ShortFusion Blog

Java, Apple Doesn't Love You Anymore - She Probably Never Did

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:33:00 -0500

I have said before that, but for Adobe, I would abandon MS Windows. And, even for my own direct needs, I would probably already have plunged off the cliff towards Linux nirvana. The anchor that keeps me firmly tethered in the grasp of Redmond is the need to support designers. If the Creative Suite would play nicely on Ubuntu, I would pretty much force about a half dozen or so artists to take the plunge. But, back to reality. The only option away from Microsoft is Apple. Apple has always been a non-starter for me. Perhaps unduly biased by a father who insisted on building his own computers - literally transistor by transistor in 70's and 80's - the early Apple offerings were considered "toys". That probably wasn't fair, but what might have been a hard-to-justify historical bias has instead become healthy fear of a company that would control its customers instead of serve them (this is done by offering a diminishing pool of seductive choices until one has so much invested into a brand that self-deception is easier than objective decision making - thinking may hurt more, but it's a good pain). Anyway, I don't have a good opinion of Steve Jobs the businessman or Apple the company (Steve Jobs may be a great guy in other arenas). Short story long, jumping to Apple is not likely happen of my own volition. That said, it'll probably be a moot point soon. As Apple threatens to kill java as a viable application platform on the Mac, one suspects that this will ultimately mean the end of Mac versions of Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and ColdFusion Builder. The problem is not that Apple will stop supporting Java, but that too much of the Apple platform is hidden from developers: [More]

blekko - the little search engine that might

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 15:39:00 -0500

I found out about blekko, a new search engine in limited beta, at SMX East a couple of weeks ago. In addition to picking up a bit of wearable schwag from them, I also took home a login account, though I have just recently had a chance to start experimenting with it. My initial reaction was to be not so excited. "Who needs another search engine?" Even after listening to the guys in the blekko expo booth as well as hearing their representative participate in a search discussion panel along with representatives from bing and Google, I wasn't motivated to immediately start playing with their new service. The problem they face is that there does not seem to be a large volume of those dissatisified with the state of search. On the contrary, consolidation of search has occurred with the remaining large players, Google and bing, still working on innovative features. Ok, "instant" may not be revolutionary, or even helpful in some case, and I don't use bing enough to know if they are doing anything innovative, but I still have not recently suffered from the inability to find utility from the SERPs that I see. All of that said, they are worth checking out for some novel features - some of which I would suspect that Google or Microsoft could implement rather quickly, and others that I doubt we'll ever see from a major player. So let's look at those: [More]

FREE ALL ACCESS PASS TO SMX EAST - NYC OCT 4-6

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:11:00 -0500

Last minute opportunity for those that can easily get to NYC. imageMEDIA, my employer and your source for cheap printing, is giving away an all access pass to SMX East, the Search Marketing Expo going on October 4th to 6th (next week) - a $1400 value. You have to jump through some simple hoops, but there has not been a lot of traffic for it yet so the odds are pretty good. You have to get your entry by midnight this Friday, October 1st. And, a quick FYI, SMX is all about getting and converting web site traffic. It'll be at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (655 West 34th Street New York, NY 10001) with a Tuesday night party, SMX After Dark, at Mars2112 (51st Street and Broadway).

Pale Moon - Windows Optimized Version of Mozilla FireFox

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:13:00 -0500

A Pale Moon appeared above my horizon today. The Pale Moon Project is a one man show producing a Windows Platform Optimized Build of Mozilla Firefox. The project site claims a 25% improvement in the performance that results from dumping junk you probably don't want anyway: [More]

Mobile Browser Detection Hack

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:21:00 -0500

As was surely inevitable, I am now obliged to think more about the experience a user might have of a site while using mobile devices. I could have staved this off for a little while yet longer, but iOS and Android fire the mouseover event in jQuery. Why? Where's the mouse? This gets in the way with a new, mobile-friendly, dhtml menu system I'm creating - works through clicks as well as mouseovers. Anyway, I thought to either investigate the event handling issue (maybe a jQuery issue) or go for browser detection. As there are more and more mobile initiatives rolling down the pipe for me, detection seemed like it might be more helpful. And, really, I didn't want to reinvent the wheel so I went looking for pre-existing solutions. I found Detect Mobile Browser, an open-source tool, but it didn't think that iPad was a mobile device. In my framework speed dating session, I said goodbye quickly to the prospect of a long term relationship. I did notice, though, from the USER_AGENT that it was reporting, that all the mobile devices I was checking identified themselves as "mobile" somewhere in the string. So, a quick hack that seems to do the trick emerged: [More]

How Many Ways To Make A Link?

