Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 7th, 2007

Oh man. With all the Moxie and FrogStar goodness Ted Patrick has been sharing all week, I cannot wait to get my hands on the Flex 3.

As petty as this sounds, how can Silverlight realistically compete in the RIA market with all the great new features right around the corner with Flex, Apollo and the next Flash Player?

GO TED GO!

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 3rd, 2007

Here’s an Apollo gotcha I’ve been meaning to post for a few weeks now.

In a super secret app I am working on in Apollo, I need to allow the user to open files that have been saved to the App-Storage directory of the application. Sounds easy enough and it is easy enough but coming from a .net background I messed it all up.

You would think this would work but it doesn’t:
var file:File = File.appStorageDirectory.resolve(imageLib.selectedItem.name);
// pretend there is an image component on stage
myImage.source = file.nativePath;
// file.nativePath returns something like this on Windows:
C:\Documents and Settings\brandon\Application Data\MyApolloApp\Local Store\hungOverSanta.jpg
and this on Mac:
/Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/MyApolloApp/Local Store/hungOverSanta.jpg

both file paths are correct and if you plug them into an explorer window will pull up the image.

The correct way is like this:
var file:File = File.appStorageDirectory.resolve(imageLib.selectedItem.name);
// pretend there is an image component on stage
myImage.source = “app-storage:/” + file.name;

Huh?

I know there is some internal string association going on there but really, that is different than any type of File System Object I’ve ever seen. I only found one reply about it at the Adobe Forums. Hopefully my post here will save someone else the headache and (if I wasn’t bald already) hair pulling I went through while trying to figure this out.

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at May 14th, 2007

So I’ve been working on this little app for quite a few evenings. It’s not that the inside was so difficult as much a me not wanting the outside to look like butt. ;)

And depending on your level of graphic design, it very well could look that way.

We have quite a few sites we host for clients and after our last experience with a horrible host provider (NET TELCOS), we became a little paranoid about site uptime. This app just sits on my desktop and pings a list of sites every five minutes and displays the results – Green is good, Red is bad. It doesn’t do much more than that, doesn’t spin like a dryer or recommend music but it definitely gives me ‘peace of mind’ to know if a site were to go down (hasn’t happened yet – Peak10 has been great), I would at least know and be able to communicate any issues to our host.

In honor of my 44th birthday today, I’d like to open up this app to anyone and everyone. Hope someone else finds it half as useful as I have.

I’m sure I don’t need to mention this but just in case, you need the Apollo Runtime to run this app. It can be found here – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

Here’s the link to my app – http://www.apollohunter.com/browse/detail.php?id=112

cheers,
Brandon

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at April 8th, 2007

This started off as a comment to a great post over at The Universal Desktop discussing why some developers might not see the value in creating desktop applications.

I can see where Simeon Bateman is coming from but only when I put it in the perspective of ‘Is the cost/effort necessary to create a xPlatform desktop solution going to be a viable option?’.

With Zinc it was possible but Zinc never ever fully lived up to their xPlatform claims (not to mention the giant file sizes necessary to create a standalone application). Apollo changes that allowing developers to really write once, deploy on Windows and OS X.

The other thing I think developers are missing out on is understanding that the more communication vehicles you can use, the wider audience you will reach. Lots of companies post a website, add some keywords, submit to Google and wait for users to show up. Once they do, how do you keep them interested and informed? Well, you can use twitter, email, web, rss, desktop app. And if you do it right, can write new content once and push it through all of the listed mediums for no charge.

I’ve said this a million times now, Content Delivery and ‘Ease of Use’ are the keys to keeping users. You give the users multiple vehicles to get the information and you make it easy for them. Some folks like to look at twitter. Some like RSS. Some like email. Some like the web but the easiest way of pushing content back to the user with the least ‘click throughs’ is the desktop. If you tell the user ‘hey download our desktop application to get your information updates delivered and customized to you’ and all they have to do is open it to be alerted of new content, what could be an easier way of delivery?

That also brings up the goodness of the disconnected application maintaining state and synchronizing content when reconnected to the web. I know that doesn’t happen often anymore but from time to time we travel and may lose connectivity or just not be on. Imagine being an IT recruiter who travels a lot and doesn’t have 100% connectivity. Knowing that if a new TPS report has been uploaded to the server and will be downloaded to your desktop app without you having to worry about it is great in that the responsibility and accountability have been taken out of the hands of the user. Try doing that with a browser based application and tell me about the ‘Ease of Use’ experience for the user.

I think the best practice is to figure out what the best tool for the job is and go with that but not forget that everyone receives information differently and we as content providers need to take that into consideration.

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at April 4th, 2007

Just got my Apollo shirt from ScaleNine and its great. Quality tee, screening is very clean. I’m gonna order another one.

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at March 28th, 2007

Music To Code By – a little bit of everything.

It sounds great through the finetune desktop player (made with Apollo). :)

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at March 27th, 2007

If so, I’m considering starting an Adobe Flex/Flash/Apollo user group. We had the Flash Developer User Group but they haven’t met since October or November of last year and their blog hasn’t been updated since the beginning of September.

With the exponential increase in Flash/Flex/Apollo development, I’d be interested in meeting the developers in my area. There are quite a few in town but we need to strengthen the network. This group would be for anyone interested in Adobe technologies.

Interested? Shoot me an email – brandonthedeveloper AT gmail DOT com.

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at March 23rd, 2007

Loading html either from a string or a location to an HTML component, if you have instances of target=”_blank” inside an anchor tag, it will not work. You can use target=”_self” though.

I got rid of them with a little regulare expression replacement (which is great in AS3):

var regex:RegExp = /target="_blank"/gi;
body = body.replace(regex, "");
html.htmlText = body

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at March 20th, 2007

2007 and I still hear folks asking what is the benefit of targeting the desktop -

Two words – Content Delivery.
Want to keep yourself fresh in the mind of users? – Content Delivery.
Want to get new content to users without the wonder of will they come to the site? – Content Delivery.
Want to do mass information updates pushed to the user? – Content Delivery.

I don’t see why folks have such a hard time with this.

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at March 20th, 2007

I posted this a few months back but I just got bit in the ass again by it.

If you are loading a swf into a Flex/Apollo project, and your swf file is using _level0 references, it will not work. The swf sees the parent application as _level0 and itself as _root.
I can’t believe I got caught up with this again! Hopefully I can save someone else from having to deal with this kind of trouble.