mercoledì, ottobre 29, 2008

Creating Windows Shortcuts in Adobe AIR

I was just starting to dig into experimenting shortcuts in AIR. Particularly, I want to create custom hotkey with my shortcut. There is a terrific article on Windows Shortcuts in AIR at Awen Code:

“This should have been easy, but thanks to Microsoft's proprietary binary file format, it really wasn't…the standard Windows shortcut file is a .lnk file.

“As you'd expect, it being a Microsoft format, there's no official documentation on the file format itself. Microsoft expects you to use their COM objects and APIs to both read and write these files. Unfortunately we've got no way to get at these APIs from AIR.”

“However, there is an alternative.

“Windows also supports .url files; these are intended to be Internet Explorer links, but it turns out that you can use them in an identical way to normal Windows shortcuts. Happily, they are simple text files and format is really easy.”

myPhotoshopBrushes.com

Seems like a very useful (and generous – free?) site!

“myPhotoshopBrushes.com is a great collection of Adobe Photoshop brushes, patterns, tutorials and many useful Photoshop stuff. They are made by artists all over the world and all are free to use. Take a look, find something interesting for you and free download. With us design can be easier than ever.”

http://myphotoshopbrushes.com/

martedì, ottobre 28, 2008

Creating a Custom Open AIM Chat Client Using Adobe AIR

RRE

lunedì, ottobre 27, 2008

Google Earth launches for iPhone

Awesome! Thanks to AK for the heads up.

venerdì, ottobre 24, 2008

Detecting Flash Player versions and embedding SWF files with SWFObject 2

This is great stuff…I keep meaning to update my Flash embeds to use SWFObject 2!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swfobject.html

 

martedì, ottobre 21, 2008

Fontifier - Your own handwriting on your computer

This seems like a really fun/clever idea! However, I can’t help being paranoid about making my signature so easy to forge….
Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer.
It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use
in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica.”

lunedì, ottobre 20, 2008

Searching for People - Simple as 1, 2, 3

bdFrom Panda.com:

“123People is a brand new people search engine that is set to launch this week. It finds and identifies information from hundreds of publicly available sources on the web in real-time, to produce up-to-date results including from social network profiles, web links, email address, images and videos.”

“You can already choose from services like PeekYou, ZoomInfo and Wink. 123People has a distinct flavor and could compete given time, but there is room for improvement.”

giovedì, ottobre 16, 2008

IE Tester

I wrote about this application earlier in the year, but forgot to install it. MB just reminded me of the coolness:

IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE8 beta 2, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.”

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2

Just in case you missed it (as I did) Silverlight 2 was announced a few days ago.

“Redmond, Wash. — Oct. 13, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser.”

Want to take a test drive? There are add-ons to Visual Studio 2008 as well as learning tutorials available here.

Purple Pedals

If I could just talk myself into riding a bike, this would be the bike for me! Well, maybe sans the purple….

“Bikes + Flickr + GPS + Purple.”

Yahoo’s site showcases the information. I like the snazzy Flash interface. For more details, check out their blog: purplepedals.com.

mercoledì, ottobre 15, 2008

AIR News Reader: Apprise

Share stories right from your news reader

Over the summer, my intern Dan Koestler and I decided to get serious about Apprise, a news reader written for AIR. There are a lot of news readers out there, so the natural question is what sets Apprise apart? Here's a summary of what I believe are our most compelling features:

  • AIM integration. Send stories to your AIM buddies from Apprise rather than copying and pasting URLs into your AIM client. Apprise doesn't replace your AIM client -- it works alongside it to make sharing stories easier and more efficient.
  • Twitter integration. Post URLs to Twitter directly from Apprise. Again, Apprise doesn't replace your Twitter client, but it makes posting stories to Twitter much faster and easier.
  • Folders. We finally broke down and added folders, our #1 feature request. We now have folders for you to organize your own feeds, but Apprise still automatically organizes posts by author and topic, as well.
  • Automatic feed resolution. It's surprising how many sites don't make it easy to find their RSS or Atom feeds. Now you can just enter the URL of the site that you want to aggregate, and Apprise will find the feed for you.

 

martedì, ottobre 14, 2008

PowerPoint Branching

I ran across this nice tip at Donovan Smith's Weblog. It is possible to create PowerPoint branching using two techniques.

