Just a quick note, but I have changed hosting providers for my weblog. The transition should be pretty seamless, and if you are reading this, then you are all set. It might take a day or two for the DNS to update.
The weblog is now being hosted by MediaTemple. They were one of the partners of the on air tour, and hosted the website. They gave us excellent support, and thus when I started to look for a new host, they were the first people I contacted.
I am heading over to Europe in about a week for Flash on the Beach (FOTB) (and the European user group tour), and was checking out the speaker list for FOTB.
It is pretty amazing, which brought the following question to mind:
Is this going to be the best Flash conference ever?
Discuss…
I have just released a simple Mac OS X app named “turl”, that provides a command line / shell interface to online URL shortening services (including urltea.com and tinyurl.com).
Usage is pretty simple:
turl URL
For example:
turl http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/
will create:
http://urltea.com/g88
There are a number of other options, including the ability to specify which URL service is used.
Source is written in Objective-C and released under an MIT License.
You can find more information, as well as download the app and source code from the turl google code project page.
A lot of people have been asking whether the Adobe AIR beta currently works on Apple Leopard (OS X 10.5). I pinged the team and they they told me that they are currently doing some testing, and haven’t run into any major issues yet. However, we are seeing some reports of issues from developers online, so if you are currently working on an AIR app, you might want to wait a little while to upgrade until we have more information.
I just noticed this article posted about Mozilla Prism over at Mozilla Labs. Prism is essentially the idea of a desktop runtime built on top of Firefox that allows web apps to run on the desktop (Im not sure how it related to XUL Runner).
Anyways, it is cool to see some acknowledgment from Mozilla that some apps may provide better experiences if they run outside of the browser, and closer to the desktop.
From the press release:
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it is offering Adobe Flex Builder software at no cost to students and faculty at educational institutions worldwide…. Adobe Flex 2 will be available to qualified education end-users for free download on Adobe.com in early November.
You can read the entire press release here.
Continuing my series of posts of interesting, but not too useful ActionScript tips (which I learned from studying Objective-C), did you know that you don’t have to initialize your counter variable within a for loop.
For example, this is perfectly valid:
package {
import flash.display.Sprite;
public class LoopTest extends Sprite
{
public function LoopTest()
{
var i:int = 0;
for(; i < 5; i++)
{
trace(i);
}
}
}
}
As you can see, the variable is initialized outside of the loop.
I have been studying some Objective-C in my spare time, and was reading up on Bitwise operators tonight. I came across a simple way to exchange the value of two variables using the Exclusive-OR (XOR) operator that doesn’t require creating a temporary variable.
Normally, if you wanted to exchange the value of two variables, you would have to create a temp variable to store values temporarily (which uses additional memory). For example:
Craig Goodman just sent out an email highlighting some of the new Flex and AIR content on the Adobe Developer Center.
Articles:
Uploading files to a server from an Adobe AIR application
Explore different scenarios that leverage the Adobe AIR framework for uploading files from a user’s desktop to a remote server.
Mashing up Google Maps with Adobe AIR
Explore how to integrate web tools such as Google Maps with an Adobe AIR application.
Lee Brimelow and I are doing a two week European User group tour at the beginning of November. We will be discussing the Flash Platform and Adobe AIR (session descriptions below).
Here is the schedule, with links to the user group’s websites.
Here is a link the tour dates in Google Calendar (I’ll keep this updated).