Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 29th, 2007
If you are from the Richmond/Central Virginia area and going to the Adobe OnAir Bus Tour event in Washington D.C. on August 20, raise your hand. If I can swing it, I might go to the Baltimore event the next day too. :)
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 24th, 2007
I’ve updated my MonitR app to the current Adobe Integrated Runtime.
If you’ve been made paranoid about your site’s uptime due to shitty web hosts, you will understand why I made this app.
MonitR is a little desktop app that checks to see if it can connect to a list of websites every five minutes. Green is good. Red is bad.
Get it here.
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 17th, 2007
I spent this weekend writing a simple ‘Data Access Layer’ utility class to be used with AIR applications and sqlite. If you are not familiar with using a ‘DAL’, data access layers act as transparent layer between your application and the database to handle the data processing. This keeps the view code clean and the sql commands as reusable methods.
You can download everything here. The zip contains the project and the AIR file.
I think I’ve commented the code pretty well. If you have any questions or comments let me know.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 17th, 2007
I don’t really watch much TV but I admit a few nights a week I enjoy having a couple beers and yelling at the cable ‘make believe’ news channels.
A few years back my kids got tired of hearing me nag them about constantly losing/ruining/destroying the TV remote so they bought me a watch with a built in TV remote. No more lost remotes. No more “we took out the batteries so now you have reprogram the thing if you want to use it”. I always had it with me and I could even see the time. Amazing.
Last November, someone stole that watch from my wife’s purse at a very crowded blues festival. We tried ordering others but Casio had stopped making the TV Remote watch and we just couldn’t get a hold of one. Dang.
Fast forward to last week. My kids wanted to buy me a new watch because I had been using my phone as my watch for the last six months. My daughter and I were at Target and decided to look at watches for “gift ideas for father’s day”. When we had come to the end of the Mens Watches:
Daddy – “Well that’s the end of the mens watches and I’m not gonna wear a ladies watch.”
Maddy – “You wouldn’t wear a ladies watch? What if it had a TV remote?”
Daddy – “hmmm”
Maddy – “What if it was blue? That’s your favorite color.”
Daddy – “Well.. yeah.”
Maddy – “What if the watch sprayed beer?”
Daddy – “Don’t even tease about such a thing”
Six years old. Wow that kid knows me. :)
Sorry to say we were not able to find such a wonderful gift but they got me a watch with a built in heart rate monitor I can use to alert me while I’m running that I need to pick up the pace. ;)
Happy Father’s Day.
Posted by brandonthedeveloper at June 11th, 2007
uhhhhh … Why?
I think Safari is a swell browser and all but, “Safari on the pc?”. I don’t get the point. I just don’t see anyone saying, “man, I really wish I had another browser for my pc. I’ve only got like three right now. (I included Opera for the sake of argument)”. I guess being a developer having Safari on the pc will be good for testing as long as JavaScript/DOM and CSS render exactly the same as on the mac.
I don’t get it.
ps – This post was written on a mac. In Firefox.
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.
