T3B

Taking "Gumbo" For a Test Drive

2008-12-03T09:48:00.002-05:00

I wanted to try out my preview copy of Flex Builder 4 (aka Gumbo) that we received at MAX so I thought I'd put together a simple little AIR application. I always find myself looking around for a calendar to quickly reference so I thought this would be a perfect little application to build. If you're like me and still stuck in the Windows XP world this handy little apps just chills out in your system tray and displays the current date. Hover over it and you get the full date, click and you get a fully functioning calendar.

Download the app at http://doubletmedia.com/AIR/DockCal/DockCal.air

Enough about that, on to Gumbo. Initial impression, I like it. It's stable, even for an early build. It seems to be quicker than previous permutations of FB. I like the new code hinting and ties into ASDOCS, they are good for quick reference into what you can do with the components. I haven't had a chance to do much with the new "Gumbonents" yet, I'll have to save that for my next app.

I am having some trouble however, and I haven't been able to find any information on it so far. Since this is an AIR app I wanted to include the update frame work. However, whenever I add in that code (taken from the Tour de Flex app) I receive the following error:

VerifyError: Error #1053: Illegal override of seek in mx.effects.effectClasses.TweenEffectInstance.

Any ideas?

Chrysler AIR app up for a MAX Award

2008-11-10T09:46:00.004-05:00

While at Knoware I had the opportunity to work on a very cool AIR application for Chrysler. Joe Johnston has a good write-up and some screenshots and video over at his blog. Congratulations to everyone who worked on the application, and good luck!

Update: Here's the link to the MAX site where you can vote. The app is listed under the RIA section.

Strange 'NOSERVER_FLEX_OUTPUT_FOLDER' Error

2008-10-15T10:18:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I was having trouble with FlexBuilder so I upgraded to ver. 3.1. Ever since then I've been receiving the following error.

'NOSERVER_FLEX_OUTPUT_FOLDER\bin-debug\' is not a valid location. The location is relative to undefined workspace path variable 'NOSERVER_FLEX_OUTPUT_FOLDER'.

If I go into the project properties and remove 'NOSERVER_FLEX_OUTPUT_FOLDER' from the Output Folder path I can compile the project. However, when I reopen the project that path gets put back in there and the project won't compile again. Anybody else experience this and know how to fix it?

Move Over iPhone

2008-10-09T11:03:00.001-04:00

The latest greatest thing in mobile technology, can't wait to get my hands on one.

http://www.pomegranatephone.com/

Copy Children From One Flex Container to Another

2008-07-16T13:45:00.002-04:00

Okay, this shouldn't be so difficult but I'm having a helluva time with it. I have two canvases. All I want to have happen is when I add a child to canvas A I want it to also be added to canvas B at the same time. Sounds easy right, but for some reason it's only showing up in the second canvas, not the first. It's driving me crazy. Any ideas out there?

var imageContainer:WallItem = new WallItem();
...
WallModel.getInstance().dropArea.addChild(imageContainer);
WallModel.getInstance().navCanvas.addChild(imageContainer);

When I do this the item only shows up in the "navCanvas" but if I take out the second addChild it shows up fine in "dropArea." What am I missing?

Flex 4 Skinning Video

2008-07-07T11:21:00.002-04:00

Looks like there is some very cool stuff coming in Flex 4 with regards to skinning components.

Brightkite & Spamalot

2008-05-27T10:49:00.003-04:00

Ryan Stewart kindly sent me a Brightkite invite a few weeks ago. Admittedly, at first I wasn't very impressed. It seemed like a more complicated Twitter without any new added value. I don't really care where people are posting their tweets from. I decided to give it another chance though and the more I looked around the more I liked it. I like that you can post photos of where you're at and what you're doing at that moment. I however, do not have a camera on my phone (pathetic, I know) so this feature isn't particularly useful to me but it is fun to see what people are doing "around me."

