This may be near the top of the most ridiculous articles I’ve read in a while.

So ridiculous, in fact — That it has encouraged me to post about it.

So, according to Matthew Garrett, disabling your flash player will help you save lots of energy, so disable it! He complains that when he visits myspace, his machine gets overloaded.

Well, Matthew — 2 things:

1. Get a faster computer.
2. Stop going to myspace, that site sucks by itself, aside from Flash

I’ve been in several debates and discussions with people who just do not like flash for their own reason. In most cases, their argument is legitimate, and I just don’t share their opinion. In this case, it is just a double whammy — not only do I disagree, but his argument is completely ridiculous.

Sure, saving power = good idea. But to go so far as to bash a specific technology so insignificant compared to other power-hungry things, it just seems really bizarre & far fetched to me.

Ok, I’m done. I feel better now.

Well, I’ve been fooling around with papervision for a while now. Sure enough, I’ve completed my first project with it.

The goal was to replace the old portfolio display/home page that my employer, Biggs Gilmore previously had. We wanted to use papervision with the goal in mind to really step it up a notch. I knew just by choosing papervision as the route, we couldn’t go wrong.

We knew we wanted to go with some sort of a “photo wall”. After about a month of working on the weekends and after work, I came up with something fairly slick. The release of Papervision 2.0 could not have been better timed, I quickly ported my app over to GreatWhite and gained a significant performance increase.

And finally, see it for yourself:

Formally known as "SWFfix", SWFObject 2.0 beta 1 has just been released.

At first I was concerned that the confusion about the original SWFObject and this new SWFObject (formally SWFfix). But after all, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that SWFObject 2.0 is now much better and on the road to standardization. Which is exactly what has been needed for embedding flash movies since day one. It’s nice that it is finally happening.

The project is open source and you can find it on Google Code.

I will be messing around with it in the weeks to come, I encourage the same from others!

Well, I attended the Adobe AIR bus tour in Chicago. I was actually surprised with how beneficial the sessions were in terms of explaining how AIR works with Flex and/or HTML. I was surprised to see Grant Skinner there. He talked about a lot of different ideas and uses of AIR and the general potential, it was inspiring.

I am and will continue to toy around with Flex/AIR and see where it leads. My primary responsibilities are all AS2, so I’m slightly at a disadvantage with time. But nonetheless I will be making it a point to keep with it.

Here are my notes during all the sessions:

(Keep in mind that I am not fantastic with taking notes, I typically will do "keyword writing" when I take note, and they were moving along kind of quick.)

• Features of Adobe Air:
  • File system access
  • Network Detection
  • Notifications
  • Applications Update
  • Drag and Drop
  • Local Database
• Sites to check out:
  • http://airapps.pbwiki.com/
  • http://www.adobe.com/go/air
  • http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/
  • http://onair.adobe.com/
  • http://onair.adobe.com/api/
• Required in all Flex/Air Apps:
  • Application files (.mxml)
  • Application Descriptor file (.xml)
• Why is he showing command line crap for the html air apps?
• Apps to checkout:
  • Aptana (www.aptana.com)

Wow. Frustrating.

For the past 3 months I was under the assumption that my FlashTracer Firefox plugin just stopped working due to firefox updates.

I was right, and wrong. I guess? It just kind of disappeared and wouldn’t show up again under the “Tools” menu item in firefox. No matter how many times I reinstalled the plugin, it just did not return.

So today I got fed up and said “Ok, lets reinstall Firefox and see what happens”.

In short, reinstalling firefox fixed the issue, and now I have my FlashTracer back! Woohoo!

Keep in mind that XRay is much more useful for debugging. But this firefox plugin can also be very very handy!