Archive for the 'Reviews' Category

Stumbled upon a link in a mail from 2001: Gravité, a control panel for old Mac OS which made it look as if you were really dragging icons. Oh, the happy times.

Someone should revive this for drag & drop in Flex.

It’s been a while since I wrote about TextMate and Flex, but still my last post is one of the first five when I google for “textmate flex“, “textmate flex bundle” or “textmate flex tips“. This surprises me as I thought that by now there should have been more written about Flex and TextMate by now, after all it’s been almost ten months. It turns out that there actually has been things going on, but in the quiet.

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Joost seems soon to be out of beta, and it’s gotten much better since the first Mac version was released and I tested it for the first time (see my review of it from back then).

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Nowadays a new data interchange format is born more or less every day. Today I saw a couple of posts on MXNA announcing SWX, so, curious as I am I checked it out. Now I shake my head in wonder of how people find the time to reinvent the wheel time and time again.

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Adobe is continuing the trend they started with the Flex SDK and will provide the Apollo SDK free of charge.

This is an excerpt from the Apollo for Flex Developers Pocketguide:

The Apollo SDK provides a number of free command-line tools that make it possible to test, debug, and package Apollo application swith virtually any web development and design tool.

[...]

While Adobe will be adding support to its own web development and design tools for authoring Apollo content, they are not required. Using the Apollo command-line tools, you can create an Apollo application with any web development tool. You can use the same web development and design tools that you are already using today.

This is really good news, and probably a very good strategy on Adobe’s part. Instead of shying away from buying a full development environment for hundreds of dollars, potential new developers can try out the platform for free and without restriction.

I for one have changed my view of Adobe/Macromedia as a company over the last year, from mildly sceptical to very entusiastic.

Today I got to try out Joost, and my impression is that it’s just like TV, except worse. The reason why I don’t own a TV set is that there’s nothing but crap on, lots of channels but nothing worth seeing. Joost is the same, except more sports. It’s not fair to judge them on their content yet, I know, and I am excited of what Joost will bring once they get some big players on — it’s just that I had expected that there would be something, at least one show, that was worth watching.

Oh, and the UI consumes 100% of my CPU.

Edit: Updating to 0.8.1 takes down the CPU usage to around 30%, which is about the same as VLC, so no complaints.

FireBug is one of the best tools I have used. Web development without it wouldn’t be the same. It’s been really really good for quite a while now, fantastic even, but there has been one feature missing, an activity monitor which shows how images and files load, like Safari’s Activity Monitor. The latest version has one, and it’s sooooo much better than Safari’s, showing timings both in numbers and graphically. It also has a profiler.

What can I say, one of the best tools (rivaled only by TextMate) in my web development toolchain just got a lot better. From the top there is no way but down, but not for FireBug.

Why on earth isn’t there any tools like this for ActionScript development?

Have a look at the sidebar of gBlog. It’s such a bad use of Flash. Sure, it looks neat with the rollovers, the “+ show more” and the tiny scrollbars, but it’s oh so stupid.

What do you do when presented with a list of links that all look interesting? You cmd-click (or whatever you do in Windows) them to open each one in its own tab or in a new window. Try. Didn’t work? Well, no surprise really, because the whole sidebar is a Flash application, which doesn’t work that way. So now you have to click the links, one by one, and each one will take you from the original site.

You open the links in tabs, you can’t copy the links and what’s more, the links are not visible to Google, there is no graceful degradation here.

I find that really, really stupid. Pity, because it’s not a bad blog otherwise.

I’ve started using the Motion-Twin ActionScript compiler (mtasc), and I thought I should share my thoughts on the subject.

My first impression of mtasc is that it doesn’t suck. It might be a low standard to aspire to, but seriously, there is hardly any competition.

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Probably the best Flash development helper application I’ve found. XTrace is a floating window that displays log messages from your Flash applications. It’s based on the clever idea of using a socket to send messages to an external program, which gets around the fact that you can’t create new windows in Flash, but have to have your log view on top of everything else.

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