Ryan Stewart has an excelent post about installing FlashPlayer 10 beta on your Mac and use the Firefox Flash Switcher extension to be able to switch back and forth between versions.

I tried on XP and ended up in two hours of browser/plugin hell. And just when I was about to give up everything started working. Here’s what I found:

• The ESPN and CNN sites don’t like the FlashPlayer 10 beta. You get a message in place of the content to install the missing plugin. At least that’s what happened for their video players.
• I couldn’t get Flash Switcher to work properly with Firefox 2.x. so I upgraded to FF 3beta.
• Here’s the real pisser: When I tried to install Flash Switcher in FF 2.x it was disabled by default because it was incompatible. So when I upgraded FF to 3beta and installed Flash Switcher it was disabled by default as a holdover from the preferences from FF 2.x. I mistook the disabled for incompatible. (Note: disabled extensions are grayed out. Incompatible extensions grayed out and get a little red-exclamation mark. I failed to notice the difference the first time.)
• It’s hard as hell to find the Flash Player plugin file on WinXP. Not that you actually need it because Flash Switcher will take care of that for you if everything is set up correctly. So I waisted a good 20 minutes finding it: C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\NPSWF32.dll. Note: that’s the Macromed folder, not the Macromedia folder which is right next to it.
• Buzzword doesn’t support Firefox 3beta but there’s a link at the bottom of the page that opens Buzzword in an unsupported browser and it seems to work fine for me.
• The Google Toolbar doesn’t work in FF3beta. Nor does All-in-one Gestures. But never fear: The Googlebar Lite and FireGestures work just as well in their place.

I started out thinking I’d take good notes on how I did all this but when things got fraked I lost track. So lets call this a suggested process. Like Ryan said, “your milage may vary.”

1. Download the Flash Player uninstaller
2. Download the Flash Player 10 beta
3. Download the Flash Switcher for Firefox
4. If necessary install Firefox 3 beta.
5. Uninstall Flash Player
6. Install Flash Player 10
7. Now when you click on Flash Switcher - probably in the bottom-right of your browser - it should show at the top of the menu something like “Save Flash 10…” You want to do that.
8. Done, now you can switch back and forth between Player versions - which restarts Firefox.

That’s great but what about the debugger? There is no debug version of the Flash Player 10 beta. If you’re using Firefox as your primary browser then I highly recommend using IE for debugging. Because you can crash IE all you want - and it happens a few times a day just because it’s made by Microsoft. But who cares? It doesn’t take all your open tabs with it.

So jump over here and get the Flash Player debug version for IE - it’s the first download below Adobe Flash Player 9 — Debugger Versions (aka debug players or content debuggers) for Flex and Flash Developers. You can install it without even closing Firefox so you don’t have to worry about plugin conflicts.

Now that I spent my morning getting this crap to work I don’t have time to actually make any Flash 10 content. Maybe tomorrow.

The first time I installed Firefox 3beta I couldn’t get Flash Switcher to work because I didn’t pay close attention to the disabled plugin state. Because many of my favorite extensions don’t work in FF3beta I decided to go back to FF2.x. I reinstalled it and started up. It crashed right off the bat. Okay, start again - crash. Start in safemode with everything set back to defaults and all plugins disabled - crash. Reboot PC and start FF - crash. Are we noticing a pattern here? So I had to reinstall FF3beta because FF2.x won’t start for me anymore. I guess it’s true: you can never go home again and you can never revert to an earlier version of software. :-)

I have a new poll in my sidebar to the right that uses AMFPHP to read/write data to a MySQL database. The poll itself is based on an XML file. The Flex app reads the XML file and looks for the database/table that the XML file indicates. The nice thing is that if either the database or table don’t exist then the Flex app creates them.

So to make another poll all I have to do is create a new XML file and point at it. No messing around with MySQL admin and creating tables and such. Not that it’s hard but changing a few lines of XML is way easier. And in true geek manner I spent hours making the Flex app create everything from scratch rather than spend a few minutes here and there doing it manually.

The poll also stores your vote in a SharedObject so that you can only vote once. In the chart your vote choice is exploded out a bit. And as you roll over the labels in the poll results it dynamically explodes out that wedge of the chart.

If anyone has any suggestions for improvement let me know. I intend to tweak it a bit and release the code for others to use. Ultimately I think even people who have zero Flex/Actionscript experience should be able to implement this on their blog.

Oh, and don’t forget to vote.

I set up a Twitter account - aTwitrTale - and wrote the first 140 characters of a story.

U tel me,what hapns nxt?

Just @aTwitrTale to add your 140 characters worth.

Post publish note:

I misunderstood how Twitter works with what you can see. I thought that any user would be able to go and see what everyone has posted to date - read the story up till now - and then add to it. But no.

When I have some time I’ll create a site that will act as the reader/editor for this story. And then maybe we can see where it goes.

I’m working on a Flex project that is just kicking Eclipse in the ass. It takes forever to build and I keep getting out of memory errors. Finally, I complained about the issue on Twitter and @tomcornilliac was nice enough to twit back that I needed to give Eclipse a bigger heap by editing the eclipse.ini file.

Simple enough. My eclipse.ini file is in the root folder of the Eclipse installation and looks like this:

-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx256m
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

I changed the two bolded lines to:

-Xms256m
-Xmx512m

And everything runs much faster and I haven’t gotten any of those pesky errors since.

You can also go Window > Preferences > General > Show heap status to get a display of how much RAM Eclipse has to work with and how much it’s actually using. Very handy to turn that on to see if you need to increase your RAM allowance.

Here’s a link to a few other suggested performance improvements you can do to Eclipse/FlexBuilder.