:cubicleman.com

Awesome!! Universalmind has made the list of fastest growing private companies this year coming in at 290. Though my tenure has been short so far with Universalmind, it has been awesome working with the best and brightest in the industry. I am excited to be part of such a tremendous team and anticipate the times ahead as we grow. You can read about the exciting news here at Inc 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America.

Don’t know who Universalmind is? We are a team of developers whose collective mind tackles your problems and solves them. As a team, we have developed, and continue to enrich, a core knowledge base of best practices for building, troubleshooting, and optimizing complex, high-performance web applications. Check us out here: http://www.universalmind.com. Come talk to us at Adobe MAX Chicago at the Universalmind booth too!

DK

Update: Thanks to Mike at Inc.com for correcting a obvious blunder.

We had a great conversation at CF_Lunch today. CF_Lunch? Well, if you are in the Atlanta area, the local CFUG promotes lunches for CF folks to get together. Check out http://www.acfug.org.

So, what’s with the title of this post? During our conversation a member posed the statement: I don’t get it. He was referring to AIR and its usefulness. Well, it got us all thinking. As developers, AIR is another kewl bread slicer, but what is AIR to say the VP of IT at ? Sure, it allows IT to leverage the skills of Flex/Flash developers to build desktop applications, but what else? What else in relation to Enterprise IT, ie inTRAnets? I could pose a few things perhaps, like cross-platform abilities, thought that is not a selling point for inTRAnets, eh? But what about you, what do you think?

The table discussed the recent AIR event. A few of us felt adding some content to address this to the event could really help the product.

DK

Ok, so yesterdays AIR Tour in Atlanta was awesome. I finally got the time to actually write something too. During the presentations we saw the HTML browser in AIR example, yet again. I think this example is really nice as it shows how AIR encapsulates a large complex problem into a simple tag solution. However I think the example gets lost quick as most people don’t see a real use in that. I can hear the IT Manager: ‘Ugh, why do I need this AIR, we have IE?’. Although the example does show that you can quickly and easily wrap your web app with AIR and completely remove any issue with that back button as well as add some branding of sorts maybe. You can also ‘mash’ a existing web app with a new Flex based app inside AIR with this. I think it would be good to add a few of these, or other, ideas into this example.

That said, it is wonderful example to get started with AIR, of course AFTER you write your Hello World app! Thus I created a HTML browser in AIR yesterday, with a few additions. Namely, I’ve created a tabbed browser. Its not feature rich or anything, hey we all have IE and that’s all we need, right? Ok, Ok. Those Apple folks have Jungle, err Outback? Oh, Safari! hehe.

Here is the zip to the source. It is Flex based of course. Enjoy!
TabbedBrowserInAIR

updated: as Rostislav Siryk pointed out, be a good idea to post the AIR file, eh? So here it is:
TabbedBrowserInAIR AIR File

yeehaw! At the Adobe AIR Tour now. Cool setup and a huge crowd! Word is its the largest registration of AIR events. Mike Chambers is up describing a Hello World AIR app. For Flex folks, looks so similar to writing a Flex app: use Flex Builder 3 > New > AIR Application….bamm! Looking forward to the topics following.

Peas

DK

Ok, so for a few weeks now I’ve been hating GTalk on Vista. Every time there is a conversation going it hangs totally. I have to wait sometimes 2 or 3 minutes to reply. I just found that turning off all message even notifications does the trick. Maybe its some sort of sound card issue??? Anyhoo, happily GTalking now!

HTH

DK

So, I got this here laptop that has the monster Vista on it. All pretty like it is, just fun finding where things were moved or renamed. I’ve been doing some Flex development which of course means I need a traffic sniffer that can decode AMF, thus the use of ServiceCapture. Personally I like Charles better, easier to setup for starters, but alas I’ve been dealt ServiceCapture. In the end they do the same job, so go go go.

The problem is upon installing ServiceCapture I could not get it to work with Firefox. Yes, I did point the auto proxy setting to the firefox.js file, but it would not work. Well, I finally figured it out last night, permissions. Right click the firefox.js file and change the permissions on it. I’ll leave it to you the reader to decide what level you wish to use, I just granted everyone full control myself. Now it works a treat. SC really needs a FF plugin to handle this though, like Charles does, makes it mucho easier.

aha! SwitchProxy! Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/125 for a proxy switcher. This allows the automagic proxy pointer to a file option. THis way you can create a proxy entry called service capture and easily switch between no proxy and service capture. Nice!

Now, if only I could get ServiceCapture working with IE7 on Vista.
[edit] Let me be more specific, it works in IE7 on Vista, but not for the current app I’m working on that is Flex based hitting webservices via HTTPS.

DK

A recent post to the AFFUG list ( http://www.affug.org ) re-visited the little surprise about how Flash transmits dates with TZ info. Now, I say surprise because coming form the static world of HTML, this was new to me.

The short story: A Date created in ActionScript on the client will include TZ info. When this Date is passed to the server-side, Java/ColdFusion ( What about .NET, PHP, etc? ), this info is retained and subsequently passed to other systems like your big Oracle DB perhaps. Hey, that’s nice, well except if you want all your Date-Times to be say Eastern.

The skinny: How to address this if you want everything to be locked to a TZ? Well, one way is to use the offset property of Date in ActionScript. Just massage all your dates coming in and out of your Flex app with this offset. Works a treat.

DK