I just discovered this by accidentally hitting the wrong key while debugging (yes, I’m still using Flex Builder 3):
To switch from Debug Perspective back to Development Perspective, hit Cmd+F8.
Flex Builder pops up a list of Perspectives, hit Cmd+F8 again to cycle through your list. This is very handy when you’re finished debugging and want to quickly get back to the Development Perspective without reaching for the mouse. I occasionally stumble on these kinds of things I should already know…
Charles Newman Adobe Flex
As noted in this post, there is no way to right-click a folder in the Finder and copy it’s full path to the clipboard. This is an annoying omission in OS X that can make life difficult for software developers and power users. But I just discovered a neat trick: you can simply drag the folder icon from the Finder into the Terminal window.
So for example, bring up a terminal window and type “cd ” (notice the space after “cd”). Then simply drag your folder from the Finder onto the terminal window, let go and you’ll be ready to hit the return key to change directory to that long path rather than having to type the whole thing out.
Charles Newman Mac OS X
If you have two Flex projects sharing the same parent folder like this:
/Users/your-name/Documents/your-dev-path/ProjectOne
/Users/your-name/Documents/your-dev-path/ProjectTwo
and ProjectTwo refers to ProjectOne in the “Flex Build Path” settings, you’ll get this warning:
Source path entry, ‘/Users/your-name/Documents/your-dev-path/ProjectOne’, is a subdirectory of source path entry, ‘/Users/your-name/Documents/your-dev-path/ProjectTwo/src’.
I don’t know about you, but compile warnings really bug me. If there is really a problem, I’ll address it directly, but in this case, there is nothing wrong. So to remove this warning from your build, add this to your compile settings:
-allow-source-path-overlap=true
Charles Newman Adobe Flex
Sprint 11 is the feature complete release of OSMF. Lots of bugs were fixed for this release including the bug I mentioned in the Sprint 10 release blog post below about the MAST plugin and the SMIL plugin not working together. In fact, in the AkamaiPluginSample all of the plugins are working nicely together. This sample app has become the sample for demonstrating many of the OSMF plugins that reside in the OSMF repository.
For more details on this release, see this blog entry:
http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/2010/04/osmf_fc1_released.html
Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)
If you’ve been waiting for OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) to settle down, now is the time to dive in. This sprint was largely about locking down the API, but we added a few features as well:
- DVR Support. OSMF now supports DVR via Flash Media Server’s server-side DVRCast application. This feature allows clients to jump back in time while viewing a live stream.
- Syndication support (Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0, plus iTunes and Media RSS extensions). You’ll see a new AS3 library in OSMF that can parse all of the major feed formats, plus the media-centric RSS extensions. I’ve also updated the Akamai Plugin Sample app to load and parse an RSS feed and display a playlist. If you load the MAST plugin before loading the RSS feed, you get a pre-roll ad before each video in the playlist. Note there is a bug with the MAST plugin and the SMIL plugin working together, I’m hoping to address this ASAP.
- Extended HTTP Streaming Support. OSMF now supports subclips for HTTP-streamed content, and DRM for HTTP-streamed content.
See the OSMF blog post here for more details on these features:
http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/
As usual, if you have questions, you can post them to the OSMF forums:
http://forums.adobe.com/community/opensource/osmf/
Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)
If you like to use one CSS file in lots of different Flex projects you’ve probably seen an annoying warning message similar to this one:
“The CSS type selector ‘ComboBox’ was not processed, because the type was not used in the application. ”
This warning will appear at compile-time if you don’t have a ComboBox in your app, for example. I like to put lots of styles in a few CSS files and reuse them, but I really don’t need this information. So the way to get rid of these warnings is to add this line to your “Additional compiler arguments” in the “Flex Compiler” section of your project’s properties:
-show-unused-type-selector-warnings=false
Charles Newman Adobe Flex
There is an easy way to figure out what version of SVN is running on the server (the repository). Just copy and paste the http or https address you use for your “svn checkout” into a web browser and you’ll see the server version in the footer of the html page.
So for example, you can see the OSMF repository is running Subversion 1.6.3 by pasting this URL into your browser:
http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/osmf/
And OVP on Sourceforge.net:
https://openvideoplayer.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openvideoplayer/
Charles Newman Subversion
The latest release of OSMF is now available here:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/osmf/Downloads
This is the work we did for Sprint 9, which concluded on January 20th. There are quite a few changes to the API and you can read the release notes for the specific changes. The release notes have detailed descriptions of the API changes and should ease your pain when compiling your player against this new release.
Some of the new features in this release include:
See the OSMF blog post here for more details on these features:
http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/
We are currently heads down on Sprint 10, which will wrap up on February 24th.
As usual, if you have questions, you can post them to the OSMF forums:
http://forums.adobe.com/community/opensource/osmf/
Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)
Let’s say I have a bunch of files with the extension “.abc” and I want to change all of them to end with “.doc”. I can rename each one individually in the Finder, but that could take a long time if there are a lot of files. Especially considering the warning the Finder gives you about changing the file extension.
A much faster way to do it is to launch the Terminal application, “cd” to the directory where your files exist, and use this command:
for f in *.abc; do mv ./”$f” “${f%abc}doc”; done
All of your “*.abc” files will be changed to “*.doc”.
Charles Newman Mac OS X
As of September 2009, Flash Player 10 is installed on 93.5% of the personal computers in mature markets. This includes the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
All the projects I work on target Flash Player 10 or higher, and I can’t keep count of how many times developers have asked me, “how can I make this code work with Flash Player 9″. Simple answer, you can’t, so stop asking ;)
Details are here:
Worldwide Ubiquity of Adobe Flash Player by Version
Charles Newman Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex