Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Adobe’s Untapped Goldmine

    What if you could push any .exe file to the millions of computers worldwide that have the Flash Player installed? With one click, a user can install Central, Breeze Presenter, or even upgrade Flash Player 8 on their machine from any web browser with the Flash Player, assuming they have administrator rights.

    My boss is excited about combining the Flash Platform & PDF on the client (a.k.a. Apollo). I used to be excited about desktop Flash development, but because of market demand, it’s been relegated to PHP & Flash Lite work; a fun hobby.

    I think of the 2 clients who paid me to find out a way to tap into Flash Player’s ability to install applications. I was unsuccessful. Only apps residing at https://www.macromedia.com can be installed using System.Product.install, although, you can manually install your own EXE’s into the unique folder and interact with them using Flash Player in a browser. Still, this requires you to somehow get the user to install an EXE on their machine; not an easy feat. If we could do that easily, then Flash Player’s ubiquity wouldn’t matter.

    There are uses for this such as remotely controlling apps like AjaxAMP, and interfacing with lower level code using Flash Player as the GUI, like FlashMidi does.

    If you could push an EXE to millions of users around the world, what would it be?

  • ActionScript.com Asks Me 10 Questions

    …and I answer 9 of them.

    10 Questions with Jesse Warden

  • DDO Tank fer Hire

    I usually stop playing games when I’m really hyped up about working on both professoinal & personal projects. When the pendulum swings the other way because of failure to meet goals thus causing me to be frustrated, stress from deadlines, or burn out, my gaming increases. The amount of gaming I do, usually, is inverserly proportional to the suck in my life. Usually; I like to play when I’m in a good mood too, it’s just easier to dissappear for an entire weekend when my Monday through Friday blew.

    As such, I’ve been having challenges making accurate time estimations, clearly communicating intentions, and been generally overwhelmed with the amount of things I need to do. Getting around to follow through with my DDO uninstallation was low on my priority list. Thus, I fired it up one night, and found, generally, it is fun enough to play to allow me to escape from the bs of real life.

    I’m a 4th level Dwarf Fighter, Kalorn Hotforge, on the Aundair server, Tank for hire if you are ever online and need a meat shield.

  • 3 year-old prototype bit me

    I was having problems with the mx.formatters.CurrencyFormatter in Flex. It takes a number or string, and formats it to look like currency. For example, 1.2567878 can be made to look like $1.25. For some reason, it was not working in my DataGrid and I had no idea why. I built some test cases, files that have nothing but a TextInput and a formatter, and they worked so I was really having a challenge figuring out why. Then, it worked when I ran the app in debug mode in Flex Builder 1.5, but didn’t work in normal mode.

    Three hours later, it turns out some code written in 2003 for our debugger was overwriting String.prototype.toString. Since the mx.formatters.NumberBase, does a:

    return value.toString()

    The modified toString function was munging the results. No debug code in your app, no problem.

    Anyway, I really like protoypes. They allow a lot of meta-programming concepts to be done, and really help those creating languages to have the developers build the future API for you based on what they overwrite, just like we did with Flash 5 & 6 in ActionScript 1. I think there is still a lot of room for growth for tools to take advantage of prototype features at compile time, and build upon some of those runtime goodies.