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:36:00 -0500

Been doing some research on page optimization and have come across a number of different ways to make a link. Most seem designed to avoid notice by search bots, but I can see some other uses as well. Anyway, these are the various specimen of hyper text linking that I have been able to accumulate: [More]

GIS WTF? Mecca in Florida?

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:58:00 -0500

Not sure if this is an Easter Egg, some sort of subtle subversion, or maybe the Hajj has just gotten tired in the Middle East, but Microsoft is now reporting that Mecca is located in Dunedin, FL. As cool as it may be to hit the beach after a long day of pilgriming, or make the secondary stop at the Mouse House (I think there must be some sort of organized Brasilian pilgrimage to Walt Disney World so there might be a conflict with the change), but I'm pretty sure Mecca is still a wee bit further away and not so much contained in the territorial United States. [More]

White Space Killing CSS Layout

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:22:00 -0500

After a longer-than-I-want-to-admit session of reconciling CSS rendering problems where <li> items were mysteriously 3px lower in Webkit (Chrome& Safari) and Internet Explorer, but not Mozilla (FF4 beta 3), I was reminded, and hopefully will remember this time that:

item 1
item 2
item 3
item 4


    item 1
    item 2
    item 3
    item 4

on all browsers, is not equal to:

item 1
item 2
item 3
item 4

item 1
item 2
item 3
item 4

Friggin' white spaces with a non-zero height pushing my items down. Bah!

AIR Based iPhone & iPad Emulator for Website Rendering

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:47:00 -0500

I am definitely Android biased as I'm not a fan of Apple's walled garden, or of being obliged to a single vendor. That said, Apple devices are nice and they seem to be the only company with a shipping tablet that is worth a damn; the augen gentouch78 Android tablet is nice, but you'd have to be delusional to prefer it over the iPad; it's desirable because it's cheap and hackable. Oh, and there are millions of iPhones and iPads out there so chances are rather good that one of your web properties will be rendered on one so it's probably worthwhile to take a peak. [More]

Augen Gentouch 78 Portrait Mode Hack For eBook Reading

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I acquired one of the cheap Augen Gentouch 78 Android tablets K-Mart is offering - a crazy excursion that made me wonder if the Delorean didn't go over 88 (it really hasn't seemed to change in the last couple of decades since I last went). Anyway, the goal was to acquire an ebook reader and a platform for experimenting with Android as I'm not terribly keen to risk my phone. There are lots of other people going over the drawbacks of the device, but I try to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. As an e-reader I need to be able to open:

[More]

Flex: Country Aware States ComboBox

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:20:00 -0500

Alex had created some extensions to ComboBox that handled pre-population of Country and State information. They solved his problem and hopefully worked for others as well, but i just had the occasion to start using them and ran into some issues. The first issue is that they extend ComboBox. When you need to set the value of a ComobBox you have to go through the grief of iterating over a loop. Luckily, I've already addressed the needed additions to support a ComboBox selectedValue property. So getting this up and running, at least initially, was as easy as changing ComboBox to eComboBox (you don't have to explicitely import the class if you put the definition in the same package). The second issue is that needed states entry varies with the country. The US has its states and territories, as does Canada and probably some other countries too (If you aren't a mostly English speaking country on North America do you even exist? - just joking) so if the country input is open ended you might find yourself wanting comboboxes as well as textinputs. I originally had gone through the annoying process of maintaining two discrete comboboxes and a textinput and logic to control the visible and includeInLayout properties; that gets old quickly. Instead, I just wanted a single entry for the State information with a common property for setting and getting the selected value. To make my life easier, I decided to just extend what Alex had created by just consolidating the XML dataProviders. For some reason, he had already included a country property so it was easy enough to group them together so as to be able to filter them later: [More]

