brunobergher::blog

This is quite impressive: Super Mario Bros in 14kB JavaScript code with no external images: the sprites are encoded as strings in a custom format that allows for 4 colors. Quite impressive.

Pure canvas magic under Mozilla and DIV positioning (!) under IE. Please do check the original post and find out more about this.

My friend Nancy sent me a link to this video:

Poetic Prophet (aka The SEO Rapper) has a few other marvels like ‘Link Building 101′:

I’ve been programming for just a couple of years. I have barely no desktop development experience, focusing only in web sites and applications. Mobile apps? Even less.

So I’d think: “how excited could I get watching Apple’s iPhone SDK launch keynote?”. Well, I’m surprised with myself. I’m blown away with them.

If you haven’t watched it yet, please do, or this will make no sense at all.

When Google announced the Android platform it seemed like a milestone, that the standardization of the APIs would be the solid foundation upon which developers would create the mobile apps of the future. I remember talking to my co-workers how I found it interesting that this niche event felt like a moment that would change things to come.

But now, this is a real turning point. OK: it’s a closed platform, only works with two specific devices, depends on a yet-to-be-tested distribution channel*, but, in my truly humble opinion, has what it takes to shape the future of mobile computing. Or even of the entire computing experience.

The keynote was only opened and closed by Steve Jobs—therefore mostly free of his RDF—and filled with useful, tempting information. Each round of explanations about the layers of the iPhone OS made me giggle, finally laughing out loud with excitement when Scott Forstall said the API included full access to the accelerometer (with X, Y, and Z axes!) and multi-touch events. It’s just top exciting.
And the SDK is free.

I just find it amazing that the presentation left me with a weird, uncontrollable desire to start writing Objective-C. Oh, now I need a Mac. : )

* Well, if you don’t count the iTunes Music Store, which is now the #2 music seller in the US, and works much alike the App Store.

The IE team announced in their blog that they’re changing they’re previously stated position that IE8 would use version targeting by using HTTP headers or meta tags to choose the way a page should be rendered. That meant that if even if the browser had a much more standard compliant rendering engine (they passed the ACID test!), developers would have to explicitly tell the browser to use the new engine. This has been widely covered, such as here and here.

But they ended up deciding things differently, and now the browser will default to the new engine, much more reliable than the IE6/7 one (standards-wise). Developers will still have the option of targeting specific browser versions with headers/meta tags, but sites that are already deployed will not have to be changed at all to take advantage of the advances in the new Microsoft browser.

Apparently it’s one of many consequences of the recent publication of Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles. It doesn’t matter what the reason is: it’s good news anyway!

Last week Ted Patrick wrote that they’re working in Adobe on a project to compile any kind of C/C++ code to ActionScript, making it runnable inside the Flash Player.

I’m not sure I understood this completely. Because if I got it right, this means that an infinite amount of platform-specific, legacy code will suddenly become cross-platform without any software that the basic AIR runtime. Ted says they’ve successfully ported Quake I, and that it ran OK.

This could be the beginning of a really big change in the entire software scenario, and seems worth a lot of buzz.

So maybe I got something wrong, but it seems pretty revolutionary stuff, isn’t it? If you’re reading this and by any chance could clarify this
to me I’d be very, very pleased. And forgive me if I got something wrong.

Update: sorry for the duplicated post. ScribeFire ain’t as reliable as I thought.

This may be really old, but it’s that kind of tip that’s always useful, even is somewhat late.

For about a year now I’ve been using the great gotAPI, e simple website that compiles reference and documentation for a bunch of programming languages. It’s basically a group of XML indexes of documentation website, showing content in an iframe, providing direct links to the official websites were the docs are. Very simple, very effective.

And the site even remembers the tabs (languages) you kept open from the last time you visited.

Learning Flex through this tool has been infinitely easier and faster then if I had to depend on Adobe’s search.

I bumped into this problem a few weeks ago and couldn’t figure out how to solve: we have this application with multiple popups, most with a black overlay behind them. But one specifically needed a white overlay.

The settings for this overlay are usually inserted into the main MXML <mx:Application /> tag or with the global style selector, as in:

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
	modalTransparency=".5"
	modalTransparencyBlur="0"
	modalTransparencyColor="#000000">
</mx:application>

or

<mx:Style>
	global {
		modalTransparencyBlur: 0;
		modalTransparency: .5;
		modalTransparencyColor: #000000;
	}
</mx:Style>

But those setting are kept for the entire application and there is no apparent way to change those at runtime.

Gladly I chose to ask at the great blog.flexexamples.com if anyone could help me, and the great peterd posted a whole set of explanations on how to do it. Thanks a lot peterd!

Basically you can access the global style settings and runtime through StyleManager.getStyleDeclaration("global") and then use setStyle() to change them.

You better check out the entire explanation over there.

I wonder why Adobe (and the numerous evangelists doing a great job promoting and explaining Flex) insists on marketing Flex and Flash as opposed, or at least very, very different things?

Flex is a framework. A bunch of very useful code that streamlines and support the [earlier] exasperating process of writing applications in ActionScript. But it’s written AS3, produces SWFs, runs in the Adobe Flash Player. When you’re writing a Flex preloader you even find out that the whole of Flex code is put in the Frame 2 of a Flash timeline, with the preloader in frame 1. There’s nothing you can do with Flex that you couldn’t eventually do with straight AS3, even in the Flash IDE timeline.

I do see that people from a AS1/2 background might have some initial difficulty understanding the difference (I know I did), but why try to make it so different? OK, Flex is totally targeted toward applications, but many sites nowadays can’t be discerned in many ways from very visual applications.

No one will try to prove or at least say that CakePHP is different from PHP. and most certainly there will be no one trying to show how Rails is opposed in anyway to Ruby. It’s like comparing apples and apple juice!

Ted Patrick is writing on this, and that’s what got me thinking.

Just wanted to say it. I told I’d blog anything from now on.