Martijn van Beek

UIModifier, release 0.0.1

2008-11-01T04:18:50+01:00

Hereby I launch a little project I've been working on. The UIModifier is a Flex component to modify properties of a DisplayObject. It mimics the working of the modifier found in the Flash IDE. It can modify the width, height, x, y and rotation with a custom pivot point. It is not finished yet, but the basic functionality is ready.

AIR and Icons

2008-10-14T01:19:08+01:00

Just a simple FYI: When building an AIR file with Flex Builder and you configured a custom icon do not uncheck the "Copy non-embedded files in output folder" in the Flex Compile sheet of your Project properties. Otherwise the AIR builder cannot find the icons and gives you a 303 error.

Matrix rotation

2008-10-10T02:53:18+01:00

I found a nice article of 8bitrocket on how to create a rotated bitmap of a DisplayObject. This works nice if the source is a square but with objects with different width and height values it's a bit tricky. (it could be that I didn't see the solution but it's a huge article).

CS4 announced, still huge price differences

2008-09-23T12:01:35+01:00

CS4 is announced by Adobe. And although the new feature look great the biggest bug still exists. The price difference between US pricing and Euro pricing is almost twice as much in disadvantage of us the europeans.

Web premium:
US: $1.699
Euro: € 1.899,00 = $ 2.808,81

Difference $1.109,81

Why Adobe? (this "bug" is also note by dearadobe.com).

(I corrected the figures because I mixed used the US price without tax and the Euro price with tax).

Dear Adobe

2008-09-15T04:49:21+01:00

Brilliant: Dear Adobe

Now let's hope this will improve things like:

64-bits Flash Player
64-bits AIR Player
The Acrobat plugin for Mac (Preview is so much better)

Let make our life better!

Browser (technology) war

2008-09-09T09:57:31+01:00

The year of the browser they call 2008.

Firefox 3 (gecko+tracemonkey), Chrome (webkit+v8), IE 8 (mshtml) are coming or are already landed.
Also Flash 10 is coming + Silverlight 2.
Instead of calling it a browser war I suggest to call it a technology war because all these technologies are compared with one and another.

mx.effects.Move is Evil

2008-07-17T09:13:41+01:00

The mx.effects.Move class has given me a lot of headaches lately. Yesterday I discovered that a bug in a project i'm working on was caused by this class. I replaced the move class with the tweener class and the bug was disappeared. Somehow the class caused other sprites to turn invisible at random (maybe they got moved to, I still don't know what exactly happened).

Adobe, why no 64-bits Flash Player?

2008-07-03T02:19:45+01:00

Adobe, is there a simple reason why there is still no 64-bits version of the Flash Player?

Collaboration with Adobe Flex

2008-07-01T08:42:23+01:00

For the first time in my professional history I’m blessed with co-workers that also know Flex (and Flash of course).

I’m thinking about a workable system to collaborate together with Flex Builder. It is possible to just edit together in the same Flex project (like we do with PHP projects), but Flex will build every time a file is saved (I know this can be turned off) which tells me there must be a better way.

My vision on the web video future

2008-06-21T02:29:43+01:00

The last year I focussed myself, together with Cross Media Ventures, a lot on web video with Flash. We tried to stream video with Red5 and FMS (2 and 3) and Wowza. Every server worked well until the connections reached a limit.

Product:	Max Connections	Price
FMS:	600	€ 1200
Red5:	800	Free
Wowza:	1000	€ 750
Windows:	1500	€ 500

Flex Builder rename bug (?)

2008-06-12T09:43:21+01:00

In Flex Builder 3 (i don't know if Flex Builder 2 has the same bug) you can rename a Class which gives you a dialog that allows to rename the class (with preview posibilities) after you say ok it renames all occurances of the class. Nice so far but there is a small bug making this functionality really annoying:

It does this on all open projects.

Solution: close all other projects before using the rename if you have multiple projects with the same classes!

Flash TextField bug?

2008-05-21T08:34:13+01:00

In the time Flash 6 was the latest version of Flash I filled a bug regarding the TextField and HTML output.

Astro, Flash Player 10 prerelease has arrived

2008-05-15T04:13:16+01:00

Flash Player 10 is coming ... Astro is packed with new stuff that is to sweet to be true. I'm very pleased to see they finally did something with the text new engine.

Download Flash Player 10 pre-release

Released new website for Kristel van Beek

2008-04-08T10:48:57+01:00

I released the new website of my wife Kristel van Beek. Everything you see at her site is created by her except the code itself. Check it out: www.kristelvanbeek.nl

Portishead

2008-04-08T09:08:25+01:00

Yesterday, April 7th, Portishead performed at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam. Normally I don't blog about such a happening but this was extraordinary. The sound was awesome and the performance was just as Portishead should be. The usage of light in combination with video was perfectly in balance. The only thing bothering me was the fact that the stage is to low (a general problem in the HMH).

IE7 + HTTPS + Flash

2008-03-31T10:08:17+01:00

IE7 in combination with Flash on a ssl connection failes when the server doesn't reacts with the following headers:

Code is PHP:

header('Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate');
header('Pragma: public');

source

Mac experiences

2008-03-30T09:39:19+01:00

After 3 weeks working on a Mac I have the urge to write something about my experiences. And I fixed my website to be firefox 2 compatible on the Mac (position:fixed fails).

Let me start with the bad!

Why can't I use my keyboard to navigate to a checkbox/combobox/radiobutton/button? This makes the accesibility very low.
Firefox 2 sucks big time comparing to the Windows version. (firefox 3 promises to be better).

The good:

I love the way everything works together
Bootcamp works like a charm (I play Games in Windows)
Parallels works like a charm (I have to test websites in Internet Explorer)
Safari is better than I ever expected.

I'm very happy with the machine and I'm happy Apple switched to Intel (otherwise I would never switched).

I'm a mac now

2008-03-08T11:06:48+01:00

Since last thursday I'm a proud owner of a Penryn based MacBook Pro. I'm switching from Windows to Mac and I'm getting used to the new fresh desktop. Hopefully my opinion would not change (alhough I'm installing Windows via Bootcamp ;)).

AIR, my opinion!

2008-02-25T09:24:37+01:00

AIR 1.0 is released and therefor there is a lot of reading on the web about it.

First of all people still don't see what AIR enables for certain developers. Well it's quite simple: Web developers can create desktop applications with stuff they already know (Flash or HTML/CSS/Javascript or a mixture of both). No need for learning Java SWT or something similar (cross-platform UI toolkit).

Ubuntu living under Windows

2008-02-19T08:50:01+01:00

A project I accidentally found mixes two worlds together. AndLinux is a windows application which installs a X server that enables windows to run linux applications. Very nice, I have Konqueror, Firefox and Epiphany running now. Also PHP5 + Apache2 works seamlessly.

Maybe a very strange idea but could it be possible to install Wine and with that IE6 (I run vista)?