There was one thing that really sold me on the service though. This past week the musical Spamalot was in town for several performances. A couple of the cast members had Brightkite accounts and were posting notes and photos of their adventures around town. It was very cool to see what they did while they were here. It provided an interesting view into how a visitor sees your hometown. The things they enjoyed doing, what they felt was interesting enough to take a picture of and post for everyone else to see. I can see where this could be useful if you were going to be traveling to a new place also. You could check out what's going on around that location and get some ideas on what (or what not) to do while you're there.

So, I think I'm sold on Brightkite. I have a few invites to give out if anyone is interested. By the way, Spamalot is a great show. If it comes to your town I'd definitely recommend it.

FlashLite Disappointments

2008-05-22T09:58:00.001-04:00

I've had an interest in mobile development for several years now. Where I work however, I don't have an opportunity to do much of it. Every once in a while though I get the chance to build a small prototype to use as a sales or demonstration tool. Being a Flash/Flex guy I of course turn to FlashLite to build these apps.

FlashLite is great for building attractive, rich interfaces in a relatively short amount of time. In addition, Adobe Device Central offers some fantastic tools for running simulations to check various conditions and situations. So what's the problem? The problem is (at least here in the States) that in most cases we are limited to distributing our applications to Windows Mobile 5+ devices only. Verizon does offer distribution program for developers to distribute their content but it is somewhat expensive and quite convoluted. This restriction severely limits how and where we as developers can distribute our applications. In my opinion this renders FlashLite an inviable option for developing mobile applications except in very targeted instances.

There is hope, however. The recently announced Adobe Open Screen Project aims to bridge this gap. To put it simply, Adobe plans to work with carriers and manufacturers to develop a standard platform that will run on PC's, devices and mobile phones. That platform will be SWF and FLV. If they can successfully pull this off it finally mean we can build our Flash (and AIR) apps and freely distribute them to any device available (which, with any luck, will include the iPhone). That will be a good day :)

FlashLite Demo App

2008-05-20T10:27:00.004-04:00

Late last week I quickly threw together a prototype of a mobile app for a big box retailer in the area. It's been a long time since I worked on anything in the mobile world so I was excited to do this. I only had about a day to throw this together so there's still a lot of tweaking but it turned out alright I think.

Flash, Flickr, AIR

2008-05-05T14:23:00.003-04:00

I decided I wanted to try creating an AIR app with Flash instead of Flex just to see what it was like. To date, I've never created the obligatory Flickr app that it seems like all developers make at some point so I thought what the hell. The result is this relatively useless but kind of fun little app that pulls the first 50 images from a randomly selected page (up to page 10) of "interesting" photos from Flickr.

I kind of liked the experience of creating an AIR app with Flash. Managing the settings seems to be a little easier since Flash offers a form based approach to creating your app.xml file. In Flex you have to manually edit the XML which really isn't too difficult but just entering a few values into a form is nice.

If you're interested you can download the app here.

Twhirl Acquisition

2008-04-03T23:00:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to Twhirl on their recent acquisition by Seesmic. It's great to see an AIR app getting this kind of exposure.

Seesmic Acquires Popular Twitter AIR Client Twhirl

User Group Advice

2008-02-07T13:07:00.001-05:00

A friend and I are considering starting a local Adobe user group. Anyone out there have advice on how to make it successful or things to watch out for?

BakTrax iPhone Web App

2008-02-05T12:42:00.000-05:00

A few of the guys here at Knoware have been working on an iPhone web app. Today it was added as a featured app on the Apple site. Design by Finch.

Beware Free Hosting

2008-01-29T11:31:00.000-05:00

The old adage "You get what you pay for" reared it's ugly head today. I've spent the better part of two days working with the Wordpress API and various XMLRPC Actionscript libraries. Having never worked with XMLRPC before I expected it to take a bit to get the hang of things. I was having a helluva time however and could not figure out why I couldn't even get a call to a simple "hello" method to work. It kept coming back with a "malformed XML" error. Wordpress comes with and xmlrpc.php file when you install the software so I couldn't believe there was something wrong with their code, after all, other people were able to make it work. Then, this morning when I was looking at the data being returned it hit me. GoDaddy's free hosting accounts have banner ads across the top of the page. The HTML for those adds was being returned with my request data and causing the XML to go all wonky. I tried a Wordpress account on a paid hosting plan and everything was fine...ugh.

