any directory on your computer by typing it in starting with the root directory. This is great when you want to use TextMate for editing or viewing config files. You may run into some permission issues, but some careful manipulation of what group you belong to can fix that.
Posted in Mac OS X | No Comments »
