As you may or may not know you cannot reference _root or _level0 from applications running within Central. This is because the application is actually running within the Central controller which itself is built within Flash (thus _root does not reference your application’s _root).
Ted Patrick has posted some information and code snippets showing how to work around this issue if you need to reference the root of your application.
I have just uploaded the 1.0 version of the Stand-alone Central Trace Panel for Mac OS X. This is a wrapper for the Central Trace panel included on the Central SDK.
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The Central Trace Panel includes the following features:
You can download the application from here.
You can download the source from here.
A couple of new articles have been posted to the Central Developer Center at Macromedia.com.
The first is an article that I wrote titled:
Using the Central Accordion Tab Component
which, as the title suggests, shows how to use the ever popular Accordion Tab component included on the Central SDK.
The second article is written by Ethan Malasky, and is titled:
Using Notices in Macromedia Central
This article discusses everything you need to know about using, sending and receiving notices in Macromedia Central.
If you have used the Central trace panel, you may have noticed the “App Name Filter” text field in the bottom left of the panel. This is used to filter trace messages coming from Central so you only see messages coming from your application.
So, how do you use this? It is actually pretty simple.
First, you need to set a global variable in your App / Agent / Pod that tells Central your application name. This is done using:
I have created an OS X version of my stand-alone Central Trace Panel. This basically allows you to run the Central Trace / Debug panel outside of the Flash IDE.
Update (12/17/2003) : I have released version 1.0 of the Trace Panel. You can find more information about it here.
I just finished an article on using the Central Accordion Tab component. It will be on the Central DevNet Center in a week, but I thought I would go ahead and give a sneak peak.
Below is an excerpt from the article that shows how to manage application views using the component. Note, that this has not been edited yet, so may contain typos, grammar mistakes or code errors. If you have any questions or run into any problems, post them in the comments.
We have posted some changes related to Central and licensing at Macromedia.com. We have made some tweaks to the EULA to make it clearer what a commercial application is, and have updated the FAQ with about 20 new questions on licensing and other items.
Finally, you can now buy Central capacity packs in packs of 20 or 100. This significantly lowers the entry point for deploying Central applications internally.
Here are the links:
Just this week I switched to OS X and found my self wanting to really take advantage of the shell. I have always wanted to be able to do shell scripting in a language that I know well, and I finally found a solution (I know enough bash shell scripting to get in trouble).
You may have heard of the Rhino project. A Mozzila project for creating and maintaining a Java based JavaScript parser. Well, what you may not have know, and what I just found out, is that it also includes a command line javascript interpreter that allows you to write shell scripts in JavaScript.
With the release of the developer release of Central, we are turning our sites on the next version. So, what features would you like to see in the next version of Central?
Post your suggestions in the comments (the more detail the better).
I am lining up articles for the DevNet Center, and was curious what articles developers would like to see written.
So, what Central Development articles would you like to see posted to the Central DevNet Center?
The next two articles will be an introduction to notifications, and how to use the Central Tab component.
Post your suggestions in the comments.