Ribbit Amphibian

2008-01-28T09:01:00.000-05:00

I'm sure by now most of you have heard of Ribbit and their Flex based VOIP service. There is a new article on TechCrunch today talking about their new service, Amphibian. Amphibian in a nutshell, is the “convergence of your personal mobile communications with your personal web experience.” One of it's main features is that it allows you to aggregate all of your different phone numbers into one rich dashboard experience. Another feature I found particularly interesting was the ability to gather a person's "feeds" (flickr, their blog rss, LinkedIn etc...) while your talking to them. Seemed to me like an interesting way to achieve a certain level of collaboration with the caller. The best part for us is that it's still Flash based so the developer community can build additional services and make them available through the Ribbit market space.

AS3 Wordpress Library

2008-01-27T22:34:00.000-05:00

Anybody out there know where I can find some examples on how to use the AS3 Wordpress library from Orange Flash? I started messing around with it tonight but didn't get too far (I'm sure watching 300 at the same time didn't help...).

More on Parsing Feeds with Flex/AS3

2008-01-26T16:40:00.000-05:00

Several days ago I posted a couple lines of code that came in quite handy while parsing an Atom feed. Mike Chambers has put together a more in depth post on parsing Atom/RSS feeds using the as3syndicationlib.

Check it out here

Re-Release: AIR Blogging Tool - "Catharticus" beta release

2008-01-25T09:29:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm an assbag. I forgot to re-test single blog accounts before I released the app. Thanks to Matt Wright for the feedback. Things should be working a little better now - give me another chance :)

--------------Original Post

A few weeks ago I thought I'd build a "quick, little AIR app" to post to my Blogger account. As I got into I realized that it was a little more involved than I thought but I also realized that it could be a much bigger, much "cooler" application if I extended it a bit.

Here is my first release of the application. There is still a long way to go but it's usable and actually has some useful functionality I think. Currently you can login to your Blogger account (plans to include WordPress later), select your blog if you have more than one. From there you can add and edit/view posts.

There is also a "Twitter Drawer" where you can keep track of the last 15 tweets in your timeline as well as post your own status updates.

You can download the application here.

You'll need the Adobe Integrated Runtime installed on your machine to run the app which can be downloaded here.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Parsing Atom Feeds with Flex/Actionscript

2008-01-16T14:57:00.000-05:00

Very important, if you are trying to parse an atom feed, say from Blogger for example. Make sure you include the following lines of code. If not, you could spend several days trying to figure out how to "trick" the system to work. I'm not saying I did this, I'm just saying it could happen...

// Define and use atom namespace
private namespace atom = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";
use namespace atom;

Another Flex/AIR beta 3 Question

2007-12-14T15:47:00.000-05:00

Has there been a change to the number of concurrent XML socket connections allowed in AIR beta 3. It appears to be limited to 16.

Is Flex Builder 3 Beta 2 still available?

2007-12-14T11:23:00.000-05:00

Anybody know where I can still download Flex Builder 3 Beta 2 for the Mac? I need to downgrade for a client project :(

Genius Reading Level?

2007-12-12T09:45:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if this is good or bad...

Get a Cash Advance

Digg Candidates Flex App

2007-12-09T22:24:00.000-05:00

My buddy Joe Johnston (of AIR iPhone fame) and I created a Flex dashboard to track the 2008 presidential candidates over at Digg. It was my first time using the Digg API, it's pretty slick. Check it out.

Digg Candidates Dashboard

Here's a few screen shots:

Digg Candidates Page Hacked

2007-12-07T09:02:00.000-05:00

Saw this while checking out the digg candidates page this morning.

