ReflexUtil and Facebook API

Is not like I don't have enough fodder for blogging, but I wanted to point out a couple people who are doing interesting work. Casey over at Tater Salad wrote about his experiences with ReflexUtil, but he's too modest to say that he did the code for modularizing the library. ReflexUtil is great for nudging into place those objects interactively. Considering I code in jEdit and don't have Flex Builder's Design View I'm sure this will come in handy sometime.

And Jason over at PB King has put a good amount of work on a Facebook AS3 API which was originally an internal project here at Terralever. There are a lot of updates that he's added. If you are looking for an alternative to the as3facebooklib this is it. I'd say that the main points of difference between the two libraries is that this one is more Delegate-based, while as3facebooklib is event-based.

Happy coding!

I <3 Weighted Companion Cube

A friend of mine went ahead and made this Facebook page for the Weighted Companion Cube. If you have yet to play the greatness of Portal you really should either grab the Orange Box or the game itself off Steam. Stop reading this and go play it now.




Portal has my vote for Game of the Year. I love the playfulness of the game, the humor, and the over-the-top gameplay. I'm also a big fan of short games. I love games I can finish in a couple sittings. I'd be fine if Portal was even shorter.

What's even better is that Valve has just touched the tip of the iceberg with Portal. A lot of Portal was just educating and selling the concept. It isn't till near the end of the training that you really get a sense of things such as 'flinging' and the mind-bending gymnastics nature of it, which is where the fun lies. I'm sure there are even more interesting mechanics that can be developed. I love the idea of integrating something like the bounce pads from Quake 3:Arena. Or having to break through into areas by generating enough force by flinging yourself vertically then horizontally.

Can't wait to see what happens next!

jEdit MXML and ActionScript 3 edit modes

http://ubergeek.tv/code/jedit_actionscript_edit_modes.zip

I've been using these for a while and figured that I should put my mxml edit mode up for the world to enjoy. The actionscript mode was written by others, but I'm including it for completeness.

The mxml mode is just the xml mode but with:

• Syntax Highlighting of Actionscript with CDATA tags.


• If an attribute has some data binding, it shows up as a different color.

Not a huge change, but its quite nice to make things extra legible.

When installing PLEASE NOTE:
With jEdit closed, delete the file ~/.jedit/recent.xml to clear your recent files listing. You must delete this to see the changes take effect for mxml files in the recent files list.

To install:

Unzip the files to your ~/.jedit/modes directory. If you already have custom modes, modify your catalog xml to include the two modes inside the catalog xml given.

Happy Coding!

Facebook Developer's Garage - Phoenix - Nov. 14th

Nov 14th at the Tempe Center for the Arts in Tempe, AZ Terralever is hosting a
Facebook Developer's Garage. Highlights of the event include a presentation by Dave Morin of Facebook on the platform and a detailed look at the evolution of the Red Bull Roshambull application by Nate Warner of Red Bull. I will be giving a short presentation on Flash integration for Facebook also.

We have been able to expand the number of seats available to 200. Please
register if you want to go, as there is a very good chance this will fill up. Plus say hi if you do!

http://www.terralever.com/Facebook-Developers-Garage-Phoenix/

Deja Vu and Reverse Psychology

Here's an interesting conversation that I had last night at a barbecue:

'Yeah, I hear that Linux desktops may hit 1% of the market soon...'

'Interesting...so how are they tracking that?'

*shrug*'I think that they're planning on tracking installs on the hardware so that they have a better idea.'

'What on the new Dell Linux PCs?'

'No, those other linux pcs.'

'The XO Laptop?'

'No, the other ones'

'The Asus ones?'

'Yeah.'

Regardless, the following hardware review for the Asus EEE PC came out of right field:

I have been waiting for the eee pc since I saw a blurb about it in, of all places, Vogue. They were pushing it as a computer that fits in your clutch, and since I travel a lot, I was salivating.

I am writing on it now, and I am just thrilled with it. It does indeed fit into my purse (it's about the size of a small-ish notebook or journal) and my wifi connection worked right away when I opened it up. I've been using the battery for about 2 hours so far and it's still at 40% power, so that looks promising.

...

WHAT?!

Did I miss something? Since when are Linux computers featured in Vogue? Since when do people give glowing reviews for Linux hardware on Amazon?

And since when does my sister print out a Tux pumpkin stencil for Halloween?

But this reminds me of a point in my life from a long time ago. A point where I looked around and said 'there's no way that people are actually going to start using the internet, but boy it would be cool if they did'.

So now I'm thinking, 'There's no way that people are actually going to start using Linux, but boy it would be cool if they did'.


UPDATE Nov 7, 2007:
Great article on Forbes regarding the Asus Eee PC and the technical, cultural, economic hurdles involved: http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/1112/024a.html

Also, my friend Scott has almost simultaneously blogged about the XO Laptop!

The idea virus is go!

How to determine if you're running Leopard in Flash

One of those things that's just right in front of your face:

import flash.system.Capabilities;
trace(Capabilities.os);

Returns 'Mac OS 10.5.0'. Hallelujah.

File Upload on Leopard

I've spent a good amount of time today trying to work out this surprise issue. Ironically I got a new macbook pro this weekend...and boy it sure came in handy for a reason I did not anticipate.

File upload is stupendously broken in Flash, on all browsers, on OS X Leopard. As details come out I'll see what I can learn here. We have been searching for potential fixes here today, for some of our applications depend heavily on this feature.

First I found this little post here, and then in the comments of Mike Chamber's Blog people are also experiencing this issue with AIR. Lastly there is this forum post that shows that Adobe has become aware of the issue:

This issue has been addressed and will be implemented in the next release of Flash Player. Regards,

Darren J. McNally,
Technical Support Engineer, Adobe
Flash/Flash Player Support


My first thought is that while its nice that they're going to fix it, I think this needs to be addressed now. I mean, like, right now. Big companies are going to lose money on this. People expect consistent functionality, and this is a real showstopper bug on a big feature.

So far I've looked at the headers being sent by Firefox and Safari to see if there is any useful information:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8

And Safari:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/523.10.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.10

So as you can see, we can tell....that we're on a Mac. Of some sort. Not very positive so far. Hopefully some more useful information should follow.