One Reason to Consider Apple’s iTV

I was just discussing the iTV with someone when it hit me…The iTV has HDMI output which would only make sense if they were going to offer High Def content, right? So when you buy your HD movies from Apple maybe it is great that you don’t have physical media with it. Why you ask! The HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray war is not a problem for you. If you were to run out and buy all HD-DVD or all Blu-ray then you run the same risk that all those people who bought Laser Disks or Beta-Max discovered. One of these HD formats will most likely fail and movies from Apple or other online services may be the only way not to (legally) avoid the risks! Just thinking out loud. Vegas Baby!

Using a Hierarchy of Components to Populate a Flex Tree Control

This post is about creating a flex tree control that uses a component hierarchy as the data provider. It is a little long and WordPress is killing me with their code style so I did my best to make it readable. Nevertheless, it took me about 5 individual attempts to get this post written completely so I hope it is understandable to everyone. Also, I am a beginner Flex 2 developer, so any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated. As with most of my Flex development, after struggling for days and then finally getting something to work, I later find out that there is a much easier way to do it that none of my searches ever turned up.

More after the jump…

Is MS Word too Helpful For You?

If you have ever struggled with formatting your documents in Word and like me just dropped out to notepad to write your document in frustration, here are some tips that may help you.

Making your Word documents behave

Update: Radtech BT600 Glitches

I have to give 5 stars to RadTech for their product support. They quickly sent me a brand new mouse when they received my complaint about the double-clicking. Another ding on quality however because the small plastic gliding pads on the bottom of the new mouse were too short to have any glide value and made the mouse scratch against the surface. I did a glide race between the old and new one and the old mouse with proper gliders sailed about twice as far as the new one. Again with 5 star support, I quickly received an email back from RadTech that my new glider pads were on the way. The new mouse is about 95% perfect with one downside: The left mouse button makes a very loud click noise. It sounds very cheap. Now I don’t want to sound anal here and I have had many (albeit cheaper) mice that made a similar noise. In fact, if I didn’t have my original to do a side-by-side comparison I would never have know there was a difference. Anyway, I plan to live with the loud click again in exchange for all the features this mouse brings to the table.

RadTech: Step up the quality a couple of notches here and you will have yourself a real winner!
RadTech BT600

Review: Radware BT600 Bluetooth Mouse

Review: I purchased the Radware BT600 from powermax.com and I would give it an 8 out of 10 for features but only a 5 out of 10 for quality.

Features: On/Off switch – I would rather personally make the call when it is on or off and not let it auto-sense like some do. Recharge via USB cable – this was my selling point since I did not want to haul extra batteries. It works ok but I have found the battery life to be pretty bad after about 3-4 weeks of use. Probably came with cheap rechargables. Scroll wheel – works great. Thumb buttons – I use for browser back and forward mainly. Software – nice mac support allows you to change all the buttons (to a limited list of options) and make custom configurations for how it works in different applications (I haven’t tried that yet).

Quality: The mouse is full size but not as large as some of the later ergonomic Logitech and MS mice out there. I would call it regular size. Overall, I think it feels cheap and looks poorly manufactured. The feel of the button clicking on both the main buttons and the thumb buttons is mushy and does not provide that tactile feedback that I like. Also, I have just emailed their support because mine seems to be double-clicking now when I only physically single-click something. I have tried changing all the speed settings for it and cannot get it to stop.

It has a one-year warranty so maybe I have a new one in my future. To be determined.

Flex and ColdFusion Beginner Tip #2

What is flex doing to ColdFusion?  While I was running the Flex beta, I was getting all kinds of data dumped to my cfusion-out.log file that showed the incoming and outgoing transactions.  Well for some reason after we installed the production ready Flex 2 and CF 7.0.2 this stopped.  Turns out that our services-config.xml file lost an important section.  Make sure that inside the <services-config> section of that file you have a <logging> section that looks something like this:

<logging>
<target class=”flex.messaging.log.ConsoleTarget” level=”Debug”>
<properties>
<prefix>[Flex] </prefix>
<includeDate>true</includeDate>
<includeTime>true</includeTime>
<includeLevel>true</includeLevel>
<includeCategory>true</includeCategory>
</properties>
<filters>
<pattern>Endpoint.*</pattern>
<pattern>Service.*</pattern>
<pattern>Configuration</pattern>
<pattern>Message.*</pattern>
<pattern>DataService.coldfusion</pattern>
</filters>
</target>
</logging>

Important Notes 

• The level=”Debug” adds a lot more data.
• <pattern>DataService.coldfusion</pattern> – I have no idea what this does yet, but I read it on adobe.com so it must do something.
• I turned on date, time, level, and category
• You would obviously not want all of this in Production

Running CFMX on an Intel Mac – Solved?

While I am not normally a big fan of reposting, I have had several comments on my information about running CFMX on the Intel Macs so I wanted to link over to Mark Andrachek’s site where he as posted CFMX on Intel Macs – The Definitive Guide which from what I hear covers everything you need to know to get it running. I also saw a post on the RedBalloons Lab site that offers some alternative ideas.

Thanks guys for your hard work on this for those of us without the time to do it!

MacBook Pro Whine/Buzz Fix May be Available

Looks like based on this Apple Support knowledgebase article that there may be a fix available for the MacBook whining and/or buzzing. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303365

I’ll probably call for mine just to see what they consider a problem and what they can do about it. I’ll post an update when I find out what’s up!

Flex & ColdFusion Beginner Tip #1

As promised, and perhaps quicker than promised, here is my first Flex with ColdFusion tip.

While it may seem a no-brainer to seasoned Flex-CF coders, this one stumped me as I was getting started so I wanted to post it here first. You may have seen some code like this:

<mx:RemoteObject
id="roRequestCfc"
destination="ColdFusion"
source="extensions.CF.requestGateway"
showBusyCursor="true"
result="requestReadAllResultHandler(event)"
fault="Alert.show(event.fault.faultString, 'Error');">
</mx:RemoteObject>

The code above is great for calling one function on a CFC using something like roRequestCfc.readAllRequests(); and having it handled by a single result method, but you sure have boxed yourself in with this. I don’t know where I got this sample code, but I was totally stumped about how to call different functions and have them handled by different result methods which is something you would want to do most likely. Then I stumbled on this…

<mx:RemoteObject
id="roRequestCfc"
destination="ColdFusion"
source="extensions.CF.requestGateway"
showBusyCursor="true"
fault="Alert.show(event.fault.faultString, 'Error');">
<mx:method name="readAllRequests" result="requestReadAllResultHandler(event)" />
<mx:method name="saveRequest" result="requestSaveRequestResultHandler(event)" />
</mx:RemoteObject>

Note the <mx:method> tags and how each has its own result attribute. This makes a lot more sense. You still call the functions in the exact same way, but you results will be handled by different methods now. :)

Is this thing on?

Wow… it has been a really long time since I posted anything.  Well, I did have my son’s second birthday party and a whole lot of other events in the last month so sorry about that.  I have been working a little with Adobe Flex 2 (on top of ColdFusion) and I have a couple of helpful hint posts that I will try to get up here as soon as I can take a break and write them up.  Until then, I’ll do my best to start posting just some random comments from time to time.  I will try to stick to my number 2 rule for this blog and not repost other people’s blog posts.  When you have something to add, fine, but just to link to it with a three word sentence…not for me.

More later….