Open Source Living is a great place to find some of the web’s best open source software. There is a lot of really high quality open source (aka free) software on the web these days. If there is a software package you’ve been thinking of purchasing, I’m sure you will find a great free replacement at this site.
If your Flex projects use a crossdomain.xml security policy file, the Adobe Developer Center has a great series of articles around the Security changes in the new Flash Player 9 Update 3 (9.0.115.0). I’m surprised I have not seen more posts in the Flex community about these changes. We have already been affected by these changes a number of times when trying to access media on Amazon’s S3 storage service due to an incorrect content-type header. All cross domain policy files must have a content type of text/* (any text type), application/xml or application/xhtml+xml. There are a number of other changes that you should be aware of, and the DevCenter article discusses them all.
Zen Master of the CSS Zen Garden, Dave Shea, will now be joining Derek Featherstone as a speaker at the next meeting of the Better Web Posse in Victoria.
The evening will begin with Derek talking about “Accessible mapping with Google Maps” and then Dave will end with “Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Web Design”.
Please take a moment to help us prepare for a sane event, and sign up to RSVP. Again the event details are:
MONDAY, December 10 | 7:00 pm
The Sticky Wicket, Maple Room (map)
Derek Featherstone a WaSP committee member and and usability consultant with FurtherAhead in Ottawa, will be speaking at the next meeting of the Better Web Posse in Victoria. The event details are:
MONDAY, December 10 | 7:00 pm
The Sticky Wicket, Maple Room (map)
Derek is also one of the organizers of the Web Directions North conference that will be held in Vancouver this January 28th to February 2nd. WDN has a great lineup this year, and if you live in the Pacific Northwest, this will be the premier web design/development event of the year!
24 ways is back for a 3rd holiday season with 24 new posts by some of the worlds best web developers. Starting December 1st and continuing through to Christmas day you can get your holiday fill of web geekery.
Looking for a cool and unique Christmas give that will have everyone talking about? FlipClips is a cool online service that creates Flip Books from your digital video clips! A 75 page Flip Book costs $8.99 and a 150 page Flip Book will run you about $18.99.
Thomas Baekdal has authored an insightful report on the Actual Browser Sizes that are being used by the people visiting our sites. The report has some interesting findings like users with screen resolution of 1024×768 and lower typically maximize their browser window, where users with larger screen resolutions are less likely to browse with maximized windows.
The report is broken into 5 parts:
Take the time to read this report. It will be well worth your time.
The Adobe Edge Newsletter has a goot article on Using the BitmapData class in ActionScript 3.0 to render video. The approach described in the article uses the NetStream and Video classes to handle the loading and playback of video and then takes that data and displays it in a Bitmap object. Once in the Bitmap object, you will be able to apply filters to give your video some very interesting effects.
AS3 E4X Rundown is a great introduction and reference to working with E4X in Flex. The author, Roger Braunstien is correct that 75% of E4X makes perfect sense, but it’s the remaining 25% that requires a bit of demystifying. This post covers the basics well then goes on to share some of the tips and tricks in working with E4X.
If you’ve ever had to install PHP from source on Mac OSX, two of the dependencies you’ve likely come across are libpng and libjpg. Ethan Tira-Thompson has created a universal binary installer for both of these libraries to make them easier to install. You could also grab these from Darwin Ports or Fink, but the installer is easier!
