Monthly Archives: March 2007

since moving to the mac, the one (well there are two realy) tool I’ve been missing has been a strong compare tool for text files. Namely code. SVN has a good compare but sometimes when I’m moving files around, I want to make sure I’m not overwriting new with old and stuff. Plus sometimes I’d like to compare against a copy I got from someone else, etc.

Enter Araxis Merge, in my opinion a must have tool! Argent bought all the devs a copy, and there was peave and happiness in dev land. No more losing changes when sharing files with each other and stuff.

As long as I ran Parallels I had Araxis and have in some occassions copied files into Windows only to compare them and then return to OS X. Well not any more!

I’ve long lamented, googled, pleaded, even prayed to obscure gods for a mac version. Well Some one heard me. They’ve got an early release download!!! Yippy skippy!!!

If you’re not familiar with Merge, check it out, it’s a great app.

I’ve wrapped up a project with Jeff (great guy to work with!) WIthout giving anything away, part of my task was some forms for the app. IE. mail this thing to my friend, request information, that kind of thing, well actually those two things almost exactly :)

The PopUpManager, is a darn cool class. This was my first time using it and it was cake.

A few lines and you’ve got yourself a popup. What we ran into was the popup seems to want to appear in the upper left of the app. No problem, use PopUpManager.centerPopUp(popup).

That’s great if your main application is the parent of the popup, since centerPopUp() centers over the parent. in our case, that a component in the upper left also.

Solution, Found thanks to FlexCoders, set your popup’s parent to Application.application.

var myParent:DisplayObject = Application.application as DisplayObject;
var myPopUp:formComponent = MailToFriendForm(PopUpManager.createPopUp(myParent, formComponent, true));

Now our main stage (the entire swf) is the parent of the popup, so centering works perfectly.

Day two is over. The team is great, i really like everybody. Best of all! The soda machine is a quarter!! :-D

I’m jumping in feet first, working with Wayne on a project that’s due out by Friday, my way to learn. It’s a Windoze world, not everything is perfect. I’m excited to keep delving into Quovadx and get some truly kick ass Flex apps with these guys!

Favorite mac app? You know it, aren’t all Mac apps ‘favorite worthy’?

Well this week’s pick: Quicksilver. I know, everyone else has already called dibs on ‘Favorite’ and I’m late to the game. But hey, sorry. I’ve scratched about .8% of Quicksilver’s potential, and even at that, DAMN this app is great! If you own a mac, and aren’t using it, give it a shot! it’ll take some time to get used to it, you’ll probably forget you have it installed for a bit, and keep clicking on things to launch them (launching is just the tip of the iceberg), I can totally see my Dock getting shrunk to just my main "Still might want to click" apps.

Once you’ve downloaded it, take a look at LifeHacker’s Quicksilver section.

try it!

The Next 360Flex is in the planning pipe. We’ve already started talking to our partners, and are figuring out sponsorship details. Stay tuned for more announcements (new website, sponsors, etc)! Tom and I are also actively working to bring our new company to maturity, PDQ. 360Conferences (website in dev now) is going to be THE source for conferences as cool as 360Flex, for developers, by developers. More to come on that!

I’m happy to announce that I found a home for my two copies of FlexBuilder that I got from Ted, with explicit instructions to give to someone or someplace that will help bring more Flex Developers to the fold, SpireMedia now has two more copies and will be bringing two more of it’s devs into the Flex fold. They’re doing some seriously trick things with Flex so I’m sure these two copies will only increase the cool app output :)

Flying home From SoCal today, tomorrow morning is day 1 of new gig. Pretty excited! See my more personal blog for trip details :)