Flex: Drag Sortable VBox

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:42:00 -0500

Among my many projects, I am working on internal AIR app that includes configuring an XML document that is consumed by a separate, public-facing, flex application. One of the features of the interface is that items are dragged onto a VBox and the children are saved in the order in which they were added; a consequence of iterating over the getChildren(). When the Flex app consumes the saved objects it displays them in order. While this is nice as it is predictable, I was obliged to enable the ordering of these items. The intuitive solution, at least for my group, was determined to be a simple draggable interface. As items are added to the VBox, the expectation is that the order can be set by simply dragging the target item and dropping it in the desired location. A Vbox is not a List and there is not a builtin support mechanism for this. And, to prevent me from simply changing my VBox to a List, List does not have a getChildren():Array method. Not saying that there is no way to get an array of objects contained within a List, but it became obvious that a simple switch would cause me potentially more grief than just adding the functionality to a VBox. That said, I couldn't find any resources that detailed what I needed to accomplish (I've been admonished in the past for re-inventing wheels, so I try to take a look at what already has been shared to save time and effort). So, anyway, on to discussing how to make a drag sortable VBox with Flex. I've tried to make my solution as generic as possible to make it a functional drop-in to any situation by using UIComponents, however, some situations might be more easily solved by more precisely identifying the data type of your draggable objects. The drag and drop parts aren't so bad. We need to make sure that the target VBox has dragEnter and dragDrop listeners and that its children has a mouseMove listener that starts the whole thing off. The only trick here is that we need to remember the original index of the dragged item and then calculate, at drop, what the new index ought to be. Our setup will be something of the sort: [More]

Steve Jobs Is A Winner

Sat, 15 May 2010 18:56:00 -0500

I was going to write an extended bit about the latest bit of discourse between Apple and Adobe, but the schedule is not going to allow it (and, really, who wants to read it?). So, instead, I will just share the wonderful accompanying image that I forced out of an Apple phanboy (along with sizable chunks of his soul) using Adobe tools. So, with no further ado, Steve Jobs, Winner, Biggest Douche of the Universe:

[More]

ActionScript: Emerging Free Book on Bitmaps

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:20:00 -0500

Thibault Imbert, an Adobe Systems Engineer, is working on a new book, "What can you do with bytes?", that he'll be releasing as a downloadable pdf for free. Thibault does a lot of interesting work with ActionScript and his site is worth frequenting (especially if you are francophone as he is also one of the few, maybe only one writing AS books in French). Anyway, he is releasing as he goes and, as of the time of this post, the first 45 pages are available. Incidentally, I came across this while looking for a way to inject animated gifs into Flash. There is a nifty site, ajaxload, that has a free animated gif generation service for throbbers.

Flex: (Somewhat) Simple ColorMatrixFilter Example

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:05:00 -0500

As my Simple Actionscript Color Separator Class seemed to be popular, I thought that I would expand on the concept of color in Flash a bit by providing a demonstration of the ColorMatrixFilter. Mostly this is for my own gratification as I have been investigating bitmap manipulation with ActionScript 3.0 and color is a big part of that (There are also convolution and displacement filtering capabilities and I will eventually be posting simple examples of those). So, the quick recap is that each pixel is made up of 4 channels: Red, Green, Blue and an Alpha channel that controls opacity. These channels are expressed as hexadecimal and aggregated together into a neat 32bit number (See the previous color post for more details). When the ColorMatrixFilter is applied, the Flash player will iterate over every pixel in a bitmap and apply the rules of the filter on an individual basis. This is particularly powerful, but, as one might expect with a ColorMatrixFilter, there is a matrix. In this case, it is a 4 x 5 matrix where each row represents a channel of the bitmap and the columns represent the channels as well as an offset. So the rows correspond to Red, Green, Blue and Alpha and the columns represent Red, Gree, Blue, Alpha and Offset. For any given pixel, the final channel values are expressed as the sum of the products added to the offset. That probably didn't make as much sense as I might hope, so let's consider the following matrix, known as the identity matrix. This is a good place to begin as this has no impact on the final color: [More]