Recently at work I have been working on a project which involves streaming large amounts of video using progressive download. If you use Flash Media Server (has a new name now doesn’t it?), then it will automatically figure out how large the video buffer should be for you, but I wanted to implement the same functionality for progressive downloads within a flex component.
To determine the correct buffer size, you need three bits of information:
- The available bandwidth that the user has
- The size of the video to be played, and
- The bitrate of the video to be played
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Ted Patrik announced this weekend that Flash Player 9 has had 2.32 Billion installations. On average there are 5-6 Million successful installations per day. Congratulations to Adobe for continuing to grow such a fantastic platform!
The bottom line: Everyone has the flash player!
This one made it completly under the radar somehow. The newest hotfix was released on the 19th of this month, but I hadn’t heard anything about it until today, and I expect that there are lots of other people who missed it also.
This hotfix contains a bunch of bug fixes which have been complected since the Hotfix 2 release, and it effects both the Flex SDK and FlexBuilder.
For more information and the hotfix installers check out the TechNote.
What would the internet look like as a subway system?
I love these things! It’s such a cool way to visualize the web and see who the major players are. I also find it’s a quick and easy way to see how up to date I am in tracking the latest Web 2.0 news.
I found this on TechCrunch.
Controversial enough for ya?
I’m calling all you Harry Potter fans out. $5 says that Harry Potter will not make it to the top of the New York Times best sellers list. In fact, it won’t even make it into the top 10!
If my claims make you mad, then maybe you should put some money on the table. Once you have made your bet, then you can go and read this post.
Note: All proceeds go towards keeping MunkiiHouse.com online. 
I seem to be coming up against problems regularly on my current project for some reason. It’s probably because I am extending many of the basic flex components to allow for intelligent databinding. My new controls will automatically implement a two way data binding to the selected item/index of their data provider collection. This makes building data driven applications very very easy, but it relies on all of the components to behave as documented, particularly their events need to fire as expected.
The fact that Flex components should dispatch ‘change’ events only due to user interaction, and not to programatic changes, has long been part of the Flex conventions and is true for all of the built in Flex components… except the CheckBox control.
It cost me most of the afternoon, but I can confirm that the CheckBox component dispatches a change event when the ’selected’ property is programatically set. I looked in the Flex Bug and Issue Management System and found that this bug has been found and logged against Flex SDK M2 (the Moxie beta). Ironically it was logged as a backwards compatability issue, even though it is broken in Flex 2.0.1 Hotfix 2. This issue will be fixed in the next release of Moxie, and I don’t think it’s worth logging it against Flex 2.0.1 aswell.
It’s frustrating that I’m comming across these issues, but it’s cool that the bug tracking system is so open and they guys at Adobe are so quick to respond to bugs and requests.
I still love Flex
There are so many web comics around these days that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. I used to read a few of them, but I don’t really have the time any more. Here are a couple I’ve seen in the last few days relating to Web2.0 which I thought were pretty good:
The quality of my last few posts not withstanding, it really is hard to keep a blog regularly updated with interesting content. I don’t think I’ll ever wind up on twitter though.
UPDATE: Adobe Confirmed that there was an error and have corrected the documentation
The Adobe Live Docs for the TextInput and TextArea class clearly document that the change events coming off these controls bubble. Ie. they have bubbles = true. A bubbling event is very convenient because it means you can listen to the parent of the changed control and hear the event rather than having to listen to the control itself.
I wanted to use this functionality on a form I am building in flex where I want to detect if the form needs to be saved (ie. any of the data has been changed). If the events behaved as documented then it would be easy to listen to the panel which holds my form components and get all change events. Unfortunatly, after much testing and confusion, I now know that the events do not infact bubble. Silly me for trusting the documentation.
While trying to figure out where my events were going, I read through the source code of the TextInput class. Here’s what I found on line 1990:
// Stop propagation of the original event
// and dispatch a new one that doesn’t bubble
event.stopImmediatePropagation();
dispatchEvent(new Event(Event.CHANGE));
So far from dispatching a bubbling event, they actually explicitly stop it from bubbling.
The simple work around for this is to extend the TextInput class, catch the change event and dispatch it again as a bubbling event. I notified the Adobe guys that the documentation is wrong, but I’m suprised that someone else wouldn’t have encountered this before.
It’s been over a week since my last post which is a first for me.I’ve just had lots of things on my place recently including:
- Starting a new project at work (I’m project manager for this one)
- Being sick
- Moving flat
I have got content to post, but I just haven’t been able to find time to polish it off to the point of actually posting it. I’ll hopefully get back into a more normal routine in the next couple of weeks and start posting again. Until then, here’s a fantastic commercial I found through digg:
Considering how much people were complaining last week about the lack of support for Flash on the iPhone, I’m suprised that this article from Apple Insider hasn’t created more of a buzz through the Flex blog sphere.
The gist of it is that Apple intends to add the flash plugin to the iPhone Safari browser through a software update which is expected in the new couple of months or so. Considering that all iPhone apps have to be web apps, that’s a big bost for the flash platform.
