girton’s devnotes

I don’t like loosing time. So what do we need? Ultra-rapid development after my official Nascom working hours. If that great idea in my head, isn’t quickly translated in a working application, I’m loosing that vibe. After some days I just don’t open the project anymore. (Another unfinished project)

So here’s where I’m hoping Mate will change things. I’ve read some great reviews from Tony Hillerson, Rapture in Venice, FusionCube, Explorers Club and Richard Lord from Flash On The Beach. There’s some buzz going arround (Adobe Max PDF). And the joy factor seams to be there.

Theoretically it should be easy to make the switch between 2 different frameworks. If you did follow the MVC pattern as strictly as possible.

It’s curious, coming from Cairngorm, transfered to PureMVC, then Multicore and Pipes and now on to Mate… I must be crazy thinking I will find the time to re-factor all these classes again.

Rien Verbrugghe -- planning the switch to Mate for 2010. Mate is one of the top 20 libes to look at -- number 15 in fact -- so, assuming we look at one library every three or four days, this definitely puts Mate into the 2010 timeframe. Especially leaving gaps for catching up with people over the holidays and catching up with the missed writing days of Pragprowrimo

I don't want to compile it, just give me the program!

Current build is not yet ready for production. If you're curious enough though, check the Downloads section and try the thing on your computer.

Oups, you're on windows! Not so bad, you can run a virtual machine. We prepared a remastered Debian installer together with a virtual machine emulator (QEmu) that will run under XP or Vista without the need to install anything on your OS. It will produce a Debian with ModAS installed. You have 2 bat files and a README in the zip.

These guys have got delivery-of-value taped before the value is complete. Particularly intriguing is the ability to grab a complete Debian with ModAS that will run on your windows, without installing anything into Vista or whatever.

The project, software that enables AS3 active web pages in Apache, could be a keeper. So many libes so little time.

Introduction

Flash MiniBuilder is a lightweight IDE created for developing programs written in ActionScript 3.

Flash MiniBuilder is itself written in ActionScript

Two of the main raison d'etre of MiniBuilder are

• provide a completely free and cross platform alternative for developing ActionScript projects.
• provide an editor with a small footprint that would eventually run on smaller computers like netbooks or even pocket-size devices.

Extending, changing (and even integrating MiniBuilder with other software) is easy: MiniBuilder is itself written in your favourite language, AS3!

This looks like a kind of fun thing to look at early next year -- or now if you have time.

16

Nov

My 20 Most used AS3 Libraries

stored in: Web Dev and tagged: AS3, Libraries

Because I work full time developing primarily in AS3. I have come across a lot of very useful libraries that I like to use in my day to day work. So today I present you with a list of the top 20 libraries that I have come to use on a more regular basis. I hope you may find and discover something here that may be of use to you. If you have a library that you use a lot please let me know.

This is a great list of AS3 libes, from free PDF generation to physics, notifications, XML browser. n8o (Nate-O) likes Mate, Flex unit, Papervision 3D, just great all purpose list.

The Canadian smartphone designer also touts better support for the developers themselves and will now let them more easily integrate paid ads into apps to subsidize its costs as well as to take micropayments for articles, add-ons and other content beyond the original app. Interface creation is now simpler as developers can now use Adobe Flash and other Creative Suite apps to build software for BlackBerries, while the Java plugin for Eclipse now has a GUI builder to streamline making interfaces.

This is with Blackberry OS 5.0 -- Java or Flash, either way is fine. I got a promotional mail for a working assets cellphone -- the nice thing about working assets is that the company gives money to Human Rights Watch rather than the Republican Party. And so forth.

The rest of the story notes that RIM has a minimum app price of $3, altohugh it doesn't talk about terms.

And then there's Android.

On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the U.S. energy department to reconsider California’s request to set its own washing machine standard. While the U.S. energy department has not agreed to the state’s request, it could be granted next year, with the new standard going in to effect some time in 2013.

Jonathan Blees, assistant chief counsel for the California Energy Commission, said the standard does not require consumers to upgrade their machines; it merely requires manufacturers to apply the standard to all California washing machines that are made after the standard goes in to effect.

Blees said many washing-machine models, most of them front-loading, currently meet the 6-gallon standard.

We forget how far the balance had swung under Bush -- this lawsuit against Department of Energy, to enable California to pursue such an obvious energy and water saving policy, is a good reminder. The LA Times blog posting has more details.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Best Lentil Soup in the World

What I consider one of the best soups in the world and not just the Mediterranean is shurba al-'adas, lentil soup. This is a soup made by countless cooks in the Levant. My recipe came from my former wife Najwa and I first published it in A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST. It was there that Fran McCullough and Molly Steven discovered it to put in there book The 150 Best American recipes: Indispensable Dishes from Legendary Chefs and Undiscovered Cooks (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). It is a soup that I simply could not leave out of my newest book due to come out in December THE BEST SOUPS IN THE WORLD. It's a popular soup in what used to be known as Greater Syria (Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, and parts of Jordan). It's based on brown lentils of course and homemade chicken broth (preferably). Try making shurba al-'adas, you'll be pleased all around.

The recipe is amazingly simple. But you do need a "food mill", whatever that may be. Anyone out there -- can you advise what is a food mill?