What I Would Have Been Twittering
Twitter is down for maintenance. It’s actually kind of pathetic how much I’m missing it tonight, but I’m okay with that. I find that when I’m doing work I usually use Twitter to complain/brag/inquire about the stuff I’m doing. Tonight I’m working on an application that will help me manage my hiking trips and GPX files. I’m using AIR and script bridging between Flex and Ajax so I can use Yahoo/Google maps as the display and Flex for the rest of the UI. So here’s what I would have been Twittering:
Whoo hoo! Finally got Flex and Ajax talking in AIR. Once you figure out the pattern of the sandbox it’s not bad.
Ugh. Just spent 30 minutes on a bug that ended up being caused by Safari.
After using AS3 going back to JavaScript just seems so hacky. I don’t get the joy.
Okay, now I can’t figure out the security sandbox again. It displays Yahoo Maps but not Google Maps.
[tags]Twitter, Personal[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
December 17th, 2007 at 3:21 am
Lol yeah I think it suits that suitation well, when your working… which might be why the it never worked on the mobile.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:13 am
Ryan, Have you checked out the ModestMaps Flex component yet? Brings in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft maps into your app as if they were native! http://modestmaps.com
December 17th, 2007 at 6:05 am
“Ugh. Just spent 30 minutes on a bug that ended up being caused by Safari.”
I know AIR uses the same/similar web rendering engine as Safari, but I would avoid using Safari as your development web browser. Even though it’s supposedly more standards-compliant than FireFox or IE, I’ve found that Safari does have a few quirks to it.
Anything you do in FireFox HTML/CSS/JS-wise should work the same way in AIR, and there are more robust developer extensions for FireFox to make life easier than there are for Safari.
Just my two cents.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:12 am
Thanks for the link Nick, I need AS3 so it doesn’t look like I can use it but I’ll keep an eye on the project, it’s very cool.
@Brian I use Camino for everything which is what caused the issue. I was looking at the example code in Camino and comparing it to my code in AIR. The code looked exactly the same so I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. Then I realized I should check Safari to see if it was just a WebKit thing and it was. I felt like a moron.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:17 am
30 minutes spent on a wild bug chase isn’t too bad: I’ve done much worse.
You’re up early (or late)…you want to be up and ready the moment Twitter comes back up, eh?
December 17th, 2007 at 6:39 am
As an Adobe employee, when u say stuff like…
‘Whoo hoo! Finally got Flex and Ajax talking in AIR. Once you figure out the pattern of the sandbox it’s not bad.’
‘Ugh. Just spent 30 minutes on a bug that ended up being caused by Safari.’
I think it would be helpful to the community to follow up with some detail on what problems you had getting Flex and Ajax talking in AIR. What did you learn about the sandbox, what was the bug caused by Safari, and how you overcame that.
These things could save people some time in the future.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:47 am
@Tink: In Ryan’s defense, this blog post is meant to be his pseudo-Twitter while Twitter is down, and the real Twitter can’t be used to explain much of anything given it’s 140-character message limit.
But I do agree it’d be nice to hear some of the details about these issues, maybe in another blog post. I had to change how I did my AIR application because of the security sandbox, and the info I found on how to work around the sandbox was less than clear.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:11 am
@Tink Yup, no problem. It’s in the works I just need to clean up the post a bit. “Code” posts always take me longer to prepare than other ones.
There’s a decent amount of stuff out there about the Ajax security model but coming at it as a Flex developer trying to do script bridging it was kind of tough. I’m hoping my post can save some time for other Flex/AIR developers.
Thanks for the feedback guys.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:12 am
Up late
. That’s how much fun coding Flex and Ajax is in AIR 
Now off to bed!
December 17th, 2007 at 10:59 am
>> After using AS3 going back to JavaScript just seems so hacky. I don’t get the joy.
Brilliant. That’s why I sing “God bless Tamarin” as a hymn. Javascript could be harmful for AS3 addicts
December 17th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
@Ryan: Take a look at the latest drop of Modest Maps… AS3 is actually just as functional as the AS2 version. Trust me, it’s worth the time