w3blog

Back when Twitter was called FlashCoders, there was a ragtag bunch of rebels who refused to bow to the Empire. The Rebel Alliance had mastered the ancient art of wielding the __proto__, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Its sharp underscores could slice through any object. So cleanly, in fact, that members could [...]

I have been inbetween projects the last weeks and thought i could do something productive while i’m idle, so i created as3swf, a low level Actionscript 3 library to parse, create, modify and publish SWF files. At the same time i experimented with iPhone development, as we at côdeazur have some commercial iPhone work lined up. Part [...]

While testing my AS3 SWF library as3swf yesterday, i found that MXMLC (the compiler that comes with the Flex SDKs)  writes undocumented SWF tags to the SWFs it produces. I was able to identify two so far: ProductInfo (Tag ID 41) The ProductInfo tag contains infos about the tool used to generate the SWF, as [...]

In case you were wondering what i have been working on in the last few months (and what will keep me busy in the coming months).. AUPEO! is a brand new platform that combines music and community – online, offline, on the road, on the web, on your desktop, on your devices. I can’t tell [...]

I need a custom installer for an AIR application i’m currently developing. That’s because my AIR app needs additional functionality that the AIR runtime doesn’t provide (specifically: detecting USB storage devices, act as a TCP socket server, talk to Last.fm scrobbler plugins). For that purpose i wrote a local RPC socket server gateway in C [...]

FZip has been around for some time now, and people seem to like it. However one feature has been asked for repeatedly: In addition to reading ZIP archive, people want to be able to create new (and modify existing) archives. So i finally sat down this weekend and added that. The code is not tested [...]

Just a quick FYI: FZip and AIRRemoteUpdater upgrades for AIR Beta 2 are now available for download. FZip now uses ByteArray.uncompress(CompressionAlgorithm.DEFLATE) instead of the now deprecated ByteArray.inflate(). I also tweaked FZip to throw an exception when a parsing error occurs and no event listener is registered for FZipErrorEvent.PARSE_ERROR events. AIRRemoteUpdater now gets the local descriptor [...]

Some social network sites offer the feature for users to see who has visited their profile (footsteps). Orkut for example introduced footsteps some time ago. A user is able to opt out of this feature (so she doesn’t leave footsteps anymore and can browse other people’s profiles anonymously), but if she opts out she also [...]

Amazing how Paul Graham always manages to hit the nail on the head. It’s the 36 hour hacking sessions where i usually am most productive. [via Tink]

I just released the first version of AIR Remote Updater, an AS3 class to automate remote software updates in Adobe AIR applications. It transparently checks version numbers, downloads the .AIR installer file if needed and triggers the AIR-native update process. It grabs the version number directly from the remote .AIR file without having to download [...]