Web Performance

Thanks to Craftymind for benchmarking the various browser technologies. The performance of Flash is common topic between me and a designer-friend. Adobe really needs to step up the performance of the Flash player on the Mac. Mac's are selling like hotcakes, and us Mac-lovers are going to start shying away from Flash applications if they don't perform well.

Let's hope for the best!

Pudding update

It's been a while since I've blogged about the progress of Pudding. I'm taking the stance that it's better to work on Pudding than blog about it!

I hit a nice milestone for the technical side tonight, so it's time to take a breather and do a little post. That milestone is brining Pudding over to Rails 2. Pudding is definitely faster as a result of this framework upgrade and it's going to make my REST development work easier. I won't be deploying the upgrade to Rails 2 until the larger release of Pudding is ready. General Tomfoolery and I are having a "day of code" this weekend. We're meeting up on Saturday and coding all frigg'n day. 

Goal? 

Integrate the first attempt at a more advanced UI. I don't want to talk about the details quite yet, but I've got a plan for Pudding this year. If the General and I can pull it off this year I can really see the creative industry getting excited about how Pudding can help them work with their clients. None of the tools out there hit the nail on the head, and I want Pudding to do it.

More to come....

CaseDetective To Flex

Ian M. Jones, a long-time microISV blogger, is re-inventing his application, CaseDetective, with Flex. He recently posted an update on how he likes working with Flex Builder and Flex 3.

Flex sample apps

For those of you wondering what the big deal about Flex is, take a look at the sample apps here: http://flex.org/showcase/

Those are some of the nicest Flex apps I've seen and IMO the best examples of software that is best built for the web, but outside of XHTML/JavaScript.

Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando

My colleagues from my day job have helped form Adogo, the Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando. "Focused on ColdFusion, Actionscript, Air and Flex in the Orlando area."

(I am particularly interested in any Flex/Air presentations! That stuff is so cool.)

If you're local to Orlando Florida, and are interested in any part of the Adobe development stack, keep an eye on this group. There are some seriously good people running and participating in this thing.

Silverlight, Flex, Web Applications :)

I'm glad to see that Adobe will be getting a legitimate competitor in the area of Rich Internet Application platforms. (Those small companies with custom plugins don't count. Neither do Applets.) Microsoft just announced Silverlight. (Don Dodge's write up. Microsoft's Silverlight homepage.)

Adobe needs this threat to their Flash platform. Nothing breeds better products than competition.

I really don't know much about Silverlight (just what I read in that press release). The obvious problem is, how much will developers, who aren't already drinking the MS Kool-aid, trust a "cross-platform" plugin from Microsoft? Not to mention, what about the tools to build the content? If the tools only run on Windows, you can forget about the people at the cutting edge.

Flex 2

While still throwing a mental hissy-fit, I decided to finally download and play with Flex 2 and the Flex 2 Builder. The compiler for Flex 2 is free, but Flex 2 Builder only gives you a 30 day trial.

Flex 2 Builder seems to be really nice. I went through a small tutorial (took about 20 minutes), and built an RSS reader. Macromedia - and now Adobe - has always been good regarding giving you tutorials with their software.

Once Pudding is at 1.0 I'm going to invest some more time in coming up to speed with Flex 2. Flex plays very nice with web services, so this ought to be fun.

IE is the devil's work

I spent the whole night messing around with my HTML tags and CSS in an attempt to get this under control.

NOTHING is working. It's happening consistently to about 3 pages.

So I started doing some googling, and came across this page on Channel which lists a ton of IE bugs. Check out this one,

Sometimes IE fails to draw some actual text correctly, but selecting the text shows it. Clicking outside the selection sometimes then shows the text properly, but sometimes text that had been displayed correctly before selection and was included in the selection also disappears when clicking outside the selection. I've often seen this on blogs.msdn.com.

WHAT?!?!?!

I found a few links that may give me a chance at fixing this problem:
http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/peekaboo.html
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/ie7-dehacker.html
http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html

I'm going to read them tomorrow and hopefully get past this stupid bug.

I JUST WANT TO REMIND THE IE TEAM THAT THIS IS HAPPENING IN VERSION 7 OF YOUR BROWSER.

Yes, version 7! It took you (Microsoft) 5 years to go from version 6 to 7, and these are the kinds of bugs I'm dealing with?!?!? Paul Graham is right. You've been a joke for years, and you've just put the last nail in your coffin. Vista + IE7 is a total train wreck.

....deep breath....

This may very well be the last HTML application I ever build. The Flex compiler is (finally) free. I think this guy was right when he said,

I'm done with it.

(UPDATE! IT'S WORKING NOW.)