joshbuhler.com

I’ve been having a blast with this thing, and if you haven’t downloaded it yet for some reason, do it now.

Unfortunately, I got a bit ahead of myself, and posted this application with a few (stupid) bugs. I’ve fixed those, and posted a new version online:

ElectionDashboard 1.1.1

Versions 1.1.0 and up have auto-updating built into them, in case I find another bug. Anything prior to that, and you’ll need to first uninstall the app before installing the latest.

UPDATE: I’ve made a few tweaks to the app, like adding an icon, as well as a progress window to let you know when the application is updating it’s data. You can download the newest version using the same link below. I’ve also included some auto-update goodness, in case I need to fix another bug.

Before installing the new version you must FIRST UNINSTALL the previous one, or installation will fail. However, once you have version 1.1.0 installed, there will be a “Check for Updates” link in the app to simplify the update process if you need to update.

Last night I came across a pretty cool idea for displaying the election results using DMX lighting. Basically, the election results are scraped from CNN, and then the shade of the room’s mood lighting is adjusted from red to blue based on the current results.

The guy behind this project posted his code for grabbing the info, and so I’ve adapted it into AS3, and made a really basic AIR app you can leave running on your desktop for at-a-glance results. You won’t get any detailed results like you would from CNN, just a simple needle leaning in the direction of the results, that updates every five minutes.

Until results actually start coming in, this won’t display anything, so I wouldn’t expect it to really start working until later today.

You can install the app using the badge found on my other site: http://ghostradio.net/apps/

While working on creating an installer badge for an AIR application I’m working on, I kept receiving the following error when trying to install the application: Error# 2032

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.

Sure, there are several places out there where you’ll find this information, but nothing really in an easy-to-print form you could hang on your cube wall.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it’s a list of the ones I use most often, and find the most useful. There’s a reason I made the first one on the list “View all Shortcuts”.

As I’m a Mac user, the shortcuts are for the Mac version of Flex Builder, but I would assume that you Windows folks can just use Ctrl instead of the Command key.

Here’s a nice PDF, ready for printing: FlexBuilderShortcuts_MAC.pdf

If there’s something you really feel strongly about me having left off of the list, let me know in the comments, and I’ll add it to the list.

Just a reminder of a nice resource available for those of you developing AIR/Apollo apps. Adobe has the full PDF of the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide available for download from labs.adobe.com.

You can also buy the book in print form, or, save yourself $15 and get it now.