So for the last few weeks leading up to my exam appointment, I’ve been cramming like crazy, and writing a lot of Flex code trying to learn and get as much studying in as I can.

Apparently, it paid off. I didn’t get as high of a score on the test as I had wanted to, but the important thing is that I passed. Plus, I now know a lot more about Flex 2 than I think I had ever initially planned on knowing. Of course, doing this reminded me that I never renewed my Flash MX2004 certifications for Flash 8 or CS3, so I think I’m going start working on those now…

Taking care of a task like this can never be easy, but at least we were able to make it a little bit nicer for Boomer. My cousin is an animal control officer, and so rather than take care of things in a cold, empty vet’s office, we did it in the backyard, in the shade where Boomer liked to hang out. Once Boomer had passed, we buried him below the Maple tree in the back where he used to spend a lot of time napping, and rolling around in the mud.

Since my sister said it better, I’ll simply point you to read what she had to say, since it pretty much sums up everything I wanted to, but better.

Boomer Norman Buhler

If you ever find yourself working on a Mac, but without a Mac keyboard with an Eject button on it, you can still open the keyboard with a mouse click by installing the Eject Menu Extra. You’ll find it in the following folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Eject.menu

Just double-click it and it’ll install to your menubar like so:

This comes in really handy at times. Recently, I was using an old PowerMac that we have here in the office for some stuff, and rather than clutter up my desk more with the extra mouse & keyboard, I was using Teleport to control the machine. While using this setup, Teleport wasn’t sending the “eject” command from the Mac keyboard I was using, so I installed this Menu Extra, and was able to control the drive, regardless of the keyboard I was using.

Click on the image above to view it in action.

This is just a basic bitmap effect that uses BitmapData to draw an image, with the pixels spilling down from the top in a waterfall-type effect. The fun thing about this is that since the source of the effect needs to implement IBitmapDrawable, you can supply just about anything as the source. In the example below, select “This Panel” to watch the options panel be redrawn. The end effect is that each individual piece of the panel is “beamed down” on it’s own. The “Flow” image is another favorite of mine.

The ’speed’ option is simply the number of milliseconds used in the Timer to execute the effect.

Source is also provided, just right-click on the example to get it.

Just set the scriptTimeLimit attribute of your <mx:Application> tag to a smaller value, like 3 seconds. That way you won’t need to wait around for a while waiting for your app to crash so you can get back to debugging the problem. It’ll crash in about 3 seconds instead of 15, or even a full minute later.

Obviously, the ideal solution is to fix the bug causing the timeout, but while you’re debugging, this should help to ease the pain a little bit.

LiveDocs: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/core/Application.html#scriptTimeLimit

After doing a bit of Googling, the most common solution I found was to make sure that the MIME-type for AIR was set on your server so that it would recognize the AIR filetype.

You can do this by adding the following line to the .htaccess file for your server: (I’m not a server guru, so this may not work in all cases, but it works on the Apache server I’m using.)

AddType application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip .air

After adding this I was still receiving the error. So… a little more time searching, and I found another piece to the solution - I had been using a relative path name in the flashVars for my installer badge. That doesn’t work. Apparently, while you can use a relative path for the thumbnail image displayed by the badge, the actual path to the .air installer file must be the full path to the file. (http://www.domain.com/pathToInstaller.air).

Since it took me a little bit longer to find that part of the solution, I wanted to post it here, just to add one more place where you might be able to find it. These aren’t the only two reasons why you could receive this error, but at least it’s two more possible solutions.

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

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