Kuler Flash CS3 Panel

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript , , ,

Yesterday I found this really useful extension for Adobe Flash CS3.
This extension adds to your Flash IDE a kuler panel which allows you to navigate through all the most rated, popular and newest kuler themes. There is also a search feature.

When a theme is clicked this extension creates a new layer in your flash document with as many coloured boxes as the clicked theme.

Download the extension here

For those who don’t know what is kuler, read the f.a.q. here:  http://kuler.adobe.com/links/kuler_help.html

Apple Safari for Windows. Terrible!

Alessandro Crugnola general ,

Probably you know that Apple just released a public beta version of its web browser Safari for Windows.

Why don’t try it out? So, after Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera I downloaded and installed it immediately just for curiosity, even if looking at the demo I saw they forced the application UI to be like OSX rather than following the Windows standards (like for iTunes).
And this is the first reason I dont like Apple applications for Windows (I’m on pc, not on a mac and I dont want to have a mac UI!).

Ok, I’ve installed it and uninstalled just after 5 minutes. I can understand it’s just a beta, but quite all the pages I tested are weird with lot of things missing, the HTML isn’t rendered as I expected.
I did just a search on google as first attempt but the result page was unreadable at all!

Some minor issues:
why the font smoothing can be changed in the application preferences? On Windows the font smoothing it’s set in the OS preferences, so just use that value.

During these 5 minutes I found many other issues, but I really think this is due to the fact it’s still the first public beta..

Flash Switcher extension updated

Alessandro Crugnola firefox , , ,

Yesterday I updated my previous flash switcher extension due to some changes in the latest release of Firefox 2.0.3 which caused the extension to stop working.
Moreover Adobe continues to change the path of the flash player installation dir.. because of this you should first uninstall your current flash player before using this extension.
The Flash player uninstaller is available here.

I’ve also included a brief help on how-to add more player versions available for this extension. Just open the ‘help’ menu item from the extension’s menu.

What

I’ve tested both on my Windows Vista business and Windows XP and it seems to work correctly, but feel free to report bugs to me..
Actuallt i’ve included these flash player versions:

  • 4.0 r28
  • 6.0 r79
  • 7.0 r63
  • 8.0 r24
  • 9.0 r28
  • 9.0 r45

What’s flash switcher?
Flash switcher is a Firefox extension (the icon will be installed in the right status bar of your browser) which lets you to switch between various flash player versions without using uninstallers/installers.

This new version is available only for Firefox 2.0.3 and above.

Download the Flash switcher extension.
Be sure to uninstall all previous flash switcher extensions from firefox before install this new one

ActionScript3 library for MySQL, be careful!

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript , ,

Today I’ve read on Mike Chanbers blog a post about a newly born library which allows flex2/as3 to connect directly to mysql.

Here’s the link to the project: http://maclema.com/assql/

I must admit some times ago I tried to make a similar thing because I know as3 could speak directly to mysql.. but it was just a test and I sopped immediately the experiments.

About the assql library: this library can be useful if you think to use it in Apollo applications, but never never think to use it on the web!
First of all you need a mysql server which allows connections outside the localhost env, secondly you need to set the database password within the swf file and thirdly you will have queries within the swf too.. bad. Better to stay on amfphp or webservices

Even if a scrambler is provided with this library, it will be quite easy to sniff the password too..

Anyway, awesome library indeed for the Apollo framework!