Set Selected Color of LinkBar

2007-11-30T23:26:00.001-05:00

We recently needed to set the selected color of a LinkBar item. This happens automagically if you are using it with a ViewStack, we however were using an Array for our dataprovider and for whatever reason, that is not supported. Fortunately I was able to find this little function to fix the problem. It basically loops through the children of your LinkBar. If the item clicked matches the current child in the loop it sets the style to your selected color. Code is below.


private function doLinkBar(event):void{
     for(var i:int=0; i<event.target.numChildren; i++){
      var curItem = event.target.getChildAt(i);
      i==event.index ? curItem.setStyle("color", 0x2a80d5) : curItem.setStyle("color", 0x000000);
     }
   }

tabIndex in Flex Popup Windows

2007-10-24T22:09:00.000-04:00

This morning I had what seemed like a very simple task to complete, add a tab order to a small login form in an AIR app we're building. Several hours later I still had not accomplished this. I'm the first to admit that after a year or so of managing a team and not doing much hands on development my Flex skills are a bit rusty but this was ridiculous. The login form is in a modal popup window. Turns out that was m problem. When I would hit "Tab" the focus would jump back to the fields in the main application window. To fix this I created a FocusManager instance for the login screen and then activated it when the screen loaded. Once the screen was "activated" it held the focus while I tabbed through the form fields on that screen. Happy day. The FocusManager snippet is below, it's pretty simple, only two lines.


   //grab focus for the popup window so tabIndex works.
   var fm:FocusManager = new FocusManager(this);
   fm.activate();

My "frist" week at Knoware...an homage

2007-10-21T20:22:00.000-04:00

On Friday I completed my "frist" week at Knoware. I say "frist" out of respect for my buddy Joe who helped get me this great new gig. He's a fantastic developer but he can't spell for shit :) After his first week he wrote a blog post entitled "My frist week at Knoware" so I thought I'd keep the tradition alive.

All in all I think it was a very good week. I'm learning quite a bit already. The most obvious change aside from the new office and people is the new laptop. I've made the switch from PC to Mac and so far I'm loving it. More about that in another post perhaps...

Another thing I've been learning is Cairngorm. We didn't use it at Crowe so I'm not too familiar. I started doing a little reading and watching some videos (davidtucker.net has started a fantastic series on Cairngorm that has been very helpful). So far I like what I see. I still haven't seen a full Cairngorm implementation but some of the design patterns I've looked at so far seem to make a lot of sense.

Anyway, I'm back at it tomorrow. God willing, things will continue to go well and I'll continue to learn a lot, and hopefully, get better at foosball...

I need a new phone

2007-10-05T11:14:00.000-04:00

A few months ago the company I work for bought a Treo 700wx for me to use. Unfortunately when I did that I signed a 2 year service contract w/Verizon so they would get a good rate on the phone. Now I'm leaving my job and they want their phone back which leaves me stuck with a 2 year contract and no phone :(

Anybody know where to get decent phones on the cheap? I'd like to get another "business class" phone (Blackberry, Treo...) if possible but I don't have much money to blow on this.

A New Path

2007-10-02T14:17:00.000-04:00

After a little over three great years with Crowe I've decided to head down a new path. In about two weeks I will be starting a new job at a local software studio called Knoware Those of you at MAX may recognize that name as my buddy Joe presented his AIR iPhone application at the Ribbit Inspire session on Monday. Unfortunately my timing is crap and I'm not able to attend MAX this year because I'm "in between" jobs. Oh well, there's always next year in San Francisco!

Dave Ramsey My TMMO Site Follow-up

2007-08-30T22:28:00.000-04:00

After my post about the Dave Ramsey site using Flash/Flex I received a few comments from some of the developers on Dave's team. They pointed out that they are indeed using Flash/Flex and Coldfusion but what I thought was even cooler was the new fpuonline.daveramsey.com site. This is the complete Financial Peace University course offered online. The video player is built with Flex and it's pretty slick. Check it out, you can view the first lesson for free on the site.

Great work guys! If you're still watching, I responded to a couple of the other comments over at my TMMO blog.

Dave Ramsey Uses Flash/Flex

2007-08-26T19:05:00.000-04:00

The wife and I are starting the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover program today to try to get ourselves out of debt and on the right track financially. I joined his website today and found something kind of cool, he uses Flash video for his video tutorials and intros which isn't too out of the ordinary but it looks like the online budgeting tool is built using Flex. I thought that was kind of cool, but then again, I'm easily amused.

