The Technicals
Bag of Tricks
Professor Peter Elsea completely changed my view of what a person can do when he taught me that skill is nothing but a bag of tricks.
The thing is, just about anyone can express music to some degree. Anyone can make a picture, or cook a meal. It might not taste very good, but perhaps that’s simply due to a dearth of tricks in the cuisine bag.
Informal Contract
So it just dawned on me, after having spent yet another weekend on this project, that maybe there should be a cap on the time or the number of revisions allowed within the scope of the bid.
Oh wait, we do have a cap in our contract. So (scratching my head), why am I now working on revision #4,536,136? Oh, that’s right, because this is for the one client that we have for whom we did not prepare a formal contract for.
This brings to light a fundamental concept… Contracts are for people who think they don’t need contracts.
Photoshop Broke My Color
I’m on a Mac Powerbook. For months, I’ve been having trouble saving images for the web in Adobe Photoshop. What would happen is I would File > Save For Web and Devices… and find that many of the colors are de-saturated in the preview window.
What happened to my colors???
Moving from PC to Mac
Yup. After after 20 years of insane loyalty to the PC, I’m switching. Which is somewhat crazy because I was the guy with the green monochrome screen who played zork on his DOS based IBM before anyone had ever heard of a mouse. I’ve mocked Mac users as technically handicapped (designers exempt) since I was old enough to type. So why switch now, after all this history?
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stack overflow at line: 0
For those of you who have never encountered the most undescriptive error message Internet Explorer has to offer, it’s a doozie. No graceful javascript error, just an infinite popup with the words “stack overflow at line: 0″.
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Setting Keyboard Focus on Flex onLoad
When you refresh the browser with a flex app running fullscreen, obviously the flex app should be focused…. but it’s not 
Here’s a really easy way to set keyboard focus on your flex or flash embeded code. Basically, just paste the code below into the bottom of your html. After the page loads, this code gets called and sets the focus on your embeded swf. Continue Reading »
Witango 6 Studio Beta is Out
Witango Studio 6, the long awaited update to the current version (5.5) is finally in beta. Macintosh users are getting to play with it right now and us Windows users are patiently waiting our turn. What has changed? Everything from the ground up, according to the development team. This time they built the whole development studio from the ground up using Java. As soon as I get a chance to play with it I’ll report on what is new.
A few months ago Mozilla announced that the organization will only continue to support version 1.5.0.x of the browser through late April. The information came via a security update for both Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, with an extra note saying that the older version will be “maintained with security and stability updates until April 24, 2007.” After that date Firefox 1.5 will no longer receive updates from Mozilla and all remaining users should upgrade to Firefox 2 if they want to keep receiving updates to the browser.
To keep it interesting, Firefox 3.0 is already well into Alpha (version 5 comes out next week), Beta 1 is expected in July of 2007, and they have posted an estimated release of November on their roadmap. You can get more details from the release schedule posted on the Mozilla website. Curious what they are up to? So were we. Mozilla has a site just for us developers stating some of what’s new. Some cool css improvements, a move to javascript 1.8, support for regular expressions, and much more.
Scrolling List using Tween
We had a situation requiring up and down buttons, and we wanted them to scroll a list. The catch is how to animate the scrolling. Here’s how we did it. Continue Reading »
Firefox Add-Ons : Got to Love Them!
Firefox add-ons, also known as extensions, and sometimes confused with pluggins, have completely cemented our loyalty to Firefox as a development tool. Why? Because these little tools are so powerful, and Firefox has provided significantly more options than Internet Explorer or Safari. Not sure what add-ons are? They are small pieces of software that add new features or tiny tweaks to your browser. Many are useless, but some are absolutely spectacular.
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