August 14th, 2008 By Theo
The news is that the proposed ECMAScript 4 (ES4) that created such a stir in the ActionScript community half a year ago is no more. Instead the ECMAScript working groups is going to pursue an update to version 3. I say good riddance to ES 4, it had a lot of interesting stuff in it that I would have loved to see in ActionScript, but that was only because ES4 had every possible feature from every language that its authors had ever laid their eyes on.
August 13th, 2008 By Theo
I think that OpenID is a great idea, but there are just too many providers to choose from. Without even actively signing up for one, I’ve got at least six OpenID’s already: one from WordPress, another from Technorati, and from Blogger, Yahoo!, Flickr and AOL. Either one would do fine, but one thing bugs me: do I really want my identity associated with one of these companies? I don’t dislike either one, but my only relation to them is that I use their products. I don’t think of myself as a WordPress user, I’m not even a loyal one (my other blog is based on Chyrp).
One solution is to go with an OpenID provider that uses less branded URL:s. By way of recommendation I have found myOpenID, which works. Your ID URL looks like http://username.myopenid.com/, which I think is perfectly acceptable. But it gets better. It turns out that myOpenID has a feature where you can use your own domain in your OpenID URL (look for “Your Domains” in the menu). If your hosting company gives you access to the DNS records of your domain you can set it up so that you can create OpenID’s that look like they are hosted by you — and in the background myOpenID does all the authentication and provides the administrative tools.
In a few minutes I managed to get it configured and I’m happy to say that I can now identify myself as http://openid.iconara.net/theo. That is the kind of URL that I think everyone should be able to have if OpenID is going to become the one and only authentication platform on the web. It describes what it is (“openid”) and who I am (“theo” of “iconara”).
Oh, and is it only me or does the OpenID logo look just like the PlayStation logo when it appears in icon size (as it usually does in login screens and such)?
August 6th, 2008 By Theo
Adobe has a blatant lack of respect for my filesystem. The various applications that I currently have installed scatter files everywhere, without asking me and with total disregard of Apple’s documentation. Read on for a list of the offences.
July 27th, 2008 By Theo
In an interview with Lee Brimelow, the Senior Product Manager for Flash Player, Justin Everett-Church clears up some of the questions surrounding Adobe and Google’s new SWF indexing capabilities:
Flash Player does not actually implement the network API, we actually hand that off to our host, so in the case of a browser the browser will make a network request and that’s what adds cookies. A similar process is happening on the search server, where we will actually say “well, I need this XML file or I need this other SWF” and it’s up to the Google host application to return that content. My understanding right now is that that part of it has not been implemented by Google even though our search player allow that capability.
TheFlashBlog: Flash Player FAQs Video with Justin Everett-Church (the quote is at 8:20), emphasis mine.
July 24th, 2008 By Theo
Have you ever tried looping over all the keys in a Dictionary? The whole point of the Dictionary class is that you can have objects of any type as keys, unfortunately someone forgot to tell the ActionScript compiler that:
var dict : Dictionary = ...;
for ( var k : MySpecialType in dict ) { trace(k, dict[k]); }
Error: Implicit coercion of a value of type String to an unrelated type
WTF?
July 23rd, 2008 By Theo
Google has been indexing SWF:s using their new techniques for a couple of weeks now, and it should be possible to see what it really means. I was very critical in my last post on the subject, and some of the things I have been proven wrong about, but it seems that so far I have been mostly right, nothing has really changed.
July 21st, 2008 By Theo
Today I needed to install Adobe Acrobat, which I’ve so far avoided to install because of its bloated size, slowness and general suckiness. Unfortunately, I really needed it. After searching my drawers for the CS3 install DVD, I pushed it into my computer and though that I’d managed the hard part. Now it should just be a matter of selecting Acrobat and hitting install. Yeah right.
July 4th, 2008 By Theo
When Adobe SwitchBoard was announced the other week I was intrigued. It sounded like something I had been wishing for for a while: a better way to create user interfaces that leveraged the capabilities of the Creative Suite applications, something that the current scripting environment doesn’t do very well. I installed it and read the documentation and my entusiasm quickly faded. It’s the same lame impossible-to-use BridgeTalk technology as before with the same contradictory and strangely inter-application-incompatible API:s, but packaged differently. It’s true that you can create great user interfaces, but the scripting still sucks — and it turns out that it’s a resource hog.
July 1st, 2008 By Theo
A tip to all lazy HTML pirates out there: if you’re going to nick the HTML off a website, remove the Google Analytics tracking code before uploading it to your own servers.
July 1st, 2008 By Theo
So, here we go again, Google has annonced that they will index SWF files with a new algorithm and the whole Flash blogosphere echobox is ringing with the words of the clueless. The announcement shows how little Google understands about Flash websites and needlessly diverts the attention away from developing a real solution to Flash website search engine optimization. The reaction to Google’s announcement also shows how little the Flash bloggers understand about the problem. I’m not sure which of these two is the most annoying.