Finally got around to adding a case-study to my corporate site including a screen-cast of some of the features of my longest running project, a Flex/AIR application for communicating football moves and plays. Essentially a digital, animated version of a football tactic board.
More details and the screen-cast are on the creative-cognition case-study page.
After various Mac system and security updates found that ssh+svn would result in errors…
svnserve: Command not found. svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
Updated my previous article on using svn+ssh with DreamWeaver with a solution.
Blowing my own trumpet for a moment… last week I sat and passed as Adobe® Certified Expert in Flex with AIR. Which I hope will help make my case with prospective clients.
… at the London Flash Platform User Group… tomorrow (29 Jan 2009).
Really handy! … ActionScript 3, Air and Flex documentaion distributed as an application on iPhone and iPodTouch – by Mike Chambers.
Downloaded it, had a play, simple and effective. A ‘back’ button would be nice though in future versions 🙂
Fireworks CS4 users have been suffering an odd text shifting problem where text becomes difficult to select and renders outside it’s bounding box while editing. Today an extension was released providing a temporary workaround in by Arun Kaza’s 12/16/2008 10:13:25 AM post on page 3 of this thread.
Wishing those at Adobe writing about DreamWeaver’s wonderful subversion integration would not keep omitting Deletion. Perhaps it is because deletion is not implemented in any automated sense (link) in DreamWeaver’s subversion client and the only sensible way to manage deletions or indeed renames (which as far as subversion is concerned is delete old file and add new file) is to use a 3rd party client. In my opinion this is all the more reason to mention this in articles like that in December’s EDGE “A guide to Subversion integration in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4”. Failing to provide notes on file deletions and file renames is going to leave newbie subversion users in a bit of a mess, with old files hanging around, or being restored when not expected following a revert.
My earlier notes related: Dreamweaver CS4, Subversion and site Synchronize. Two cautions.
An emerging pet hate of mine: AIR applications that do-away with the system chrome, only to then re-implement parts of it, but ignoring host-system conventions. Note this isn’t anything to do with AIR itself, more to do with designers and/or developers not entirely considering user-experience across all platforms.
The example above taken from Tour de Flex.
Personally for this app I see no reason not to have used the host system’s chrome. Doing so would have entirely avoided this issue. But to re-implement fundamental controls such as those pictured using positioning and icons based on only one operating system in an app which is cross-platform undermines the user-experience for users of other systems. In the example, a Windows arrangement and appearance is used which feels wrong on a Macintosh system, where the arrangement should be reversed and in the left rather than the right corner of the window. That it is Adobe setting this presedent in a number of their AIR applications is disapointing. I hope it is a convention other AIR developers will not follow. I certainly wont.
Will probably yield scary looking error:
Process terminated without establishing connection to debugger.
Command:
“/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.2.0/bin/adl” -runtime “/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.2.0/runtimes/air/mac” /PathToProject/bin-debug/Project-app.xml /PathToProject/bin-debug
Output from command:
error while loading initial content
So, basically by setting the project to compile against the SDK 3.2 you are implicitly changing the version of AIR you are building against from earlier versions to 1.5. To fix you need to open file :
/PathToProject/Project-app.xml
and change the namespace to “http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5”
This has already been logged as a bug (FB-15687) in the bugbase against Gumbo, by the release of which, hopefully it will be intercepted to present a more meaningful message.
New Tour De Flex application looking like a very cool and a very useful resource. More information…
Basically it’s a Flex Component explorer as an AIR application and Eclipse plugin.
Just thinking I’d have preferred that the System Chrome was used in the AIR app to provide the min/max/close buttons rather than those alien windows style icons on the wrong side of the window. Mac user me! 😉