Occasionally when working in the Flash IDE, while editing properties of items on the stage, such as height, width, or the positioning of the item using the Properties Panel, you’ll find that after a while the hot keys to toggle between various tools end up disabled. (V, Q, A, etc.)

As someone that relies on hot keys, this can be very frustrating, and a big productivity killer. Until now the only way that I’ve found to restore the hot keys was to restart Flash. But, because this bug ticked me off so much, I vowed to hunt it down, so I could reproduce it reliably, and hopefully it can get fixed for when Blaze is released.

Here are the steps that I’ve found to both kill, and restore your hot keys in the Flash IDE:

To kill hot keys:

1. Select an item on the stage
2. Clear the value for width in the properties panel
3. Tab out of the Width text field
4. Click OK to clear the “Invalid size…” warning
5. Hot keys should now be broken

To restore hot keys

1. Select the item again
2. Enter a valid value for the width
3. Tab out of the Width field
4. Hot keys should now be working again

I’ve only been able to test and verify this in the Mac version of Flash 8 Professional, so I’m curious to know if this info applies to other versions of Flash and the Windows version as well.

UPDATE #2: (Sept. 15) I was able to get the scroll bars working correctly after changing the scroll bars to “Click in the scroll bar to: Jump to the next page” under System Preferences > Appearance.

However, the problem with this is that I don’t like that setting. I prefer the “Jump to here” setting. However, the only way that iTunes 7 will behave like the rest of the apps on my system is to have that option selected. Otherwise, it does it’s own thing.

UPDATE: I’ve since updated my Mac at work, and there’s nothing wrong with how the scroll bars work. So, it looks like it’s a bug on my system at home. Now I just need to see if re-installing iTunes will fix it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… Apple updated iTunes, iPods, and all that stuff. I think it’s great. But rather than rehash all that, I want to know what they were thinking when redesigning the UI for iTunes 7.

iTunes 7 has been working pretty good for me so far, other than a few issues - one being that Menuet seems to be crashing now as a result of updating, so hopefully there will be a fix for that soon.

My biggest gripe has to do with the changes to the user interface. I’ve been getting used to the new locations of a few buttons, but what’s with the new scroll bars? Has anyone else noticed that when you click the handle of a scroll bar to drag it, it doesn’t actually start moving the scroll bar until the cursor is further along the scroll area? Or, if you try grabbing a scroll bar handle closer to the end of the handle, the entire scroll pane jumps to a new position, as if you had clicked in the gutter of the scroll bar?

If this isn’t happening in the Windows release of iTunes 7, or you haven’t updated iTunes on your Mac yet, here’s what’s happening to me:

This behavior is not only irritating on it’s own, but it’s doubly irritating because these scroll bars behave differently than every other scroll bar in OSX. It’s the type of complaint I’ve heard against Flash applications because the UI controls in the app don’t behave like users expect them to.

I don’t claim to be a UI expert, but stuff like this really drives me nuts.

As a side note, I really like the adding of the [CLEAN] / [EXPLICIT] flags to songs in your personal library, similar to the way they’re tagged in the store. Makes it easy to know what songs I should probably have or not have playing on the speakers when various folks are within earshot. Though, it would be nice if I could add these tags to the songs that I ripped from my own CD collection, and not just the ones purchased from the iTunes Music Store.

We knew it was coming eventually, and still is, but at least there’s a new ray of hope coming down from on high, in the form of screenshots of Flex Builder 2 for Mac.

Sho Kuwamoto has posted some screenshots of the still under development build of Flex Builder 2.0 for Mac, and it’s looking great. Obviously still under development in the shots, but the fact that it’s running on OSX gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies.

I can’t wait until this thing hits the rest of us Mac users.

Lately I’ve been working on a fairly large application that relies heavily on Flash Remoting. Needing something better than the NetConnection Debugger (which apparently doesn’t work in Flash 8 - though it seemed to only work 50% of the time before), I found ServiceCapture.

