Alternate heading for this is how to install Flash SDK in Chrome though either way I was stumped this morning as I just wanted to get in to learning Flex 4.

• When developing Flex applications you need the SDK version of Flash for debugging which means uninstalling previous versions first. After digging around my Mac for a little while then hitting Google I was able to find out that this has to be achieved via a seperate, downloadable uninstaller (unlike all other apps I use).
• I followed the 6 steps from Adobe then I opened Google Chrome and checked About Adobe Flash Player page only to see that its still installed. At this point Adobe's advice is quite simply repeat these steps to uninstall Flash Player - honest, that's what it says.
  I did repeat the steps a couple of times for sanity sake then I remembered that Chrome integrated Flash recently so I fired up Firefox and found that indeed Flash was uninstalled!
• Back to Chrome and I went to about:plugins and Disabled "Shockwave Flash". Fired up About Adobe Flash Player and now its gone!
• Final step is installing Flash SDK and you're done

After admitting I had a little Adobe Max jealousy @ryanstewart DM'd me to let me know you can catch the keynote online. All you have to do is register at http://max.adobe.com/online/keynotes/

Actually, after a little digging around Ryan even posted about this yesterday.

Please update your bookmarks and feeds for my site.

I now have a Mango Blog at:

http://www.andyjarrett.com/blog

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/andyjarrett

Recently for work I have had to convert quite a few word docs to the FlashPaper format.

Realising how long this would take I looked into an undocumented feature of the FlashPrinter.exe of calling it from the command line and passing the required arguments.

You can easily take my code and get any language like Java or even Ant to do the following.

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The first post of 2008 is here and its a joke, of course. Hope everyone had a good christmas/holiday. Enjoy the first of many Fridays of the year!

A fellow decides to take off early from work and go drinking. He stays until the bar closes at three in the morning, at which time he is extremely pissed. After leaving the bar, he walks home. When he enters his house, he doesn't want to wake his wife, so he takes off his shoes and starts tip-toeing up the stairs. Half-way up the stairs though, he falls over backwards and lands flat on his back. That wouldn't have been so bad, except that he had a half bottle of scotch in his back pocket, and it broke; the broken glass carved up his ass terribly. Yet, he was so drunk that he didn't know he was hurt.

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First of let me say that as much as I would love this to be my code it mainly comes out of two posts [1,2] on ASFusion.com.

To sidetrack for a moment, I must point out now is that even if you don't find answers in the Asfusion posts always check the comments out! They get up to 50+ comments on some posts with hints and tips there as well.

Back to the form. I had a project which started life as a 5 page HTML form with the need to make it a little user friendly to the eyes and more organised. Any form over 2 pages I hate in general and I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks one long page is better than X amount of multiple pages this is whether i'm filling them in or creating them.

In moving my HTML form over to <cfform format="flash"> I ran into the problem of having to duplicate some Ajax where one select is populated from a DB then another select is populated from there. It didn't take too much digging around and I thought i'd share in case it helps anyone else out. My Flash/As knowledge isn't 100% so if you see an easier way drop me a line in the comments.

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The visible attribute and the gap left in Flash forms

First of thanks to Kelly Keith to actually putting me onto this solution after my post to CF-Talk about removing the gap left in when you set an item like visibilites to hidden. To quote Kelly direct the short answer is "When visible is set to false set the height to a negative number."

Below I've got three examples of problem, the solution and an event driven solution.

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I finally managed to get myself to London again for the Ben Forta presents on Flex 2 for ColdFusion Developers presentation, and as usual it answered lots of questions and I think amazed quite a few people. The PowerPoint slides should be available soon on the UKCFUG site, and the code demo'd is available at http://labs.macromedia.com/. So what came out of it:

1. Beta 2 is coming any day - it was actually out on the day of the presentation!
2. The pricing has been a major factor in this release, after all the posts and messages last time Adobe have focused on price. To prove this you can actually develop Flex apps for Free by creating the MXML in an editor of you choice and compile it using the freely available Flex Framework and SDK
3. Support for Mac is coming, though there is no official news on Mac-Intel
4. Flex apps 2 are 100's of time faster on the initial load then Flex 1. If anyone who saw the Pre Flex 1 presentations, or experimented with it will remember how slow a simple hello world app would take to start.
5. Flash 8.5 was actually rewritten to improve speed and is not compatiable with previous version, but to ensure backward compatibility has the pre 8.5 engine available within it
6. There will be a new Flash Lite to use with Flex 2, so you will be able to push these apps to Mobile devices

