Adobe has just released “FABridge”, the Flex AJAX Bridge on Adobe Labs which exposes Flex apps to the browser.
This should also interest web developers if you want to utilize Flex 2 components / mini-apps in your AJAX & DHTML applications, have limited Flex/Flash resources on staff, and/or don’t feel like coding all of the bridge code… Adobe just coded it for you.
Neurofuzzy had a good write up about his experience with the IE Eolas patch Microsoft is distributing, so I figured I’d write up on mine too. I also had wrote up about 4 paragraphs in the past hour whining about how I hate it, but suffice it to say, all of my existing Flash & Flex content, while playable, requires an extra click to “get it to work”. The banner at the top of my site, my comments app to this blog post, and even my little “Copy to Clipboard” trackback link movie at the end of this post all no longer work like they should in IE. They display just fine, you can see them, but when you go to click in a field to write something or click a button in IE… you have to click twice.
That’s sad… for me because all of my Flex & Flash content is now broken user experience wise, and for users who have to deal with all of the sites NOT fixed by using the JavaScript workarounds such as Microsoft’s solutions, FlashObject, or Adobe’s hotfix for Flex 1.5. Do you think Eolas would pay the invoices I send to them for having to add code to my personal & professional projects? I think out of spite I’ll bill them for my time.
I applaud Microsoft for battling this patent, for implementing this change vs. the former one, and for using this as a line in the sand early. Eolas, however, has left a scar on the Internet, and the ingenuity of programmers has managed to dramatically reduce the casulaties. Go JavaScript.
Still, I’m sad. I use Firefox, but most of my clients don’t, nor do millions of users. As the script implementations increase, so to will the damage’s visbility disappear so there is a silver lining. History will hopefully view this as the US patent system gone horribly wrong with implications to have gone even worse and learn from it.
Blogging tools are getting smarter. I upgraded to MoveableType to 3.2 over the weekend. While their internal spam controls doesn’t hold a candle to my French Canadian comments SWF + 3 lines of Perl code, the trackback auto-discovery is pretty cool. It’s not new, it just came turned on by default so I just found out about it. Basically, if my blog entry links to another blog with a trackback URL, MoveableType will automatically ping it when you post. Pimp!
However, for those who manually copy trackback URL’s, they are still unweidly. You can’t link to them because they are meant for blogging tools, not a web browser. As hyperlinks are unbroken text, they don’t always wrap correctly; I put mine in a scrolling div. You therefore have to highlight and select it. Not an overtly hard task mind you, but requires more than your average amount of hand-eye coordination merely for the sake of citing someone elses discussion.
So, I immediately thought of a Flash solution. Then, I immediately felt bad for bashing AJAX the other day (12305848’th time in 2 days), so I went looking for a JavaScript solution instead. It turns out the first 10 results for google are sites that think IE is the only browser in the world that matters, a blog that wrote 2 entries on how insecure IE’s ability is to read your clipboard is, and a security company’s report on the exploit. There are 2 ways, one for IE4 and one for IE5… never went to page 2 in search of a Moz way. While I managed to get the IE code to work for her majesty (her work is IE5, hardcore), I realized, in the time spent I could of been done with my Flash idea. Still, I owe it to myself to get out of my comfort zone.
…and of course upon returning to said comfort zone, I actually, you know, accomplished something. Imagine that.
I created a text hyperlink in Flash that uses the same CSS as my site. When you click it, it copies the trackback URL to your clipboard. Small, but helpful I think. Secure, and so far works on IE6 & Firefox 1.5 for PC, and Safari on Mac. The trackback URL is passed to the SWF via flashvars, and the SWF merely goes System.setClipboard(trackback_url) when you click it. It’s at the bottom of this entry, “Copy to Clipboard”.
Patrick Mineault posted some video tutorials with the release of AMFPHP 1.2 at AMFPHP.org. However, SourceForge‘s servers blow… I couldn’t even download them to mirror them on my servers, so had to wait for Patrick to mirror them on his server first. Anyway, they are now mirrored on one of my servers.
Additionally, I’ve put them in my CaptivatePlayer so you can watch them all at once with volume control.
AMFPHP Video Tutorials – (All 6)
or individually:
Nature Boy has the full mirror list here.