Martijn van Beek

Sloppy code

2009-05-21T08:02:37+01:00

Ever since I became interested in programming I stumbled upon bad formatted code. The reason someone writes such code is because he is sloppy and fails to see the importance of clean written code.

Flash CS4 IDE navigateToURL bug on the Mac

2009-04-23T08:34:01+01:00

The internal Flash Player of Adobe Flash CS4 on the Mac (Intel, I couldn't test it with the PowerPC version) has a bug regarding navigateToURL. Using this code:

navigateToURL ( new URLRequest ( "http://martijnvanbeek.net" ) );

Will navigate your default browser to "http://martijnvanbeek.net%00". Strangely this only happens inside the IDE but can be very frustrating (I was searching for a bug in my own code for an hour).

Flex Builder Gumbo expired

2009-04-01T10:55:08+01:00

Today my Flex Builder Gumbo expired and I have to switch back to good old Flex Builder 3. I was so getting used to the new features presented in Gumbo that switching back will be tough. Was the initial roadmap for a new beta of Gumbo planned for this moment? Is so sadly Adobe hasn't met the deadline.

Dear Steve II: The files problem

2009-03-22T10:52:53+01:00

The dot files problem:
Since I own a mac I’m bothered with the fact that the Finder places a .DS_Store file in every folder you visit. Although I won’t mind it on the local harddrive, it’s a pain on a network.

Dear Steve I: The support problem

2009-03-20T10:47:42+01:00

Recently my dear MacBook Pro 4.1 had trouble with the internal keyboard and trackpad. It randomly failed to work after a period of uptime in MacOS and Windows XP.

Because Apple has the policy to deliver support via Authorised Dealers I had to miss my Mac for 4.5 weeks. I don’t have AppleCare but the computer was still in it’s one year warranty period.

Flash Player Bitmap Limits

2009-01-14T09:53:53+01:00

The last few weeks I have spend most of my time creating workarounds for limits within the Flash Player regarding BitmapData.

In the Flash Player 9 era things where "simple" a bitmap bigger than 2880x2880 fails to render when using BitmapData/Mask or Filters. Just loading an image had also a limit, which was something like 8191x8191.

Google Chrome and why I use it for Flex debugging

2008-12-23T09:53:44+01:00

Google Chrome on Windows is my new default browser at work (I use Mac at home, Windows at work). It is perfect for debugging my Flex apps because since Flex Builder 3.0.2 update debugging is working not perfect. Flex builder freezes my complete system trying to get a connection with the debug player. 40% of the time it failes :(

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