Pamelia Kurstin plays a musical instrument called the theremin. ( Pronounced: th-AIR-e’men ) Adobe needs to hook up with her for their next AIR tour. If I have to explain why then please exit the blog through the back door. :-)

And if you were at Grant Skinner’s 2006 presentation at FlashForward in Seattle then you’re probably thinking the same thing I am: these two need to put on a show together.

Testing my Flex apps, especially using the debug mode, in Firefox is a big problem. The app opens in a new tab in Firefox but sometimes bad things happen and it crashes the browser.

Firefox isn’t the quickest starting browser out there especially if you’re like me and have lots of persistent tabs automatically open.

But just because Firefox is default browser on my computer doesn’t mean it has to be me default browser for Eclipse/FlexBuilder. I can easily change it to IE so that I can run my apps. And there’s a little added bonus: when you kill a debug session from the debug panel IE automatically closes. With Firefox I always had to kill the debug session and then close the tab. And with the browser one monitor and the debug panel on the far monitor – of a three monitor system – that’s a lot of mouse tracking. ( Yeah, yeah, poor me. I hear you. )

To make IE your default browser for running your Flex apps go: Window > Preferences… Now open the General menu and select Web Browser. Now you can just check off which browser you want to use.

Another added bonus is that I can use the regular old public Flash player in Firefox and only install the debug Flash player for IE. That way I don’t get all the Flex error messages popping up on . . . well, I won’t tell you who’s site they pop up on all the time. But you know who you are. ;-)

My wife is a huge fan of the show What not to wear on TLC. ( It’s essentially about showing women how to dress better. )

I think we – the Flash/Flex community – could use a show How not to code. I know that I’d watch it. And SeanTheFlexGuy is game. So lets do this thing.

I’ll help out with doing the encoding, video player stuff. But I don’t know squat about shooting or editing video.

The perfect hosts would be McCune and Deepa. But they are probably busy with their book. Maybe Ryan Stewart and Ted Patrick could do it in their copious spare time. They already travel all over the world for Adobe so they could just do one show per trip and we’d be set.

Unfortunately HowNotToCode.com is being squatted on. But HowNotToCode.org and .net are available.

By the way, I volunteer to be the first dweeb who gets lambasted for his coding practices, or lack thereof. I can see it now: the host would be banging his/her head against the wall saying, “I can’t believe you use the Flash Authoring tool to write code.”

If you’re a Flash developer/designer and you’ve ever tried to explain to someone what Flash is you probably got about as far as mentioning keyframes before you started seeing glazed eyes.

The same is true of Flex. If you’ve never seen it there can be a lot of confusion as to exactly what it is and how you use it. I put this short ( less than 10 min ) video together to cover the three essentials:

1. Flex Builder
2. MXML
3. the Flex Framework

This isn’t a video that goes into any depth on writing code. It’s just a quick glance behind the curtain, so to speak.

[ Download Flex Builder 3 ]

And no, I couldn’t resist The Matrix reference. I didn’t even really try. ;-)

At Ted Patrick’s request I posted this video to youTube with the 30OnAir tag. I hope he didn’t request that just to make me look like a fool. :-)

I busted out the Visa and got my Flex3 last night – $299 for the Professional upgrade.

And of course there was rejoicing throughout the land because AIR 1.0 was released!

My Pownce client still works. The Google Analytics Reporting Suite seems okay. MoTwitAir is a go! ( Kudos Sim! ) But Snitter was a no go. :-(

( Update: Snitter has a fix for AIR 1.0 posted already. Snitter on! )

The Adobe Media Player still works. I really need to use that more to watch videos at TED.com.

I hope the Flex team is kicking it at a huge release party before heading off for a well deserved break. Then back to work on Flex 4! ( Actually, Ely is probably half finished refactoring the Flex framework already. )

Adobe also tossed up a new ad-banner on their homepage. I like the “Carpe Desktop” bit.