Well the time has come for a new theme. I’ve been putting it off for a while now and although this one is perfectly serviceable. I feel it is time to spruce the place up a bit and get rid of the digital cobwebs. So as soon as I get a free moment I will be reviewing whether or not to use an “off the shelf” theme or roll my own (I suspect time will be a major factor in that decision :p).

My main criteria are:

• Widget enabled - Although I’m not that fussed with all these Flickr etc widgets, I’m more after the ease of inclusion that Widgets offer
• Flexible layout - Not fixed width
• Three Column - Perhaps two vertical and one horizontal…
• Magazine style - So probably a static front page, or “current article” element on the home page

If anyone has any suggestions please feel free to leave a comment :)

Well after what appeared to be a lifetime, MXNA is finally back. Or is it…

It now has a shiny new name to go with it’s shiny new rebuild: Adobe Feeds (http://feeds.adobe.com). Heading to http://weblogs.macromedia.com will redirect you to the new URL so now worries about having to update your bookmarks just yet.

I, like most have missed it not being there as I use it for light reading when my usual feeds are a bit stale. So here’s to you AXNA. I hope you have a long and reliable existence :)

Adobe upped the ante again this morning by announcing the Open Screen Project.

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

So what does this actually mean, well here are the key take-aways from the announcement:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Can the day get any brighter :p

Following on from my tongue-in-cheek post a few months back about MXML standing for Magic Extensible Markup Language (according to Wikipedia anyway). It appears that some people are actually putting it in there presentations and service offerings.

I found this in a PDF presentation

RIA Technologies

Browser Launched

• Adobe Flash/Flex
• Flash is the runtime environment
• Flex is a RIA framework
• Actionscript and MXML (Magic XML)

And a small development company offering services creating application using Magic XML…

Flex applications

Starting today XXXXX offers its clients development of Flex web applications based on MXML (”Magic eXtensible Markup Language”) and ActionScript program language.

If you are still wondering, MXML doesn’t officially stand for anything. However the sensible bet is that it was likely born out of the fact that Macromedia defined the XML namespace and therefore the “M” probably represents Macromedia.

The moral of the story is, don’t believe everything you read on the net. Even if it is on Wikipedia (or this blog for that matter :p)

So today is the London leg of the onAir tour. I thought this would be a great opportunity to test out qik too. So over the course of the day I will be streaming directly from the event (battery life on my N95 permitting).

For those who want to have a look you can find my qik page here (http://qik.com/flashgen). I did manage to stream all of Andrew Shorten’s keynote (that tanked my battery) - not sure how the sound came out as I’m running mute here as we are currently in session. Anyway as I upload more videos they will appear in my Qik profile.

Depending on your own personal preferences you will probably have Flex Builder (eclipse) projects set up in a particular manner. Some prefer to have all of their projects in one workspace and open and close them as they need them. Others prefer to adopt a similar set up but use the working set filters to show and hide projects as needed. And a third percentage like to have a separate workspace for each solution they are working on, thus opening and closing a workspace as needed.

I fall in to the second category, those who use working sets and have an individual workspace. I hardly even switch to a different workspace because I have this one set out exactly as I like it and in the past a bit of hacking was required to get your new workspace to look and function identically to its predecessor.

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It seems that a lot of people are still unsure what the libs folder is actually for within a Flex Builder 3 project. Well if you’re not sure, here is its use - It for importing SWC files in to.

I know a lot of developers still use the library path to import SWC’s so that they are available for authoring and compile time. However you don’t need to do this anymore. just import your SWC (Cairngorm.swc for example) in to your libs folder within your project and Bob’s your Uncle (He’s my brother but there ya go :p), it’s available straight away.

No more addtional steps to add a SWC anymore. Yay!

I don’t do a huge amount of Flash Lite work. However when my good friend Dave Williamson pinged me on MSN yesterday and informed me that he had just flashed his Nokia N95 to the latest firmware, which resulted in the Flash Lite player getting updated to version 3.0; I thought to myself that perhaps it was time to update my Nokia N95 as I hadn’t done a firmware update for at least 6 months.

For those who want to have a go themselves here are the relevant links and instructions. Remember though, firmware updates are potential opportunities to ‘brick’ your hardware. So read the steps, re-read them, print out anything you need prior to starting this and make sure that your phone is fully charged and securely connected to the USB data cable. If you ‘brick’ it you have been warned and I accept no responsibility.

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I had a funny conversation with my good friend Sean regarding the on-going issues he has had with his first generation Macbook Pro. It appears his particular model doesn’t like screens. In actual fact, if memory serves me correctly, the initial problems were resolved by Apple replacing everything except the metal lid on his MBP (as that would have constituted a direct replacement, and as we all know Apple hates giving something for nothing :p).

Anyway 5 additional screens later - the last so poorly replaced that the latches wouldn’t even engage so Sean couldn’t even close it properly - and numerous stand up arguments with various Apple employees within their Regents Street “flagship” store. You can imagine Sean’s and my surprise when he received a call Monday night from Apple regarding the fixing of his latest issue to be told that they were going to replace the entire machine with a shiny new 2.6ghz 250GB ‘top of the tree’ standard build MBP (so not 1900×1200 LED screen, but you can’t have it all :p) instead of attempting to botch another screen replacement.

They were even nice enough to migrate all of his data etc to his new machine…

So congrats to Sean on his new old Macbook Pro and nice one Apple, you do have a heart - even if it appears at times to be hard, black and shaped like a lump of coal :p

UPDATE: It appears this is solely related to the “Instant Hijack” plugin found in Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack application. To resolve it you need to remove the Instant Hijack plugin. if you want to test to see if this is the case prior to uninstalling the plugin use:

sudo /usr/local/hermes/bin/hermesctl unload

UPDATE 2: Rogue Amoeba have released a new version of Instant Hijack to resolve this SSH issue. I have installed it and it does indeed resolve all reported SSH problems.

There have been quite a few posts about the latest patches from Apple and how they appear to break SSH via the Terminal and SFTP via any FTP client. I haven’t update to the latest version of Safari (3.1) or Apple’s security update 2008-002 so I cannot confirm or deny.

It appears that a lot of people are getting “bus” errors. So if you need or use SSH on a daily basis (like I do) I’d advise caution until there is more information.

You can read more about these issues on the Apple forums here