Flex Serialization

There’s a few good use-cases for serialization; for me the first and foremost is the performance combined with ease of use.
In AIR we have SQLite access, or in a bad case we can write some format to a file and recover it later somehow via parsing. But why? That’s a lot of work… And it’s not the fastest approach either.

And what about if we’re doing a browser application that we want to save a state of something, but don’t want to host the storage and write a web service to handle data?
We don’t have stealth access to the filesystem directly, which makes it hard (errr, impossible) to silently store things on behalf of the user.

We can actually tackle both easily using serialization.

AS3/Flash Geolocation API

I was playing with the Geolocation API, and have been having the hardest time getting it working. It would activate the GPS on my device (a Droid2), but would never trigger any updates and hit my breakpoint.

I knew this had to be something I was doing, because I’ve seen it working, have examples of working source, and can’t get it to work on my device…

Entering the Tablet Ring: PlayBook, from RIM

As a current Flash/Flex developer, I’m constantly looking for new toys that will allow me to publish products to their platforms – and we just got a new contender.

The PlayBook – a tablet forthcoming by way of RIM, a business-centric renowned mobile device company, and is looking at developers to help catapult their product into the limelight.

Flex 4 Skin States

While there’s plenty of information about skinning your Flex 4 component, I haven’t found a whole bunch of information on how to get them to talk together. In most situations I would consider this bad practice, however there is often a need for identifying properties set on your component from your skin in order to display certain aspects properly.

Access to the Stage in Flex

I recently was working on an application, and needed to listen to KeyBoardEvent dispatches from the stage. This isn’t usually that much of an issue, except when your component needing to listen to these Events is created as part of the application creation process.

You didn’t hear this from me, but HOW TO RIP MP3s FROM A WEBSITE

Ok, I probably shouldn’t be posting this, because I’d be pissed if someone ripped my content. But, this trick has served me some extraneous effort in ripping MP3′s or even other formats from certain websites (*cough* Grooveshark *cough cough* Pandora *cough*).

This approach works for everything from websites loaded in the browser using HTML5 or Flash, to custom applications (Adobe AIR, desktop applications, etc.).

Scale to Fit (or Zoom to Fit)

This is a seemingly trivial task, but attempt to tackle it and you’ll quickly find yourself scratching your head wondering what the hell you’re doing…

PC Woes and Virus Foes

So recently I’ve been somewhat of a PC fixer-upper again (among other things)… But these days I’ve been wise to enforce some form of payment (usually in the form of firewater or cold hard cash); which, any family/friend-helper can attest to, becomes a nightmare. Part of why I decided to pick it back up is to experience what today’s battles are – and unfortunately they’re mostly of the same variant that was rampant even 10 years ago.
I’ve been asked by family and friends alike to give what insight I could into what it takes to keep your PC clean, and how to recover if you fail.

Hey, can you pass me my utility belt?

I recently had to set up my work PC, and found out that there’s a good set of utilities that I’m often using and take for granted.

Some are new to me, and some are alternatives to paid programs that I’ve lost licenses to. I typically like to use open source over paid licenses, and this round I’ve managed to do a pretty good job at finding a well rounded set of tools to do the job!

Format yo-self, fool!

I wanted to take just a short time out to discuss (read: rant) something that is near and dear to my heart.