1.       Custom Slideshow > Custom Shows…  allows you to create versions of your PowerPoint slides that only use slides you select. You can have several versions of your slide show in one PowerPoint file.

2.       Simply create a hyperlink to other PowerPoint files. PowerPoint even allows you to set the slide number you wish to link to within the slide (by selecting Bookmarks…).

lunedì, ottobre 13, 2008

15 Tools for Monitoring a Website's Popularity

MC pointed out a very useful article at  Six Revisions : “15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity.”

“As a web designer or developer building a site, it’s helpful to first scout similar websites (i.e. the competition) to help you make design and development decisions. Knowing what websites work and which ones tank can give you insights and inspiration on what design elements, website features, and website content is effective.”

venerdì, ottobre 10, 2008

LivingSocial

“LivingSocial enables you to catalog your interests, browse what your friends enjoy, and find others with similar tastes. Pick an interest to get started.”

http://livingsocial.com/

Pixelpipe: Send Photos to Different Sites at the Same Time

Pixelpipe’s a new service that uploads all your pictures to all your favorite sites at once. Here’s how it works:

•             Choose all the destinations you usually send photos to (like Blogger, Picasa, YouTube and nearly 50 other sites).

•             Add titles, tags, and captions to your chosen photos or videos.

•             Click upload, and relax while Pixelpipe send all of your photos to their various destinations.

I’ve mentioned Ping.fm before, and am enjoying it. I guess we can expect more of these applications as we proliferate across the net!

A Portable Fuel Cell Charger for Smartphones

This article from Newsweek definitely rang true for me! The biggest drawback to my iPhone is the USB cord leash.

“For now, smart-phone users like me are stuck carrying a power cord everywhere we go, and constantly looking for a wall plug. "Batteries are holding back the portable revolution," says Ken Lazarus, chief executive of Lilliputian Systems, a company that claims to have found a solution… a pocket-size fuel cell that runs on butane and can charge a smart phone through a USB cable.”

giovedì, ottobre 09, 2008

AS3: Setting the Focus on an Input Field:

Many of my blog entries are just notes to things I had to look up. Like this: how does one set the focus to an input field in ActionScript 3? Thanks to a blurb on Flashcrobat (great title), here is the answer:

myObj.stage.focus = myTextField;

More

martedì, ottobre 07, 2008

How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes?

Matt F. passed along this fun/brutal quiz. Of course, isn’t it a good thing if deprecated tags just don’t occur to me?

 

lunedì, ottobre 06, 2008

Bluehouse

Bluehouse doesn’t seem that innovative to me – more a mash up of Facebook, and Acrobat.com?

“October 6, 2008 (Computerworld) IBM will today open the online door to a service that merges some of the best features of social networking with business-collaboration tools.”

domenica, ottobre 05, 2008

Flex 3 vs. SilverLight 2.0

Matt F., web guru extraordinaire wrote a really great article on the good, bad and the ugly of Silverlight 2.0 as compared with Adobe Flex.

mercoledì, ottobre 01, 2008

Apple Drops iPhone NDA

ER pointed out this interesting O'Reilly Radar entry. About time?

“Apple has dropped the NDA covering the iPhone SDK. Developers will now be able to discuss how they develop for the iPhone. This was one of the biggest complaints developers (and technical publishers) had about developing for the platform. Apple posted the following message.”
.
.
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“I am sure that the developer excitement around open-source and not-NDA'd Android was a factor in the decision making. Hopefully, Apple will listen to more constructive feedback (such as the latest Engadget Cares essay) and start letting apps of all type, even those that compete with their own, be released on the iPhone platform.”

Flash CS3 and Trace

This isn’t earth-shattering, but it doesn’t hurt to make a note.

I started noticing that the “trace” function was not sending any information to the Flash output panel, and began to investigate. Ultimately, in my case, the error is that trace does not work in Flash CS3 when publishing for AIR. From Adobe Labs: “When testing your movie with trace, no output is sent in the output panel. Use debug movie to view trace statements.”

Adobe documentation mentions another, simpler occurrence (that I could picture myself doing by accident): you can actually shut off the output intentionally. The output panel contains a menu drop down that includes a “Filter Level” option. There are only two choices: none and verbose. None truly is none!