Drupal with Flex Using Flex / Ajax Bridge

Mike Potter has created a Flex UI for one of the Drupal elements. Cool work. I can’t wait to see everything replaced with Flex. Check it out to see how he did it.

Adobe has added an updater for the Flash authoring tool to allow you to publish HTML files with the code to work around the IE ActiveX update. It’s a little quick and dirty solution, much like the HTML code was in the first place.

And here’s another solution that works pretty well.

You browse over to Dell.com just to see what a $5,000 laptop looks like. Even though you own a $2,500 Dell laptop that is just one year old.

Personally, I’m waiting for a laptop that will support two external monitors plus the laptop monitor all at the same time. Lets see, 1920×1200 across three monitors is . . . carry the 3 . . . 6,912,000 pixels! Yeah, that’ll work. :-)

Sometimes it’s not good enough to just move forward on a timeline. Sometimes you just have to move backwards. And when you do, this code is all you need.

I’ve been using this to create a Flash versions of Powerpoint slides. I created this code because I wanted to enable the functionality of moving forwards and backwards on the timeline. It also needed to be easily enabled by other people in the office who aren’t Actionscript savy. All they need is this code on the main timeline and then place a “freeze();” on any keyframe where you need to stop the animation.

SWF example (note: you have to click on the SWF to give it focus for the keyboard input.)

Download FLA (zip)

Code:

You know what surprises me, besides the fact that people actually watch baseball? It’s that very few people see Adobe a threat to Microsoft. I’ll bet “the guys” at MS see it coming.

Remember back in the mid 90s when Java was tauted is a Windows killer? What ever happened to that? We’ll, for one thing, Java was supposed to be a ‘write once, run everywhere’ tool. But, that never really came to fruition.

Flash is a write once, run everywhere tool. Of course there is that dreaded plugin drawback. You know, that piece of software that is only on 95%+ of all the PCs on the planet. That piece of software that can update itself without user interaction. That’s the part that really sucks about Flash. There are just a few people in the world that don’t have it.

Hey, I have a great idea for a TV series. There would be two main characters. One is a really bright guy who is kind of dorky in a hyper intelligent sort of way. He’s sort of “out there” if you know what I mean. He just makes leaps of intellectual faith but always seems to be right. The other character should be a good looking, but not great looking, woman. She’s the scientist, the skeptic. These two have been teamed up to search the world for users who don’t have the Flash plugin. Maybe there could be an overarching story based on an evil software company that is involved in a worldwide conspiracy to kill the Flash plugin. I’m sure it would be a big hit.

Here’s how the landscape appears right now: Microsoft is coming out with Explorer 7 and their Atlas framework for developing AJAX apps. It is supposed to be cross browser friendly, but which browsers? There is also the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), formerly code name “Avalon” that we’ll see in Vista. Reportedly “Avalon” will be an optional download for XP users but at what cost to performance?

There is no doubt that WPF will be a rich development environment. At the same time it will be new to every developer out there. As a developer you have to learn a new technology to write apps that will only run on Vista. With the launch of Vista slipping to early 2007 it will miss the ’06 holidays. That coupled with the prediction that PC sales will slip later in the decade mean that Vista isn’t going to have a good adoption rate.

So, are you the developer going to spend countless hours learning a new development tool for a small and slowly growing audience? Well, you’ll probably have to, right? If you’re into writing desktop apps then this is obviously the future. Or is it?

Adobe is coming out with their Apollo program. (If you haven’t read much about it then just search “adobe apollo” at Google news and you’ll get lots of hits.) You can think of Apollo as Flash for the desktop. Interestingly enough Apollo will go public around the same time that Vista ships. You want to bet on adoption rates? There is no way Vista will keep up with Apollo.

Here’s the kicker: I mentioned at the start that back in the mid 90s Java was tauted as the Windows killer. Well, that might just happen if Flash/Apollo become all they can be because the Flash player 9 is written in Java.