That was just the general spill, below is whats new in Flex 2 and/or beta 2

1. CFC CRUD, Bean wizards. Seeing this in action was pretty amazing. - This actually is available as a seperate download so you can use it in conjunction with CFeclipse. Look for the ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0
2. RDS - Shown last night it was a nice feature to have available agin. This is also available to use when you download the ColdFusion Extensions
3. ActionScript to CFC and CFC to ActionScript wizards availabe by right-clicking on the appropiate file. Again available via the CF extention
4. Charting Components are now included in the beta 2 of Flex, which might mean that selling it as a seperate package might be out of the window.
5. Live Charting - Charts feeding directly from data

There was some more covered but my notes at that point get scarce. Needless to say I think there will be a few downloading Flex 2 today after the meeting, but even if you don't want to go near Flex make sure you download the ColdFusion Extensions for RDS support and CFC wizards.

The one point Ben made a few times was that if you want it in the application/server let Adobe know. Without letting them know there is a demand they won't include it.

By the way the sample app used was Phone Selector.

a.k.a Another Adobe and Macromdia post

So its coming to the end of the day in the UK soon (6:15pmish here now) and i realised that for the first time in ages i hadnt fired up FeedDemon all day WOW - last time that happens. So incase you havent heard there's gonna be a huge merger between Macromedia and Adobe - for more info check out the mini site at www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html. If you are looking for a more personal touch in finding out what this means you NEED to check out Mike Chamber recent blog entry.

Well i could go on about relative links out there but MXNA and Goog have done that well with all the post stating their concerns.

One big concern i have that doesnt seem to of been addressed that well anywere is the community focus. With the likes of of all the MM staff blogs which are an invaluable resource, there participation on mailing lists right down to MXNA? What will come of this?

Send message to your friends like this or maybe something more creative via Fridge Magents.

Another cool use for flash

OMG, i know its not friday but i've just came across what can only be descibed as one of the largest collections of links to flash games...ever. When i say large i mean nearly 1400 listed and categorised, and all at games.briankass.com/. All I know now is that i gotta keep away from site while working :o)

Updated: Brian, who runs the site has left me a messages - there are now over 1400 (1401 to be precise) Flash Games available.

I've been looking for a customisable flash image viewing app for a while now. I know there's a few out there but this one i just like the style. SimpleViewer has a small footprint of 12kb for the actual .swf file, then depending on the amount of images a small .xml file which hold all the settings. Along with the set-up guide for the XML files, you can also downloads .cfm, .asp, and .php files which help you build the .xml via forms.

Demo Hi-Res

Some time ago i wanted a HTML editor for a small back-end content manager. I wanted one that worked well across all browsers. I did try HTML Area, which worked well but was IE and Moz only. Well i've just come across a flash text/html editor. It has some limitations , like the generated HTML cannot be posted (or so it seems) but you can view the generated code, as well as

• Save
• Load
• Delete
• setSize Method
• Color Picker
• Fixed Font Sorting
• It also uses span classes instead of font classes (for true HTML output)
• And you can skin it via Actionscipt

Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers have created Take Away, Macromedia news for your iPod or MP3 player. It reads back using a voice synthesizer which isn't too bad, but personally the pitch is quite low, and the read-back speed is quite slow too. If you could change this to your personal liking i could see this catching on quickly

A Bit of amazing flash. Tell the chicken man to dance he'll dance, tell him to scratch his head he'll do it. Have fun for 5min at http://www.subservientchicken.com, its just odd.

WOW, I think its the geek factor here thats making me love this site and its ingenius use of flash, rather than find it annoying. SitePal.com offers a the ability to have a speaking avatar on your site to help guide users through your etc. You can change all aspects of the avatar like hair, eye color, face. Either way well worth a play and a look into there showcase, Einstein quiz, and best of all the demo of Text to speach, which from what i can tell also translates in for you aswell!!

I've just came across Feedmine via my referers which seems to be a aggregator for Web developers and it cover topics like CF , PHP, Linux etc. I don't know anything else about the site as it seems to be lacking in any information as you'll see.

Not Coldfusion related but when stuff likes this is just worth a mention. Flash can now be used in a host of ways, and when ever a new site with a new navigation style comes out it always just makes me sit back and think "wow". Though this doesnt happen too often Microsoft have seem to of employeed some clever designers to produce this, which just had me and the lads in the office playing with for a god few minutes.