A quick tip if you’re using Flex Builder and are missing a quick way to format your code. Flex Formatter is a free open source plugin that adds some very useful buttons to your IDE. These will make ASDoc, format, and code rearrangement just one click away.
Get the plugin from SourceForge or read Grant Skinner’s installation guide to install it from within Flex Builder.
Firefox 3.5 as well as many smartphone browsers like Mobile Safari include a JavaScript API to geo-enable your web applications. Using it is pretty simple, and it gives us the ability create a completely new range of services utilizing the user’s current position. We can use it to position yourself on a graphical map or use yr.no’s weather API to get the weather right where you are.
Adobe is steadily letting out more details on new features in Flash CS5. In addition to the ability to publish native iPhone applications from Flash, Flash CS5 will also include a new physics engine. In the video above, you can see how they use a single panel to let designers easily add weight and other properties to their objects. Properties from this panel will be used to “pre-record” the movements on the timeline before the movie is published.
I’m eagerly awaiting to see if the ActionScript part of this engine will provide a full-feautured set of physics tools, or if we still have to use 3rd party tools like Box2DFlashAS3 (which is great btw.) for advanced runtime physics.
Screenshot of Making Waves Labs using Safari 4
This blog is not just a place for new content. It is also our test bench for presentation. CSS3 is currently a buzz word around front-end developers, and it provides new possibilities to make the path from design to website much more straight-forward and joyful. Even if it’s still in its early stages, all web browser makers (all except Microsoft) have teamed up to make this a future standard. Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome already support a great number of the properties/selectors, and because not everybody will see all features today, CSS3 will degrade gracefully for users with less-than-optimal software.
After creating Flash ads for Google AdWords, I think I have stumbled upon some tips that will save other developers from a lot of debugging. Browsing Google’s AdWords documentation, I found these basic requirements for Flash ads:
Flash ads must be 50K or smaller in size and utilize Flash versions 4 – 8. All Flash ads should support the clickTAG variable.
Even if my ads met these requirements, they would not get accepted by the upload tool. The error message I got was “An error occurred. Please try again later”. Thank you. Very helpful!
I started eliminating code, and finally after removing all references to Tweener, it worked! After some more searching, I found another page called Follow our requirements for Flash image ads. It seems the Tweener package includes calls to Math.random(), and by Google’s second requirements page, random numbers are strictly forbidden.
The lesson is: Even if you have found some requirements, it doesn’t mean you have found them all. And please stay away from Math.random(). 
During the last days I’ve been testing accessibility issues in Flex. Screen readers (SR) in particular. The most common SRs in Norway are JAWS, SuperNova, WindowEyes og Blindows. Out of these only JAWS and WindowEyes have Flash Player support. Most of my testing has been with JAWS, which is the most common SR in Norway and the SR with best Flex compability.
Following is a compilation of procedures, findings and experiences from my tests. No conclusions are reached yet. I’ll leave those to a later post.
Alternative title: What I’ve been doing is wrong
Different browsers have different “default” styles, which makes it a challenge to even make text appear the same way across all of them. When you want to accomplish this, there is a well known CSS trick that I’ve been using for a long time: Read More »