If you're interested, I'm blogging our Total Money Makeover experience here.

Flash Lite For Windows Mobile

2007-06-06T13:08:00.000-04:00

Okay, I have a Flash Lite question that's been stumping me for a while now so I thought I'd throw it out there and hope someone in the Flash Lite community has an answer. Does anybody know of a way to package Flash Lite applications for distribution on Windows Mobile devices? Are there any tools, applications, best practices etc... out there that someone could point me to? I've found several references to SIS files for Symbian devices but nothing for Windows.

Blogger Update

2007-02-14T09:37:00.000-05:00

I updated to the new version of Blogger yesterday and so far I'm pretty happy with it. The beta has been available for a long time so this is probably old news to many of you but they have come out with some handy new features. Just of couple of the highlights I've discovered so far include the "Save" feature (you no longer have to publish for your changes to take affect), and the template editor. The template editor is an AJAX editor that makes it easy to add and edit page elements without having to work directly in HTML mode. All in all it seems like a very nice update.

Big Ass Flex Badge

2007-01-04T11:26:00.000-05:00

idk why...

Flash Lite Components

2006-12-19T09:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I posted a question about using Flash components in a Flash Lite app which it turns out you can't do. Alessandro was kind enough to reply with a link to some Flash Lite specific components. Since I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem I thought I'd repost his link on the front page here.

Flash Lite Components

Jesse Warden is also working on a "light weight" set of components for Flash Lite. Keep an eye on his blog for details.

Flash Lite Question

2006-12-18T09:34:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend I was working on one of my first Flash Lite prototypes. I got it working nicely in the emulator and when I got into the office this morning we tried testing it on the actual device (Q phone) and got and "Actionscript Stuck" error. After a little research it looks like this happens if you use any of the Flash components. My app currently uses one datagrid and an xmlConnector. I could probably work around the connector component but I'd really like to keep the datagrid if possible. Has anyone found a work-around for this?

Apollo on TechCrunch

2006-12-16T09:31:00.000-05:00

Apollo was one of my favorite things at MAX this year. I'm very excited for it to be released, it's nice to see that people outside the Adobe developer family are excited too.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Preparing For Apollo

MyBlogLog

2006-12-11T20:46:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine told me about this site today. It's kind of like MySpace or Facebook for blogs. It's kind of interesting. I don't know how much I'll use it but it does have some good reporting about who's viewing your site.

MyBlogLog

Flex 2 dateChooser Component

2006-12-11T12:06:00.000-05:00

If you've done much work with the dateChooser component in Flex 2 you know that it can be a little restrictive. I was recently working on an app where I wanted to load a list of dates from an XML file and somehow identify that those dates were clickable on the calendar. Turns out the only way to do this is to disable all of the other dates. I ended up dynamically building an array of start and end dates to pass to the disabledRanges method of the dateChooser component. The code is below. This may be obvious to many of you but it caused me a great deal of pain, one important thing to note is to be sure that the elements of your array are Date objects, not strings. Strings won't work....believe me.

The only input for the function is an array collection containing the dates that you want ENABLED.


private function setValidDates(validDates:ArrayCollection):void{
var rangeArray:Array = new Array;
var millisecondsPerDay:int = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24;
for(var i:Number = 0; i < validDates.length; i++){
var startIndex:Number;    
if (i > 0){
startIndex = (i-1);
} else {
startIndex = i
}
var startDate:Date = new Date(validDates[startIndex].getTime() + (1* millisecondsPerDay));
var endDate:Date = new Date(validDates[i].getTime() - (1 * millisecondsPerDay));

if(i == 0){
 rangeArray.push({rangeStart:new Date("Jan 1 1906"),rangeEnd:new Date(endDate)});
} else if(i != validDates.length && i != 0){
 rangeArray.push({rangeStart:new Date(startDate),rangeEnd:new Date(endDate)});
}
}
startDate = new Date(endDate.getTime() + (2*millisecondsPerDay));
rangeArray.push({rangeStart:new Date(startDate)});

