:cubicleman.com

Ok, I admit it, I used a sensational subject line. So what. Google is really the new evil, well we certainly could call it a entry on the top 5 list of fashionably evil companies of late. Will it be on top? We shall see. But I digress.

I’ve been using the Google Chrome browser for several months now. I find it far better then Safari, using less resources, fast, etc. Upon the first install, the beta version of course, I imagine I saw a link to or saw the text of the EULA or TOS flash by in a series of NEXT depresses. It is too bad, some interesting wording was in there, in a place most consumers have become accustomed to not reading at all, legalese, eh? Did you read it dearest reader? I thought so. So what are the interesting parts?

11. Software updates
11.1 The Software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the Services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the Services.
20.2 From time to time, Google Chrome may check with remote servers (hosted by Google or by third parties) for available updates to extensions, including but not limited to bug fixes or enhanced functionality. You agree that such updates will be automatically requested, downloaded, and installed without further notice to you.

Hmmm….I MUST agree to updates of Chrome, eh? In fact, there is no way to turn this off! On a MAC there are some possible ways around this But WTF? I can’t easily shut this off as a feature? Sure, forcing updates means ultimately a more secure product, but its my choice damn it! Take that away and you are evil, and I don’t mean in the Knievel way. Heck, even the ubiquitously evil Microsoft allows this, eh?

So, that aside, its a great browser and works a treat when debugging my Flash Platform based applications. Oh wait, except for one small caveat. Google decided to bundle Flash Player 10.1 with Chrome. Hey, that’s awesome! Google is helping to spread the Flash wealth, nice. What’s that Steve? Yeah, whatever.

Why would I complain about this? Google Chrome pushes Flash Player 10.1 Release. This is really pretty cool, as then Chrome updates can push out the new plugin in case of, ahem, security issues for one. As a Flash Platform developer, this pains me no end though! Why? Consider this: I work in Flash daily and constantly use the debug player to do that work. I’ve set Chrome as my default browser ( brownie points G? ) I kick off the debugger with Flash Builder and rock the code, yeehaw! A nice “forced upon me” Chrome update comes along with out any real notification that happens to update Flash Player and bammmm! I waste productive time watching Flash Builder spin endlessly trying to connect to a debug player. ugh!

With this setup Chrome literally points to using the packaged Flash Player installed with Chrome. There is no way to directly change things in Chrome to point to using a external Flash Player plugin version. So, that magical update of Chrome can cost me a hour of time when suddenly the Flash Player in use is now the one Google deems apropos release Flash Player 10.1. yikes! Just to be clear here, the setup now IGNORES your system installed Flash Player plugin.

So, what can a developer do? aha!! or beter maybe: SHAZZAM!!!! Form of a pail of settings…oh, sorry. Open Chrome and navigate to about:plugins There you will find a listing of plugins available to Chrome and links to enable/disable. Just disable the stock Flash Player, usually the first on the list, and enable the installed one likely the second entry. Here is a screen-shot of what I’m talking about.

A year back I bought a Logitech MX Revolution. The mouse absolutely rawks. Big heavy and ergo. The hyper scroll wheel gizmo is really awesome. You can actually set the acceleration threshold on it too. Well, after a year, its still working just swell, but the finish is starting to peel on it on the right side. I contacted Logitech Support about it. Their contact tool allowed me to upload a pic I snapped of the peeling mouse. Within 24 hours I had a reply asking for my contact info. Another 24 hours and I had three contacts from them: 1) from the support person saying another mouse is being shipped, 2) from their support group surveying my feelings on the process, and 3) a shipping confirmation. Shortly after that came the UPS tracking number.

Yesterday I received the new mouse. The packaging mentioned nothing about returning the old one nor did the customer service rep! Talk about customer service. I’ve never had to deal with Logitech before. I think their products are top notch and this experience has really solidified my thoughts on them. Anyone else have such a experience?

peas

DK

MAX is only a short hop away on the calendar now. Looking forward to meeting some of you peeps out there, some great sessions, some sneak peeks, some big news about…I can’t say, oh yeah, and the free b33r! w00t!

At this years MAX we will see three, no four now, un-conferences. These are free conferences within MAX brought to you by folks you know and love in the community.

Ray ‘Jedi’ Camden will be leading the ColdFusion Unconference with some help from Scott Stroz, hey even a Jedi has to slip out for more free b33r and mini quiches. Please join us for some great topics brought to you by folks like Charlie Arehart, Brian Rinaldi, and Mike Brunt to name a few.

Those amazing wonder twins Tom and John will be activating their powers in the form of 360 and MAX to bring us 360|MAX. Drop by and get your Flex and AIR on for sure. Come see the Merapi Overmen show off some really uber kewl Flex/AIR-meet-Java relationship building. You can grab a chair, if any are left, and hear folks like Juan Sanchez, Laura Arguello, Jun Heider, just to name a few speak on Flex.

FiTC will also be in the MAX house. Head there to catch Ethan Eismann, Lee Brimelow, or Grant Skinner among other Flash Titans.

SoDA will also be there holding discussions on business of design agencies and related topics.

So, there you have it folks. With all the content going on this year, I may just have to escape the hallway cruising and sit down and consume! Yeehaw!

peas

DK

Ok, so I’m no CSS Zen master, far from it actually. The thought of creating good CSS that is cross-browser supported and all just makes me shiver. I had to look at something today concerning links with fancy image backgrounds and rollovers that tweaked this image. After some quick googling, I am a card carrying member of the Google Brain Club, I found this neat article on A List Apart on something they call CSS Sprites. Wow, what a cool deal. Basically you use a single image for all of your links and just reposition this image as a background. What does this gain? Well, for starters only one image needs to be loaded or preloaded. Sure, this one image may be bigger than a single one of the single link backgrounds, but the composite is likely to be smaller and take only one request. It might very well fall into the same number of packets as a single one too depending on image compression and such.

