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.

Come work with us!

We just updated our jobs page at work with some new positions. We're looking for great people to work with, including contractors, that are interested in doing kickass work for great clients.

http://terralever.com/about-us/careers

The flash positions are in the Phoenix or Tucson areas. All other positions are in the Phoenix area.

Peace!

Facebook Platform API for AS3, and group.

I mentioned briefly that we're building an api for working with Facebook's new Platform. As part of the 'release early, release often' open source mantra, we're releasing what we have right now. Its not fleshed out, but I think that the model that we've built is extensible and easy to use.

Download the API here

Our Facebook Group with more information, documentation, etc.

Here's some of our current features -

Authentication- The Facebook object handles authentication and security automatically. Its transparent, you just don't have to think about it.

Ease of use- Authentication can either be 'desktop' or 'web' style. This essentially means that you can test your app locally in desktop mode, and then deploy it web style. Our current testing model is to check a configuration xml to see what our authentication style should be:

if(configXML..mode == "desktop")
          {
              //start us up in desktop mode
              var config_api_key:String = configXML..api_key;
              var config_secret:String = configXML..secret;
              fBook.startDesktopSession(config_api_key, config_secret);
          }
          else
          {
              //start us up in widget mode
              fBook.startWidgetSession();
          }

And so we deploy a different configXML file on our server which doesn't contain our secret for use in 'widget' mode, but we can test the flash locally, dramatically speeding development time!

Proxy support - When developing a Facebook application, you'll want to pass all requests to the Facebook API through your server for security reasons. This server should just mimic the Facebook api, and work in the same way:

 fBook.useRedirectServer = true;
 fBook.rest_url = configXML..redirect_server_url;

Extensibility - The Facebook AS3 object is extensible. This means that you can extend your proxy on the server with new methods, and extend the Facebook object with new FacebookDelegates to handle your application-specific service calls.


What we're currently looking at improving is fully implementing the Facebook API. After that we'll be adding more helper functions to improve the usability of the api. Things such as automatically grabbing all images in an album, etc.

Enjoy!!

Facebook opens the gates! And they're off!

Well, about an hour ago, Facebook just announced their new Platform integration API. And we had an announcement ourself.

We've been having a TON of fun as a launch developer, seeing what's possible with their api. We've learned a lot of tricks along the way, specifically about integrating securely with a third party in a stateless REST environment. And all that we've learned should be released soon. We're developing an ActionScript 3 API for Platform, which we will be releasing soon.

Right now Jason is over in San Francisco taking part in a hack-a-thon with the Facebook guys. I knew I shouldn't have let him have all the fun. *sigh*

Why I like Facebook is the sort of 'extroverted internet' approach they've taken. I'm not a big MySpace fan, and a marginal extrovert myself. But I can understand what makes Facebook a great social application.

Facebook understands the concept of signal-to-noise ratio better than any existing social networking site. If you have to surf through tons of crap to find what you want, it makes it less accessible, and less valuable. Google understands this. Getting the user from point A to point B quickly is paramount to user experience. What about in the sphere of social networking? In terms of relationships, Facebook is speed dating, and MySpace is a noisy, loud night club.

Of course there is a place and time for both. Facebook has used discretion in allowing access to its users. It doesn't want to lose its integrity, and the high signal-to-noise ratio. But it has to be competitive on features, without opening the flood gates to the noobs. And so the new 'Applications' features have been developed.

Applications are Facebook's equivalent to MySpace codes. But unlike MySpace codes, which is basically just html, Facebook uses FBML to include html in its pages. Applications must also be registered with Facebook, requiring a certain level of proficiency, and removing anonymity from the application developer. That's important when you've got 27 million+ users to keep secure.

Overall I'm really happy to see a social networking platform rolled out that has this kind of smarts. We'll see where it goes from here!

Centering in Safari and IE off by one pixel

If the size of the browser window is an odd number, you'll run into problems with the centering not matching the centering of your html. A friend of mine needed this fixed, as his page elements could not match up with the background. This fix here suggests resizing the browser window to fix the problem. Well, while that is feasible workaround, I'm not sure how usable it is for a user to have their browser modified like this.

And so I cobbled together some javascript for him that basically overrides the background positioning and centers it manually via javascript. Like so:

function positionBackground(){
//set this to the width of your background image
var backgroundImageWidth = 760;

var size = getPageSize();
var body = document.body;
if( navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari') != -1 || navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE") != -1)
{
 if(size.width % 2 == 1){
  size.width -= 1;
 }
}

body.style.backgroundPosition = size.width/2 - (backgroundImageWidth / 2);
}

function getPageSize() {
var myWidth = 0, myHeight = 0;
if( typeof( window.innerWidth ) == 'number' ) {
  //Non-IE
  myWidth = window.innerWidth;
  myHeight = window.innerHeight;
} else if( document.documentElement && ( document.documentElement.clientWidth || document.documentElement.clientHeight ) ) {
  //IE 6+ in 'standards compliant mode'
  myWidth = document.documentElement.clientWidth;
  myHeight = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
} else if( document.body && ( document.body.clientWidth || document.body.clientHeight ) ) {
  //IE 4 compatible
  myWidth = document.body.clientWidth;
  myHeight = document.body.clientHeight;
}
return {width:myWidth,height:myHeight};
}

window.onresize = positionBackground;
window.onload = positionBackground;

Unfortunately you're required to input the background image's width by hand, but since this is usually consistent I think its acceptable.

Alas, I'm really unsure that this is a better way of thinking about how to fix things. It really bothers me that the current mentality for rigorous CSS and tableless layouts requires such elaborate javascript fixes to get them to work. But that is a topic for another rant. :)

Cool trick: Re-instating deleted files in subversion.

One of the problems with version control in general is dealing with large amounts of binary data. If you add a large chunk of data, say an image sequence, its in there...for good*. If you delete it, and you want it back, well, is it possible to get it back without having to put it back in, increasing the size of the repository? With Subversion you can.

Earlier today we had a subcontractor who's new to using Subversion make the classic subversion mistake: copying a directory using Windows Explorer's copy and paste, instead of using Tortoise. So he copied his files to a new location, then used TortoiseSVN->Delete to remove the files from the repo, and supposedly committed his updates (which didn't move any files like he thought). When we asked him where the files went he was like 'i can see them'. So I went ahead and im'ed back 'i'll fix it'.

I reverted just the deleted branch to before he deleted the files. Then I moved them to where I wanted them to be in the current branch using the proper right-click and drag method with Tortoise.

The 'cool' part of this is that I'm actually moving files that aren't part of the current revision, and don't even exist in the current revision, from a previous revision. Remember that in Subversion all file revisions are really just links with data attached. All I'm doing is telling Subversion to link the data from a previous version to the latest revision, and Subversion just does what its told. Awesome!

* It is possible to use stream editing to remove files from SVN repositories, if you are braver than me.