myCal.disabledRanges = rangeArray;
}

***UPDATE***
I received a comment recently asking for a sample of the XML used in the example above. I've included a snippet here.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<calendar>
 <calItem>
  <date>1/7/2007</date>
  <milestone>Dad's Birthday</milestone>
  <time></time>
  <location></location>
  <notes>Don't forget to pickup the balloons and the cake at the store before 5:00 on Friday.</notes>
 </calItem>
 <calItem>
  <date>12/6/2006</date>
  <milestone>Christmas Party</milestone>
  <time>7:00pm</time>
  <location>The Wave Room</location>
  <notes></notes>
 </calItem>
</calendar>

YouTube Going Mobile

2006-11-28T08:55:00.000-05:00

Another exciting advancement on the mobile front from Verizon.

BBC NEWS | Technology | YouTube moves to the small screen

Valleyschwag 2 Pic

2006-06-03T11:55:00.000-04:00

So here's what came in my first shipment from Valleyschwag...not bad. I can't wait to see what next month brings!

My First Valleyschwag Shipment!

2006-06-02T09:15:00.000-04:00

So yesterday I received my first shipment of goodies from Valleyschwag. I was qutie excited (I've always been a sucker for schwag). It came with some pretty cool stuff and of course the signature Valleyschwag burlap bag. The highlight was probably the MoveableType t-shirt and wrench. I'll try to post a couple of pictures soon.

MS 150

2006-05-28T22:09:00.000-04:00

I decided to join the office team in the MS 150 bike tour this year. I realize most of you don't know me from Adam but if you'd like to pledge me and support a teriffc cause I'd certainly appreciate it. Just click the link below and search for Tim Todish. Thanks!

Epledge

Tabs Launched on Netvibes

2006-04-07T12:41:00.000-04:00

I saw a post earlier in the week about this being in beta but it appears that they have added it to the live site now. Very cool :)

Netvibes

gotoAndLearn()

2006-04-05T08:15:00.000-04:00

With my buddy Joe leaving to go to knoware last week I've had to dive back into the world of Flash development -- I've been away for a while :(

Anyway, I stumbled accross this site last week while searching a forum, gotoAndLearn.com. It is a great resource of easy to following Flash tutorials done with Flash Video. Perfect for someone like me who learns best by watching someone else.

New Davinci Code Trailer

2006-03-21T09:37:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry, I know it's off topic but I can't help it. May 19!

Da Vinci Code

Survey Management RIA

2006-03-03T15:41:00.000-05:00

We did a soft launch of my first major Coldfusion project yesterday. The app is a complete survey management tool that covers everything from survey creation to reviewing survey results in a Flex dashboard. Unfortunately it's an internal app so I can't post an example but I think we are going to be genericising the content so hopefully we can move it to a public site sometime soon. In the meantime I'm going to put together a small case study that explains some of the key features including data transfer between our internal corporate network and our external data center, integrated Windows authentication etc....

Quick overview of the app:
1. A user visits the survey starter app to initiate a survey. (Coldfusion)
2. A survey is created and sent to a specific client. (Coldfusion)
3. The client recieves and email, clicks a link and takes the survey. (Coldfusion)
4. The data is transfered back to our internal network via BizTalk and a CF web service. (Coldfusion)
5. The person who initiates the survey recieves an email telling them that the survey is complete with a link to view the results in the dashboard. (Coldfusion & Flex)
6. Based on their permission level the user can view results of their own survey(s) and the surveys of people who report to them. (Coldfusion & Flex)

Another Cool Personalized "Desktop"

2006-03-01T09:20:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I did a post about Netvibes which is a slick Web 2.0 welcome screen that you can customize with your favorite feeds, gmail etc...

Recently someone suggested I take a look at Pageflakes. At first glance it looks very similar to Netvibes with much the same functionality. The one thing that really popped out at me though were the tabs at the top of the screen that allow you to setup different views and/or categorize your "flakes." These are a great feature and might just be enough to make me switch from Netvibes.