Some of the other guys here have been using it fine with no problems, and have been really happy with it. I downloaded the Mac version, and while it works great with Safari, NetNewsWire, Menuet (an iTunes thing), and just about anything else that connects to teh interweb, it does not work with the Flash 8 IDE.

Any Mac users out there running into this same problem, or had this problem and found a fix for it?

It’s that time again… Another MacZOT BlogZOT, this time for an app called HoudahSpot.

HoudahSpot was originally featured on MacZOT a week or so ago. At the time, I didn’t purchase it because I already had Spotlight with my Tiger installation. But, with it being part of the BlogZOT, I thought I’d give it a try. After playing with it for a while, I’m wishing I would’ve purchased it a long time ago.

One of my biggest pet peeves about Spotlight is that after searching, I have to click the “Show All…” link to get to a point where I can find the location of the file I’m looking for. Why Apple couldn’t put a link to the file from the Spotlight dropdown menu is beyond me. HoudahSpot displays your results, and as you select each item in the results, info about the file appears in a tabbed interface below the search results, making it easy to get all info about the file and it’s location. It’s pretty slick.

There are a few things I do still like about Spotlight, so I’m not going to completely abandon it, but since you can enable global hot keys for HoudahSpot, it makes it fairly easy to choose between which one you want to use.

So, if you’re using Tiger, and were a little underwhelmed by Spotlight, you might want to check this one out.

Link: HoudahSpot

One last thing…

If you’re seeing this on June 16, 2006 head over to MacZOT, where you might be able to get a Free copy of HoudahSpot

This is a great reference from Tink on Macintosh File Types (macTypes), listing what the type codes are for different file types. I’m linking this as it’ll make it easier for me to find in the future, as well as to add one more thing.

These file types can be used with FileReference.browse () and FileReferenceList.browse () to filter the types of files your users can be allowed to select when browsing for files to upload. On Windows, you specify the file extension to filter by. In OSX, you can use the macType.

This works great - provided that the file was created on a Mac, by an application that sets the macType when the file is created. But this isn’t always the case.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking lately about finally getting myself a laptop. And, being a Mac guy, the MacBook Pros have been looking mighty tasty. However, as the tool I do most of my work in, Flash Professional 8, isn’t available as a Universal Binary, I know that it’s going to run a little bit slower than it would on a PowerPC processor. My question is, how much slower?

Those of you that already have your shiny new MacBook Pros, what do you think? Is the slowdown too much to even bother with, or should I just wait until the next release of Flash and the other Studio tools?

Looks like another MacZOT BlogZOT is going on, this time with Pzizz. Pzizz is an app designed to help you sleep better, and take quick naps. You tell it how long you want to nap for, and it will ‘generate’ a nap - using some new-agey calming music, and a narrator telling you to relax. Just listen to this, put your head down, and try not to sleep.

I was pretty skeptical the first time I saw this, but I recently tried it, and after about five minutes, I was just about gone. Another couple of minutes, I would have been out cold.

So now, just like the last BlogZOT, for every blog that mentions it, MacZOT will be increasing the value of their MysteryZOT bundle by 5 cents. I’ll admit I’m hooked on the ZOT offerings, so I’m willing to try and boost the value I get when I can.

<infomercial>
MacZOT.com Fans want Pzizz because ‘According to the National Sleep Foundation, sleep deprivation and its effect on work performance may be costing U.S. employers some $18 billion each year in lost productivity. Another study pushes this cost to over $100 billion.’ - link to full article
</infomercial>

MacZOT is running another BLOGZOT promo they’re calling “BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com“. This time, it’s for a chance to get SubEthaEdit for cheap, depending on the amount of bloggers who mention the site. As I’ve wanted to get my own license of SubEthaEdit for a while, I wanted to mention it here in a chance to get it for free. The normal price is $35, but the price has been lowered to $13.65 so far, so if you want your own copy, you can get it for at least half-price.

Apparently, MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software during this promo.

Links:

• SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys
• BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com

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/