So, how to pull it off? I’ll go over a quick single link example. First, fire up Fireworks (can you tell I’m not a real graphics guy? :} ) and create your two link, or button, states. Here is a sample:

Now, use some simple CSS magic:
#outerCont {top:0px; left:0px; background: url( images/button_states.gif ) 0 0 no-repeat;}
#outerCont a:hover { background: url( images/button_states.gif ) -200px 0 no-repeat;}

Here is a sample page showing it in action:
button_states.html

Back to our regularly scheduled Flex/Air fun!

peas
DK

Mr. Ben Forta is heading to Atlanta for the tour. Please come and join us at the January 22nd Atlanta Flex and Flash User Group. Check out the link after the break for the full details and please be kind and RSVP.

http://www.affug.org

peas

gosh, I really need to blog more often, eh? Well its a new year, so maybe…nope, this ain’t gonna be one of those ‘hop on the I am posting my new years resolutions bandwagon’ posts!

Ok, so, I’m a dude in IT. Naturally I dig electronics. That said, I have a really slow acceleration on uptake So, I don’t have a iPod, iPhone, well nor a Mac for that matter. I did finally break down and buy a wireless mouse. After snooping around the net for months I finally went to a store to get physical as it were. The top three mice to look at on my list were all Logitech brands: MX Revolution, VX Revolution, and the Nano. When up front and in person, the Nano is too small for daily use. Sure would be great for a traveling lappy user though. The store was out of MX revolutions, so I snagged the VX. After two days I was convinced it was too small. So I hit a Fry’s and snagged the MX Revolution. Holy Mouse Traps Batman! This thing is expensive! Well, considering its the first mouse I purchased in ~8 years, I was a daily user of a 3-button Logitech forever, $99 doesn’t sounds so bad.

The mouse is totally schweeeet! Glides nice and has a good weight to it. Kind of heavy actually, but to me that’s good. It has ample buttons including a thumb button that looks like a wheel, it has three positions. Oh, and speaking of the wheel, interesting. It has a auto sensing switch that based on the speed at which you are spinning the wheel switches between freewheelin or coastin. Odd way to explain it, eh? Basically it goes from a wheel that has positions as you roll it to none. Why is this cool? In freewheelin mode you can traverse say 50 pages of a Word doc in seconds. You can set the threshold of the switch in the SetPoint tools.

The cons? Price! When you press one of the two switches on the left side used by your thumbs the mouse can literally lift up a bit. The other thing, seems the SetPoint software is conflicting with Dreamweaver, which I use minimally anyhoo.

ok….next up is a keyboard. Any suggestions? No split keyboards for me, I can’t touch type. A couple of reasons why I can’t, but that’s another post.

peas

So, I’ve been wanting to play around with this PaperVison3D schtuff. Why? Well, I certainly do not use 3D in my job, I just wanted to! Unfortunately time demands, new baby and all, keep me from really digging into it. Add to this, almost all the stuff so far that I have seen is Flash based…as in not Flex. There are a couple Flex based examples. One is in the PaperVision3D source called FlexFocus. Another recent great example is from that master robe wearer Doug McCune himself. He calls it CoverFlow. In either of these Flex based cases, terms like Sprite and Clipping are used, Flash terms again that I’m not all familiar with. Though I can brag about playing with Sprites on the C64 and IBM PC way back when, but those were wholly different animals. Thus I sat down and employed the all to famous design patter: Hack It Up. The result? A cross of Canvas3D and Lee Brimelow’s Carousel FLA.

Now, what the heck does the code do? I’ve commented some where I know, there is much in there I just don’t follow…yet. The short and skinny: the images are placed in planes, the planes are positioned and rotated in such a way to appear to be in a 3D carousel, this carousel is fixed, the buttons tell the camera to render the scene from a different vantage point along a circle. The math behind it is elementary, though I’m sure there is a bit more to that PaperVision3D Plane, BitMapMaterial, etc…

What does my version add to the mix? One, its Flex based…use the tag Luke! Two, I have incorporated the use of a public dataProvider to inject the URLs of the images. Yes Dorothy, you can change this dataProvider at runtime. See the example below, the test button at the bottom swaps the dataProvider.

Carousel Roundabout Exmaple
Source code is fully available via the context menu of FP.

DK

ok, hoping to step out and coin a new term: BRIA
BRIA is Business Rich Internet Applications. Idea is a RIA and BRIA are a little different to me. Consider Finetune, Pandora, or Scrapblog in contrast to say BusinessObjects, Fidelity Mortgage Search, or Viziant. BRIA are a subset of RIA focused on pure business applications such as the Enterprise sector.

Go ahead, use it, steal it, let me sue you for it. hehe…jk

DK

Using Eclispe and Trac? Would you like to see your Trac issues in Eclipse? Maybe even create and update Trac issues in Eclipse? You are in luck! A co-worker just discovered this and I promptly set it up. The project is called Mylyn. Its a plugin for Eclipse that is designed to be a ‘Task-Focused UI for Eclipse’. It can interface with Trac, Jira, and Bugzilla. Besides working with issues directly inside Eclipse, it also monitors the issue base and notifies you of new issues. Really sweet. Read about it below. You can install easily via Eclipse update tool too.

http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/

DK

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.