Netvibes

2006-02-27T09:03:00.000-05:00

Netvibes was listed as one of the top Web 2.0 apps of 2005. Many of you have probably already seen this but for those who missed it like I did, I thought I'd post a quick link.

Netvibes is a dashboard style page with pods you can customize with your own content. You can keep notes, view your Gmail, keep an eye on various feeds, do web searches etc... This can all be achieved without the hassle of having to create an account. Of course, if you want to be able to view your page from multiple computers, an account is required.

netvibes

U.S. Grants Patent For Broad Range Of Internet Rich Applications

2006-02-23T09:09:00.000-05:00

I can't believe this would ever be able to be enforced but it could cause some serious headaches for people until it gets sorted out.

InformationWeek | Pateents | U.S. Grants Patent For Broad Range Of Internet Rich Applications | February 22, 2006

CF Eclipse Tutorials

2006-02-21T15:16:00.000-05:00

I'm just finishing my first major CF project. I built it using Dreamweaver 8 and Flex Builder 1.5 mostly. I'd like to give CF Eclipse but I don't know much about it. I was wondering what advantages (if any) does it have over Dreamweaver, and are there any good tutorials on how to use it out there. Anybody have any ideas/suggestions on this?

9 must have Firefox extensions for web developers

2006-02-20T09:05:00.000-05:00

"Engadget's CSS blog lists 9 Firefox extensions that anyone who works with web technology should check out. Some you might have heard of already, others you may not."

read more | digg story

Coldfusion and Windows Integrated Security

2006-01-27T12:28:00.000-05:00

The project I'm currently working on resides in two locations. One inside our corporate firewall for users to setup a survey and a second outside our firewall for users to actually take the survey. For the internal piece we wanted to be able to identify the user based on their Windows login information so they did not have to log-in a second time.

It took a little searching but once I found what I was looking for it was actually quite simple to implement. First off you need to disable anonymous access to the directory containing you web site in IIS and then enable Windows Integrated Security. Once that is in place you you can use the CGI environment variable AUTH_USER to grab the username of the user currently logged into the machine in the domain\username format.

Final Launch: OMNOVA Solutions - Design Center

2006-01-18T09:25:00.000-05:00

We finally launched the last phase of the OMNOVA Design Center last week. It was a long and sometimes bumpy road but in the end I think we came up with a very good app. The final launch includes five more product lines and a few usability tweaks. You can check it ou at the link below.

OMNOVA Solutions - Design Center

Nokia with Macromedia Flash Player - Gizmodo

2006-01-18T09:16:00.000-05:00

Could this be one of the first Flash enabled phones coming to the States?Probably not, but we can hope....

Nokia with Macromedia Flash Player - Gizmodo

Why SSN should NOT be stored as an integer in a database

2005-12-28T08:43:00.000-05:00

Good synoposis on the dangers of storing some types of user data as integers.

"If you have a hand in storing SSN's on any level during developing, read this. Personally, I've seen this happen too many times."

read more | digg story

Cool use of....Ajax?

2005-12-20T12:15:00.000-05:00

To be honest, I'm not real sure how they're doing this but it's pretty sweet. Watch in real time as stories on digg are updated/added.

http://www.digg.com/spy

CFEclipse

2005-12-20T08:52:00.000-05:00

I downloaded Eclipse yesterday so I could try out CFEclispse. I guess maybe I don't know how to use it because so far it doesn't seem like there is anything better about it vs. Dreamweaver 8. It also seems to choke my system whenever I open it. If anybody has any tips I'd love to hear them. Also, if anyone has suggestions for good Coldfusion development apps I'd like to hear about those too.

