Adobe have released a free PDF book on creating Adobe Air applications for JavaScript developers.
Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide
For those of you who have not heard, Adobe Air represents a fantastic advance in web development technologies. By using the HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the standard bread and butter for web developers, you can leverage those existing skills to create fully fledged desktop applications. Complete with standard OS install, uninstall procedures, custom taskbar(XP)/dock(Mac) icons, the works!
No messing around with C and MFC ( the horror!! ) when developing WinXP apps any more. Plus an Adobe Air app is platform independent. You can build an Adobe Air app and it will run on any OS that has the Adobe Air runtime installed. And what’s more, the Runtime Install procedure is the thing to behold too for it will install painlessly the first time you decide to download an Air app.
Adobe Air will change the way we understand the web, and continue to blur the line between the OS and the browser. It’s my guess for web technology of the year.
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I came across this problem today. I was attempting to create a new binary file using Ruby and tried the following:
While this worked on the *nix os, it resulted in a corrupt binary file when run in WINXP.
To create a binary file in ruby you will need to include the “wb” option. See below.
Bye!
I’m a list junkie and Remember the Milk is where I get the hit…
If you ‘re the same you can download a simple Adobe Air application I put together with the Remember The Milk website inserted in an iframe. Plus a little extra.
Doing web development work my browsers and WinXP taskbar can get messy. In a typical setup, I’ll have Firefox running(with several tabs), Internet Explorer 7, possibly 6 too, an IDE EG Aptana Studio or Editplus, probably a few explorer folders and 4 console windows too.
Yes messy I know.
Now you can imagine what that taskbar looks like, and in the midst of this boiling cauldron, in a Firefox tab will lurk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/. It can be a pain to find it.
Wouldn’t it be great if I could keep the http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ seperate from the rest of the Firefox tabs? Perhaps with a distinctive easy to locate icon too.
Ideally I would have http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ running in system tray, not visible in the taskbar and it would disappear back to the system tray when I minimise it, waiting ready to be restored again at short notice…. if only…..
Da Ding!!
BTW the systemtray feature is WinXP only. Perhaps a dock version will appear shortly
Shiftthis have written a Wordpress pluginto help you with re-ordering your Wordpress pages.
It’s called the wordpress-order-pages-plugin.
I’ve found this plugin useful when to allow me to control the order of my Wordpress pages when using my wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin .
It provides a visual layout of your pages and you can change the menu order easily. Very nice.
Guide to install and use Subversion client for Win XP.
If you are starting out with Ruby on Rails you’ll probably find yourself working on the depot application from the current edition of the book “Agile Web development with Rails”. However if you have Rails 2 installed you’ll quickly run into problems. The current edition of “Agile Web Development with Rails” supports rails 1.X. However with the release of Rails 2 key changes in the framework render the instructions for creating the depot application obsolete.
To get up to speed you should find the following tutorials useful, the first 2 deal with the rails 2 method of creating a basic depot application while along the way showcasing the new features of Rails2.
http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/12/rolling-with-rails-2-0-the-first-full-tutorial
http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/12/rolling-with-rails-2-0-the-first-full-tutorial-part-2
I’ve also found this next PDF informative. It costs 9 dollars but for that you get 140 odd pages of Rails2 goodness that should fill the void until they get around to updating “”Agile Web Development with Rails”
Hello,
New improved version of the JQuery drop down menu now available.
It contains the extra features requested:
Enjoy!
UPDATE: Comments fixed. I was getting a reporting a missing sql comments file. The problem and the solution providerd here fixed the issue. Thanks
http://www.dazecoop.co.uk/03-04-2007/wordpress-database-error-cant-open-file-wp_commentsmyi-errno-144
Hi all,
I’m afraid the commenting on this blog is not working at present.
In the meantime if you would like to contact me feel free to email me at weeatbricks@gmail.com
Thanks
Jamie
The wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin at a glance:
I wrote this plugin to provide my wordpress blog with a navigation or menu that provides drop down menus or sub navigation menus where you need them.
This plugin uses the cross browser JQuery javascript framework for the sliding down menus and JQuery is installed with the plugin.
Each ‘Page’ of your wordpress blog becomes a link in the new navigation bar. Pages that are ‘children’ populate the drop menu of the parent ‘Page’.
For example. You might have a page titled About. You can then set or create pages such as contact us, team, location or whatever and set the parent of each of these pages to ‘About’.
In your new navigation menu hover over the ‘About’ link and a dropdown menu containing contact us, team, location appears.
I’ve tested this on Wordpress version 2.31 and above. It will not work on version 2.0.x as these version does not support the concept of parent and child pages.
Try out the Demo
Download wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin here
Simply unzip the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu.zip and copy the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu directory into your ./wp-content/plugins directory.
Login to the WordPress Admin Interface and enable the PlugIn in the PlugIn section.
Next put the tag below somewhere inside one of your wordpress template files.
That’s it.
Example:
Insert this somewhere into one of your templates, eg header.php
<?php
echo wp_jquery_dropdownmenu(2, “Blog”,1, 0);
?>
This is the default dropdown menu configuration. If you would like to learn about how you can alter your dropmenu further please read the following:
There are four settings to consider.
The first value(2 in the above example):
0 - does not put a link to you blog into the dropdown menu.
1 - Put a lnk to your blog on the left hand side of the dropdown menu.
2 - put a link to your blog in the right hand side of the navigation menu.
Second value (”blog” in the above example):
If you would like a lin to you blog to appear in your dropdown menu. Put the text here. In the above example “Blog” is used and will probably do for most people.
Third value (1 in the above example):
0 - pages will by sorted by their ID
1 - pages will be arranged accorded to their menu order. The menu order can be set in the pages section of your wordpress blog.
Fourth value (0 in the above example):
0 - if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to be unavailable for clicking.
1 - if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to to click to it’ page.
You can style the css by editing the files styles.css in the plugins/wp_jquery_dropdownmenu folder
Comments, questions or suggestions most welcome!
Enjoy.
This plugin, wp_jquery-1.2.1 is based on the wp_jquery plugin available at http://miracles.heaven.fr/wp_jquery/
It adds support for the JQuery JavaScript framework to your word press blog and admin backend.
I’ve added two enchantments:
Enjoy!