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Pop quiz: In AS3, are static methods & variables inherited by subclasses?

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SSBs? Site-Specific Browsers, courtesy of Fluid.app.

Fluid is a slick little app that allows you to create unique browsers for a particular website. These new browsers appear as regular applications that you can leave in your Dock, or Applications folder. In the screenshot above, you can see the Unfuddle app that I made in about five minutes earlier today.

Pretty handy for those sites you tend to visit a lot, and leave open all day long. Plus, if a site supports it, you can get some fancy Coverflow browsing of the links in the page as well.

FluidApp.com

I seem to have an addiction when it comes to finding the best bug tracker out there - I’ve never been really been satisfied with the ones I’ve used in the past, and I’m just too lazy to write my own. As a result, I’ve ended up playing and installing a bunch of different apps, trying to find the bug tracker I like the most.

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With the recent release of Safari 3.1, I was curious to see a before and after comparison of how Safari 3.0 and 3.1 would render the Acid 3 test. For those who don’t know, the Acid tests are designed to determine how well a browser follows various web standards. Currently, no browsers pass the Acid3 test with 100%, but they are getting closer.

Once I checked out the two versions of Safari, I got curious to see how well some other browsers performed. And so here are the results of my completely unscientific testing, sorted by the respective scores of each browser. Now, on to the results!

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We’ve recently begun upgrading our phone system at the office to a new VOIP setup. We’ve been setting everyone up with some nice Linksys phones. These things are pretty nice, with lots of neat features for a desk phone. One of these features is the ability to check a phone’s status over the network - you can see if someone is available to take a call, if the line is busy, stuff like that. Good stuff to know if you need to transfer a client to someone - you can check if they’re available or not before trying to transfer them.

Now for the reason I mention Spry, and think it rocks: John setup a mini web service that checks our VOIP server and returns some XML that gives the status of everyone’s phone. I then built a Dashboard Widget that pings this service and displays everyone’s phone status in the Dashboard. I decided to give Spry a go, and it was slick.

I spent more time playing with the design and layout of the widget than I did actually writing the JavaScript that parses the XML to display the phone info. It was a little tricky at first, as I couldn’t find any documentation on what methods were available, but once I found what I needed, the actual code took about 15 minutes.

If you haven’t checked out Spry, I suggest you do:

Spry framework for Ajax

Debugging can sometimes be fun, or a nightmare. This usually depends on the project, your current mood, and the types of bugs you’re trying to resolve.

Often, fixing a bug means that you read through your code, follow the logic involved, spot the error and fix it. Other times, a bug may only be killed by means of voodoo rituals, and the throwing of a virgin into a volcano. At least it seems that way at times.

A few new articles appeared in the Adobe Developer Center this afternoon, and one of them was a good primer on debugging in Flash by David Stiller. It covers the basics such as using trace () statements, and looping through your objects, then moves on to using the Debugger Panel and debugging your swfs in a browser.

There’s some good info here; for those just starting in development, or who don’t do much development, you might learn something new - for those more experienced, it can a nice little refresher on some basics.

One of the nicest features of the article is that it explains how to actually use the Debugger Panel. Using this thing is a bit of black art to some, as the documentation hasn’t always been as clear as it could be. Many of the Flash developers I know that use it have learned to use it by means of repeated trial and error. The article also mentions some of the third-party debugging tools such as X-Ray.

So, if you’re new to debugging, or just want to read up a little, check it out:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/debugging_actionscript.html

With all the hot new Web 2.0 apps being released these days, it’s nice to see some launch every now and then without the (Beta) tag thrown onto the end of the name.

My buddy Jac just posted about why he and the MyStickies team had decided to release their application without the beta tag:

If there is nothing wrong with a free beta, why did we change it? We didn’t want people to think we were not taking responsibility for it. We wanted MyStickies to be successful, and we thought people would listen to Jason and not use it if it said “Beta” on it. Were we right? Don’t know. People seem to use Gmail even though it has Beta on it’s logo.

It’s a quick read, but it’s got some interesting thoughts, and some good links.

Links:

• Writing (Beta)
• The Difference Between Web 1.0 & Web 2.0 (Not from his post, but still applicable.)

Recently mediaRAIN produced a site for a local sculptor that features a video of the sculptor speaking about his artwork. He then came back to us and wanted us to make a few changes to the site, including the addition of a few animated elements on the site that were triggered by various points in the video. A perfect situation for using onCuePoint, right?

I set about making these changes, putting off adding the cue point metadata to the FLV files, as I wasn’t looking forward to re-encoding the videos. Even on a dual-processor PowerMac, it still takes some time to encode those FLV files. (There were three of them.) Plus, if I got one in the wrong spot, I’d have to re-encode the video again. So, like I said, I wasn’t looking forward to it. However, I found a very useful tool in FLVTool2.

FLVTool2 is an open-source, command-line tool written in Ruby for tweaking and manipulating your FLV files. You can trim FLV files, and add cue points to them after the videos have been encoded. Adding these cue points to my FLV files was a lot faster than it would have been if I’d had to re-encode each video. You just define the cue points in an XML file, point FLVTool2 at the FLV files, tell it where to find the XML file defining the new metadata, and then tell it where to put the new files. Once I ran the command, it only took about 15-20 seconds to update all three of my FLV files. I had to tweak the timing of one or two of them, and it was only a matter of seconds to run FLVTool2 again.

There are few other utilites I found that do the same thing, however, I like this one as it was open-source, and it will run under OSX, Windows, and Linux, which means you could even set it up to edit your FLV files on the server if you needed to. Very cool. If you’re doing a lot of work with FLV files and video in Flash, this is one you should check out. Of course if you are doing that kind of work, then you probably know about this one already. Either way, it’s pretty cool.

Link: FLVTool2

iClip lite is probably one of the most useful Dashboard widgets I have installed. Basically, it works like a clipboard that can hold 20 different items. Just copy or cut something, and drop it into one of the “clip bins” on the widget. You can then retrieve those items for use later.

One of the best parts is that the widget is free, and it works great with Flash. I use it to store snippets of code, movieclips, and graphics, so that I don’t have to copy one item, navigate somewhere on the timeline, paste it, return back to the original location, navigate again to the new location, etc. I can just copy everything from the original location, drop each piece into a bin on the widget, then move to the new location once, and drop everything into it’s new spot. Very handy.

Download: http://www.inventive.us/iCliplite/

Update: Thanks Colin!

I just received my free IconBuffet delivery of the Tower Grove Wedding set. I’ve got five deliveries of it I can give out. If you’d like it, let me know.

I’m still looking for the Modena Simbolo set, so anyone who wants to trade that one, will get priority. I’ve also still got some deliveries I can make of the following:

• Dresden Tournament
• Durango Research
• Marseilles Cafe
• Tower Grove Promenade
• Modena Simbolo

Just send me an email: josh at joshbuhler.com,  or use the contact form on my blog.