Coldfusion is Safe at Adobe

2005-12-08T09:01:00.000-05:00

We're just beginning to use Coldfusion on some projects at work. I'm very excited about what I've seen so far. We've developed a few Flex apps now using VB.NET for the backend data integration and one using Coldfusion. The difference in speed of development between the two was like night and day. I couldn't believe how much easier it was using CF. When the Adobe acquisition occurred there was some concern here over what might happen to CF since Adobe hasn't really had a developer focus in the past. The interview below suggests that everything will be OK :)

Exclusive CFDJ Interview: Where's ColdFusion Headed Under Adobe? @ COLDFUSION DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

l33t $p34k

2005-12-06T16:05:00.000-05:00

For all you n0n-h4x0r$ out there.

BBC - h2g2 - An Explanation of l33t Speak

Google: Ten Golden Rules (Newsweek Article)

2005-12-06T08:49:00.000-05:00

Interesting take on "corporate life."

"Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here's how we do it at google."

read more | digg story

A Preview of Flex Beta 1

2005-11-29T10:10:00.000-05:00

I know it's all over the blogs already but here's a link to the new features in the Flex 2 Beta 1 release.

Mark Anders' Blog: Flex Friday Demos: A Preview of Flex Beta 1

CSS Templates

2005-11-28T11:15:00.000-05:00

Found this on digg. Looks like good stuff, I hate wasting time trying to line things up just so. I'm all for anything that will make that easier :)

intensivstation :: CSS Templates :: Templates

OMNOVA Design Center Ver. 2.0

2005-11-23T16:29:00.000-05:00

Well we launched phase 2 of the OMNOVA design center today. It didn't go quite as smoothly as we hoped but then again, it never does. The new version has a second product line with about 4500 SKU's and some pretty cool new features. Check it out at the link below.

Design Center

WiFi Sniffing

2005-11-22T14:18:00.000-05:00

Good story about WiFi sniffing at a coffee shop I frequent. Be very carefull what you do on public WiFi networks.

Network Intrusion / Invasion

Sony BRAVIA - The Advert

2005-11-16T12:24:00.000-05:00

Got this link from a friend today. Very cool, they didn't use any CGI, it's all real bouncey balls.

Sony BRAVIA - The Advert

Study Predicts Political, Economic Turmoil If UN's Internet Governance Schemes Succeed - Yahoo! News

2005-11-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

Not sure how big of a threat this actually is but it sounds pretty scary to me. The UN has enough problems of its own, they don't need to worry about controling the Internet.

Study Predicts Political, Economic Turmoil If UN's Internet Governance Schemes Succeed - Yahoo! News

Here's a quick tip for ya....

2005-11-15T12:34:00.000-05:00

If you're encrypting querystring variables and then pulling them into Flex (I think Flash will do the same thing) be sure to check your string for a plus sign ("+"). We spent over two hours this morning trying to figure out why a web service call was bombing. Turns out Flex will replace a "+" with a space (" ") so the id it was passing to our web service had a space in the middle of it which caused it to fail. To fix it we did a replace on the back end to put the "+" back in. Good times....

XD: Design for Devices

2005-11-14T09:20:00.000-05:00

I've been interested in working with mobile devices for a while now but I just haven't gotten around to actually doing it. Not to mention trying to find a mobile phone here that supports Flashlite, isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. Anyway, here's a good article on design for multiple devices...

XD: Design for Devices

Macromedia Flex Apps

2005-11-11T13:16:00.000-05:00

OMNOVA Solutions - Design Center

Active Dashboard

Here are a couple of Flex apps we've built so far. My co-worker is a Flash/Flex genious, he built all the front end stuff. I mainly built the back end. The data is all pulled using .NET web services and SQL server databases. I think they turned out pretty well. Our biggest problem initially was figuring out how to make Flex read in the data from the web service. We eventually learned that the results set had to be structured as an array of objects. In the future I think we'll be using Coldfusion to write the web service and CFC's. It's a lot simpler :)

Macromedia XML News Aggregator

2005-11-11T10:17:00.000-05:00

Macromedia XML News Aggregator

Great source for Macromedia related news and events.

My New Tech Blog

2005-11-11T10:13:00.000-05:00

Seems like everyone else has a blog about usefull stuff so I guess I should try to also. My goal is to use this space to talk about projects, post code snippets and ask for help. Hopefully someone out there will find this stuff helpful :