Posted by Phil on November 16, 2009 under Training Sessions, Web Development | 
I’ll make this short, lets say you have a lynda.com license and you are using their very fine service to enhance your understanding of AIR by means of Flex. You download the exercise files (cos you’ve got the cool account) and you throw them in your file system, install flex builder 3, you are all set. So you crack open flex builder and import the flex project archive you received from lynda.com, only the problem is when you click run nothing happens and when you click debug it tells you “error while loading initial content”. You google like a mad-man trying to find an answer and get everything from, ‘upgrade your flex sdk’ to ‘kill a chicken… twice’. Turns out that while these may fix some issues, what you really need to do is fix your namespace. Seriously that’s it, just change the namespace.
Open your config .xml file and find this line:
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0"> |
See the “1.0″ on the end? That’s your problem, see you are probably developing with AIR 1.5 (and why wouldn’t you?), not AIR 1.0. So change the line to read
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5"> |
Save the file and relaunch/debug your app. It should run like a champ now. On the upside, maybe lynda will find this post and fix their example files. Until then, this trick should keep you going.
Posted by Phil on May 25, 2009 under Javascript, Training Sessions, Web Development |
I’ve been working on a tool for javascript developers. It all started after searching the web for some form of tracing tool I could use when writing javascript so I could see why a certain function wasn’t firing. I only found a handful of solutions (and none that I was very impressed by). So I finally ended up coding one myself.
So I give you, jTrace – javascript tracing for the peoples (say that last part like strong-bad to get the full effect).
I coded jTrace with jQuery 1.3.2 (as an include… not so much a plugin, although that’s what I usually call it), and then I created a ‘bloated’ version that has jQuery included inside of it (for all you mooTools and prototypers out there… I got your back 
). For those who use the bloated version, yeah I coded the jQuery portion to use ‘jQuery(…’ instead of ‘$(…’ for the selectors so it shouldn’t break your exisiting code.
To get an in-depth approach on jTrace and how to use it, head over the ‘usage‘ page on the jTrace site.
Have questions, comments, or props? Leave them here in the comments, thanks!
Posted by Phil on November 19, 2008 under Javascript, Training Sessions, Web Development |
And now for our quarterly Web Developer Training (because monthly just wasn’t happening). This quarters training is on the infamous (and my personal favorite js framework) jQuery. After recieving some requests for a training session on it, I finally got one put together and hope that it benefits everyone in some way. Also this training is sampling my new training template (not that the old team awesome template wasn’t good enough, it just… well it wasn’t as cool as this one ) If you have any questions etc. throw them in the comments. Enjoy!
Web Developer Training – jQuery
Posted by Phil on October 20, 2008 under Training Sessions |
So Branden was asking me this morning for help on acquiring a news video clip from msnbc.com. There are several and many ways one could tackle this issue. He had already aquired the video, but the audio wasn’t coming with it. Now I’m not 100% sure on how he grabbed the video (I didn’t really ask), but I’m thinking he used a screen recorder. That usually works, but sometimes it doesn’t capture the audio, and that can be for a myriad of reasons. So what did I do to aquire the video for him?
1- Go and grab TubeMaster Plus. This is a handy little tool that has a built in browser that lets you surf to a page and then grab any streaming video (complete with audio) from it. While the interface is a bit clunky, it is somewhat intuitive. It also does have a built-in “tutorial” site built into it to help you get started. The biggest help for me was if I had been told it was a stand-alone client, meaning no IE of FF needed, just throw the link on the main page and it will use the internal browser to render the page and aquire the video. Note that the video should come down as an FLV, you can either convert it inside TMPlus, or use your favorite software to do the encoding.
2- Go and get MediaInfo. This is a handy little app that will tell you the bitrate, video resolution, fps, etc of any media file. Open the FLV in MediaInfo and checkout the video bit-rate, the frame-size, and the audio encoding. Generally I leave this window up.
3- Use SUPER to re-encode/transcode the file into a format more suitable for your use. SUPER is a rough program to download, I’m not sure if the authors actually enjoy torture, or just can’t build a web-page to save their own life, so instead of grabbing it at the offical source, grab SUPER from somewhere trustworthy, like AfterDawn.com (yes the site name sounds like it could be naughty, but it’s not, they’ve been on the scene with video encoding since just about the birth of AngelPotion, and if you got that reference, you just gained a little of my respect ).
