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Category: Web Development

XTrace 1.1

At last XTrace 1.1 is out the door! This has been a long time coming, and has alot of changes & new features: CMD+Shift+C now clears the log window XTrace now automatically starts the trace server Added the Sparkle (auto updating) framework Added the ability to disable wrapping in the log window Added the option for window auto-close (log window will close when the SWF it is connected to closes) New icon thanks to Ale! Log message coloring/formatting thanks to Daniel Giribet Compiled & tested as a universal binary I’ve recorded a quick tutorial on how XTrace works. If you’re new to XTrace, or just want a quick refresher I encourage you to take a look. If you would like to get involved with development, please send me an email!..

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Apple’s Javascript Debugger: Drosera

I was doing a little web-work, and came across a bug in my javascript code. I spent a couple minutes trying to find it using the javascript console in Safari, but quickly gave up and decided to give Apple’s Javascript debugger (Drosera) a try. I tried it a couple months ago but couldn’t get it to work, but I decided to download the latest nightly build and see if it had improved. It did. Drosera attached to the webkit browser fine, and inspected any page that I looked at in the webkit browser…

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XHTML 1.0 Transitional Compliant

This isn’t any big news for any of you non-web people, but I just finished making this site fully XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. In the process I’ve added some new content on some pages, and tweaked the style of some. On previous sites I’ve created I really didn’t care that much about compliancy but with the last couple sites I’ve made I found that keeping the site complaint made the development process alot easier. If you really don’t know much about XHTML I recommend reading this article; I found it very informative.

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Random Tid Bits

Heres some programming tid bits that really didn’t deserve their own post, so I grouped them all together into one post! 😛 else-switch We all know about the common else-if language construct that is available in almost all programming languages, but here one you might of not been aware of: the else-switch statement. [code lang=”javascript”] if(false) { } else switch(number) { case 0: //do something break; case 1: //do something else break; default: //do default action } [/code] Actually, you can follow if with any control statement. For instance, you can have an else-return or an else-break statement. This might be old news to some programmers, but I never knew you could do that!..

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CSS Optimizer 1.0

I finally found some time to get CSS Optimizer 1.0 released to the public. The 1.0 release brings with it alot of changes: Adding support for the “”}”” hack outlined here: http://diveintoaccessibility.org/examples/fontsize.html Added processing css from the standard input (-i option) Added outputting processed css to the standard output (-o option) Added -q (quiet) option Code cleanup & optimization Updated manual/reame now in HTML Online version of CSS Optimizer at: http://developer.mabwebdesign.com/cssoptimizer/compress.html CSS un-compressor at: http://developer.mabwebdesign.com/cssoptimizer/uncompress.html Exit codes are now predictable…

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Cool Apache Trick

I recently came across this cool apache trick. You can change the value of a PHP configuration variable using a .htaccess file in your server. For instance if you wanted to change the include_path php configuration variable you could use the following .htaccess command: Every PHP file contained in the same directory, or child directories of the .htaccess command will have the include_path variable changed to the new value. Its strange that there isn’t much documentation available about the php_value derivative, no information is available on apache.org, and even google didn’t seem to turn up any ‘real’ documentation about the command.

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NaturalDocs

A few weeks ago I was searching around trying to decide what documentation system to use in my Actionscript/Flash projects. There are alot of options out there, but these are the ones that I found viable for my situation: as2api AS2Doc VisDoc NaturalDocs As2api: overall as2api seems like a good solution but I really didn’t like the style of the documentation as2api created and the os x binary didn’t seem to work on os x. AS2Doc: looks like a good package, but it costs money; I cant see paying for something that has a free alternative which has very similar functionality. I’d rather donate to an open-source project. VisDoc: looked really nice- exactly what I was looking for, I was very close to buying it until I saw NaturalDocs…

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OS X Hex Value Color-Picker Plug-In

Recently I was throwing around an idea about making a plug-in for the standard color-picker panel for OS X. All I really wanted it to do was give me the hex value of the selected color. I did a fair amount of research and eventually found that someone had already done it. I’ve never seen that advertised, or shown anywhere; but so far I’ve found the plug-in proves useful. Now if only the author would make the source available so a good example of how to make a color-picker plug-in would be available…

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Embedded Pixel Fonts in Flash on OS X

Recently, while building my new version of my flash web-site I had a problem with a free pixel font i downloaded from Orgdot. Here were the symptoms of my problem: If I embedded the pixel font it would blur when used with a dynamic text field. The same pixel font would not blur if in a static text field. The pixel font would not blur in a dynamic text field that used system (A.K.A. device) fonts. Flash did not give me any errors when embedding the font. The windows version of the same font caused the Flash IDE to hang when it embedded the font (IE when the movie was published) I was following standard pixel font guidelines, sizes in multiples of 8, integer coordinates, 100% _xscale & _yscale…

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