oddhammer

I was mucking about on about 4 or 5 different things at once and ended up back at this post. I was really curious about what the "Godfathers" of Flash were up to when I read that post over a year ago, and it seems like the question has been answered and I apparently missed it.

So here's what they've been up to..

"The Greenbox™ Home Energy Manager empowers homeowners to understand and manage their energy consumption. With knowledge of their energy use, consumers can take proactive steps to conserve energy, understand their impact on the environment, and save money.

Conveniently monitoring electricity, water, and/or gas usage in real-time, the Greenbox provides direct feedback to consumers about their homes performance. Studies have shown that households can reduce their utility bills by 10-20%, just by being aware of their ongoing usage.

The Greenbox presents easy to understand graphs, charts, historical data, and community comparisons to empower people to understand and make informed decisions about their energy and water usage. A personalized recommendation engine takes the mystery out of making your home more efficient by forecasting usage, cost, and emissions savings that can be created by implementing various efficiency improvements."

That's something that just might come in handy as a barrel of oil topped $123 today and other types of energy are slowly creeping up in cost.

Now I'm curious if they're using Flash for that device and if consumer devices like this are the reason Adobe moved to open (free) the licensing for the Flash Player recently. I figured it was for flashy fun things like set top boxes, handheld games (leapster), etc. and not necessarily for utilitarian devices like an energy management system. I guess I figured wrong.

wow..... the announcement today from Adobe about opening the Flash Player up to the market to be placed on any imaginable device is just stunning. This is going to place even more demand on people with Flash skills as these companies begin to produce handheld devices using the Flash Player.

The only thing in the press release that set off my BS detector was this.. "“The Open Screen Project will make it simple for Verizon and our partners to deliver rich mobile experiences to more devices,”" .. yeah, and how big of a fee will they charge developers before they can develop for the Verizon network?

I also noticed that there was no mention of Apple in that press release.

.Net? Java? No Thanks, We’ll Take Macromedia Instead
An article on Internetweek.com gives the reasons Mitem Corp chose to use Flash MX rather than .NET or Java as a solution for a large scale internet application. 

.Net? Java? No Thanks, We’ll Take Macromedia Instead
An article on Internetweek.com gives the reasons Mitem Corp chose to use Flash MX rather than .NET or Java as a solution for a large scale internet application. The interesting thing is they were traditionally a .NET and Java shop and had to learn Flash.. i.e. they converted development over to Flash rather than using what they already knew.

It’s an interesting read if you’re trying to decide whether to use .NET, Java, or Flash for a web app.
read the whole article

I found a minor bug (sort of..) in the public release of Flash Player 7..  release 7,0,14,0
(( I found out on 10/2/03 that this bug was fixed.. and that the fix would be in the next release of the player which will be out “later this year"))

I found a minor bug (sort of..) in the public release of Flash Player 7..  release 7,0,14,0

((this bug was fixed in Flash Player 7.0.19.0 12/16/03 but I’m leaving this info here because there will still be people using 7,0,14,0 for some time..))

The example above shows sorting by length of the string in the array.. it works in both Flash Player 6 and 7.

However.. if I change

if (a.length >= b.length){
to
if (a.length > b.length){

It will crash Flash Player 7 dramatically.. giving the script timeout error, and sometimes closing the browser without any warning. Yet the same code will compile just fine in Flash MX and will display without incident in Flash Player 6.  I know it’s bad coding..  it showed up on my radar because it was in an old project I did where I ported some ASP code over to ActionScript and didn’t double check the logic used in the original code.

What’s happening is one or more array elements fail the sort method because the order(a,b) function does not return the expected “1” or “-1”. Apparently Flash Player 6 is not strict about this.. and Flash Player 7 is???

To see an the example of the "invalid" code that will display in Flash Player
6 but will crash Flash Player 7 --> click here.

suggestionArray = new Array("apple","bug","frog","dog","pineapple"); mytext = main(); function main(){     wordArray.sort(order);      wordString = wordArray[0];      for (var q = 1; q<5; q++) {           wordString += "r"+wordArray[q];      }      return wordString; } function order(a, b) {      if (a.length >= b.length){           return -1;      } else {           return 1;      } }