4- When SUPER is done encoding, enjoy your video. A simple solution to your video ripping problems.
Other sites/tools you can use to aquire your favorite online videos.
- YouTube Ripper (webservice) - Just paste the YouTube link in the box and then right-click and save the flv.
- LiveHTTPHeaders – (Firefox plugin, manual, and painful)
- Fiddler2/httpspy – (IE plugins, manual, and painful – note that httpspy has become difficult to find… extremely difficult to find, and there is another program out in the wild that is NOT the same. Consult the Ninja on the offical version)
If you need pictures I can create an actual Developer Training (with a minisite), but for now, I’m hoping the text will do. If you have questions or need more examples etc. Leave a comment and I’ll get on it.
Posted by Phil on July 30, 2008 under Training Sessions, Web Development |
I may be jumping the gun here, but I thought I’d post the training a day early. Yes that’s right, I have another training session that may be of interest. This one has to do with gzip/deflate and various js compression engines (JSMin, PACKER, and YUI). I may have thrown some other things in there, but I wrote most of this last week, so I can’t really remember 
.
Let me know if there are bugs to be fixed, or if you have anything you’d like to add.
Web Developer Training: Compression
Tags: apache, compression, deflate, developer, dojo, gzip, jquery, jsmin, mootools, packer, Prototype, training, xampp, yui
Posted by Phil on July 11, 2008 under Training Sessions, Web Development |
Short post… because the full post is a minisite. The goodness of sprites cannot be discounted. They make for a faster site and a better user experience (except for your poorly cache-managed mobile devices… and for that the site really should implement agent identification and direct them to a smaller version of your site anyway). Anyway you can get the full scoop out on the tutorial-minisite.
Developer Training – Sprites (sponsered by Team Awesome)
Enjoy, and feel free to drop a comment or two
Posted by Phil on April 3, 2008 under Javascript, Training Sessions, Websphere Commerce |
It’s time to learn how to get the bugs out. This week we covered basic debugging (from starting the server) to using some external tools (such as the fantastic Firebug plug-in). For the full show you can check the audio clip at the end (I’ll post it when I’m done ‘cleaning’ it).
Highlights:
- Rational debugging mode
- Firebug (for both CSS editing and javascript debugging)
- Drew’s fantastic commentary as nothing works the way he intends (for the first 20-ish minutes)
- My extremely long pause… that I think I may still be on.
On a side note, there are two other tools that are very helpful when trying to debug or develop on IE, Safari, Linux browsers, etc. They are XRAY and Aardvark, and both are bookmarklets (meaning you bookmark the javascript itself and run it when you need it, similar to a bookmark).
XRAY can be found here http://www.westciv.com/xray/.
Aardvark can be found here http://karmatics.com/aardvark/bookmarklet.html.
Audio clip will be here when I’m done editing it… UPDATE: Or it won’t, looks like my sansa destroyed the file, I mean it’s still there, just not in a format that any program can read… I may still play with this, but I’m thinking it’s a lost cause… sorry 
Tags: aardvark, debug, debugging, drew, firebug, help, Javascript, plug-in, plugin, plugins, rational, tools, training, weekly, xray
Posted by Phil on February 22, 2008 under Training Sessions |
Today we had a very good lesson on the correct way to style and set up good looking tables. Just as a quick recap, I’ll post highlights from the html and css here, as well as the original audio from the training session (40ish minutes).
Here is an example of a table well thought out and coded correctly. Notice the use of classes to facilitate the css in controlling the visual flow of the table.
Also note, that WordPress absolutly destroys any layout and aligns everything to the left (argh!) Anyway, pressing on, here is a From Table, again well thought out and designed correctly.
<table class="form-table" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td rowspan="2" class="description">Name:</td>
<td><input type="text" value="" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input type="text" value="" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="description"> </td>
<td><input type="text" value="" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="description">City:</td>
<td><input type="text" value="" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="description">State:</td>
<td><input type="text" value="" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="description">Zip Code:</td>
<td><input type="text" value="" /></td>
</tr>
</table> |
Now if you find yourself wishing you could see the original files, well you can. Simply grab them from here. Also, if you happen to have your “Bulletproof Web Design” by Dan Cederholm handy you can flip to page 153 and start reading there. I’d also post some css, but the post is getting rather lengthy as is so just grab the zip file to see the fully stylesheet.
And now the part you’ve been waiting for …
The audio from the training.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
