My Milieu of Musings

As an Adobe Instructor, I often deal with debugging student code.  Often, mistakes are a result of simple typos.

When I was teaching advanced ActionScript 2.0 curricula, I strongly advocated using SE|PY.  It essentially examined the open file (usually a class file) and implemented IntelliSense based on what was typed previously within the file.  By simply choosing from the dropdown list, attentive students were able to avoid simple typos.

Unfortunately, SE|PY didn't do so well with ActionScript 3, often suggesting method calls that corresponded to ActionScript 2.0 instead of 3.0.

A reference to FlashDevelop came across my RSS feeds.  I marked it for later investigation, and promptly forgot about it.  On a whim, I went and checked it out while students were working on a self-directed lab.  After about 5 minutes, my interest was peaked enough to download it and try it out.  After 10 minutes of using it, I was sold.

Read more...

We've been working with Flare recently to visualize potential learner flows through elearning courses.  One of the cool features within flare is the ability to zoom in on a visualization via the mouse scrollwheel, similar to the browsers Ctrl-Scoll functionality to change font sizes.

Everything works fine in Flex, using the default html publishing templates, but we found that the scoll message was not being propigated through when using SWFObject.

Read more...

We encountered a new error yesterday.  One of our clients has a Flex app that retrieves data from a different server over https (which are hosted on a dedicated server separate from the Flex app).  Sometimes it worked; sometimes it failed w/the following message:

The following unexpected error has occured: [FaultEvent fault=[RPC Fault faultString="Security error accessing url" faultCode="Channel.Security.Error" faultDetail="Destination: DefaultHTTPS"]

Read more...

Apparently, there were major security issues w/the HD video-capable release of Flash Player 9.0.115 (released officially back in Dec 2007).  There were reportings of Flash banners being served up as ads; however, they were exploiting security holes in the player, which allowed the player to manipulate the broswer.

Guess it's time for an update.