Particletree has an amazing post on Visualizing Fitts’ Law. Fitts’ Law is a guiding principal of HCI and understanding this concept is essential if you consider yourself an Interaction Designer or User Experience guru.
David Zuckerman from Adobe’s Flex Builder team offers up a Flex Builder editor cheat sheet that is sure to make your FB coding much more productive. My favorites are:
Before I rid myself of my Windows based PC’s, FileZilla was my Win32 choice for FTP clients. It was open source and worked reliably and well with FTP and SFTP sites. Now FileZilla is available for Mac OSX and Linux too! It’s not a sexy Mac application though - it looks very much like its Windows version, but it does work well!
I’ve never really liked the look of the glass 3-D dock in OSX Leopard. However, I really like the look of the Dock if you pin it to the left or right of your screen. I prefer my Dock at the bottom of my screen so I have been stuck with the glass dock. Until now!
To rid yourself of the glass Dock, open Terminal and type (press return at the end of each line):
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
Once your Dock has been restarted, you will see that glass has been replaced with this new style:
If you’d like to go back to glass, simply reopen Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock
My colleague David Meeuwis showed me a most useful and non-intuitive tip that explains a subtle difference between using the @ axis and the attribute() axis in E4X. For example, given the following XML fragment…
<names>
<name salutation="Mr">Billy Bob Thorton</name>
<name salutation="Mrs">Angelina Jollie</name>
<name>Brad Pitt</name>
<name salutation="Ms">Jennifer Aniston</name>
<name salutation="Mr">Vince Vaugn</name>
</names>
The AS3 expression below…
myXml.name.(@salutation == 'Mr')
…will find all the names that have a salutation attribute equal to ‘Mr’. However, if there is any name in the xml that doesn’t have a salutation attribute, that query will throw an exception and die. However…
myXml.name.(attribute('salutation') == 'Mr')
Will give back all names that have a salutation attribute equal to ‘Mr’ and ignore any name elements without a salutation attribute.
So unless you are absolutely positive that the attribute you are selecting always exists, you should be using the attribute() axis over the @ axis.
Here is a quick Flex example with view source enabled that you can test with.
If you like to have an organized Dock in OSX, here is a quick hack that will let you organize the applications that live on your dock by placing spacers between them. Here we go…
1. Open Terminal and type (or copy and paste) :
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'
2. While still in Terminal we will restart the Dock by typing:
killall Dock
Once the Dock has restarted, you will see a space between some of your icons. You can reposition the space, by clicking on it and dragging it to a new location. You can also delete it by dragging it off your dock. You can even have many spacers by typing in the above commands as offen as you like!
Here is a great tool that that makes it super easy to create a favicon.ico file for your website. favikon is a slick little web app that lets you upload any image you like, crop and resize it, then finally export it to a favicon.ico file that you can then place on your website. For those of you not aware of what a favicon is, they are the little icons that appear next to the URL in your location bar. Here are some details on favicons and how to place them on your site.
