Well I’m not sure it’s the best way but Aral Balkan’s SWX looks pretty promising. You load SWX as you would a SWF, with loadMovie, since it’s a SWF the data is Flash native and ready to go.

Right now PHP is the only support backend but Aral is looking to add the others Python, Java, .NET, and of course Ruby! A Rails version that could that could return an object and it’s ActiveRecord associations would be pretty cool.

The release of Apollo has renewed my interest in Flex, I was on the Flex Builder Beta for OS X but don’t do enough Flex work (yet) to shell out for Builder so… I Googled around for the best open source solution.

It was my lucky day as Todd Sharp updated Darron Schall’s 2005 post about setting up eclipse just yesterday. That solved code coloring/hinting, I then found this tutorial by Wim Vanhenden for compiling on OS X. Done and done.

Don’t know if it’s my imagination but the Flex SDK seems to compile much more quickly than a couple of months ago. The only downside to this solution is that it doesn’t use my beloved Textmate, there is a bundle for Flex but it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while.

* UPDATE *

Actually just did a search and found some ‘Textmate Flex Tips‘ that extends the Flex bundle.

Apollo made it on to Slashdot the other day and was immediately lit up by the natives. I usually stay out of this stuff, but lately the level of ignorance towards all ActionScript based tools (Flash/Flex and now Apollo) is drivin’ me nuts.

For ten years I’ve listened to people crap all over Flash. Then the very same people turned around and wet their pants as soon as they could do Flash like things with AJAX (probably just lost my Rails audience with that one). The latest release of script.aculo.us implements some MP3 playback, possibly via Flash, and they get a case of the vapors:

You’re missing the point. We don’t WANT to use flash. Why bother with
script.aculo.us at all otherwise? Flash can do animations and ajax-
like functions as well.

Ding, ding, ding we have a winner, your prize is a new nose to replace the one you cut off to spite your face.

Extremists be they in any area from politics to web development are ‘programmed’ to cheer for their team rather than the best solution. Which is how any discussion on slashdot of a non open source project devolves into the merits of the GIMP:

People are just looking for an excuse not to use Linux, so they say Photoshop. Most home users don’t need photoshop, probably haven’t paid for it, and could do just as well with GIMP. For professional graphic artists, I guess can see a need for Photoshop, but those are the extreme minority of users. Even some professionals could probably get by with only using GIMP. I don’t think that having Photoshop on Linux would do anything to increase the number of people using linux. People who say they need photoshop are just looking for something to complain about.

If you can’t see that Photoshop beats the GIMP, well like a gimp, is the same reason you can’t see the potential of web apps on the desktop.

They’ll wail away on Apollo because it’s new and scary, but just like they came around to Rich Internet Apps when someone built Prototype for them, they’ll come around to web apps on the desktop once we show’em how it’s done.

GIMPs!

A reminder that that Adobe is presenting a webcast of the new features in CS3 at 3:30 EST (12:30 PST).

They already have some marketing pages up:

Web
Design
Production
‘Master Collection’

Mongrel being the four-legged variety, not the ruby server.

I heard about the dog food recall last night but it wasn’t until this morning that I checked the list (which is very long) and found that my dog’s wet food was on it. Thankfully once I checked the product codes his food was fine.

I recently started buying him natural food from Castor & Pollux and will be getting rid of the Eukanuba. During my googling I ran across iamscruelty.com (parent compnay of Eukanuba), nice, another reason to go with a different brand.

Be careful what you put in your mongrel! You never know what it’ll spit out :P

Castro doing the ‘Torpedo’ (he sleeps with all legs extended like a bear skin rug), he would be very offended to be called a mongrel as he’s a purebred Havanese.

Here’s how to stop your site’s uploads or other static file directories disappering after doing a ‘cap deploy’ with Capistrano. Capistrano is actually behaving exactly as it should. The problem is that the ‘uploads’ directory is being left behind in release purgatory while the other files happily move on up to the castle in the sky that is the current release.

The solution is to have all uploads stored in a directory outside of the release system. As usual the smart folks who made Capistrano are way ahead of us, if you do a ‘ls’ in your apps path (on your remote machine) you’ll see four directories

$ ls
current  releases  revisions.log  shared

‘cd’ into shared/system (cd shared/system) and create an uploads directory (mkdir uploads). Next create a Capistrano task in config/deploy.rb (on your local machine) that symlinks the public uploads directory in the latest release to the shared/system/uploads directory. The example below would be the task for using Capistrano on Media Temple’s Grid Server …

task :after_update_code, :roles => :app do
  run "ln -nfs /home/#{site}/containers/rails/#{application}/shared/system/uploads #{release_path}/public/uploads"
end

That’s it! Your uploads are now release agnostic.

Vixiom designs edgeacoustics.com (be sure to turn up your inferior speakers). A lot of sites claim to be multimedia but this is the real deal with audio, video, interactive elements, and some pretty complex ActionScript to make sure it all holds together. The 3D was done by our friends at SoftMirage.

Is your non-coding time in front of a computer spend bashing away at your keyboard like an overcaffinated spastic monkey playing Battlefield/Counter Strike/Half-Life etc.? Always kiled by those dirty cheating snipers/special ops $%@!ers because you can’t hear ‘em? You need some better sound equipment!

E.D.G.E. Acoustics earphones have industry leading noise isolation, and the highest response accuracy available, they’re a division of Etymotic Research who hold 89 patents in products from consumer earphones to hearing aids.