Michael Bianco

New Xcode Actionscript Language Definition File

The new actionscript language definition files that I posted about earlier are available. You can get the Flash 7 or the Flash 8 version of the definition files. You can download the BASH script I wrote which generates the files here. To install simply drop the two files included in the download into /Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Specifications. Kudos to Sam Robbins for creating the original actionscript language definition file. The best thing about the new language definition files is placeholders for actionscript functions & methods like in Objective-C. Here’s a screenshot of the code-sense with placeholders in action: Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements! Enjoy!

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…

Xcode Actionscript Integration: The Next Step

I’ve tried the whole Eclispe setup, but I’m just too used to Xcode to really like it. So I decided to improve the support of Actionscript/Flash Development in Xcode…

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.

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…

Free iPod

I finally gave in and decided to try one of the those ‘Get a free iPod’ offers. I did some research before signing up, and it seems as though this offer is totally legit. To get the free iPod you have to complete 1 offer (some offers are free, some cost less than $5), and get five people to do the same using your referral link. From what I’ve read gratis (the free ipod company) gets ~$100 for each person who signs up for an offer. That means that when you complete the requirements for a free ipod they already have $600 in their pocket and an ipod costs ~$300. So, if your interested in getting a free ipod, and are feeling really kind, please sign up with my refferal link.

XASH: Flash Help File Viewer

XASH, a Flash help file viewer written in Cocoa whose goal is to make it easier & faster to view flash help files is now available. At the moment the implementation is very simply and doesn’t provide any advantages over Flash IDE help viewer (other than its faster, open-source, and a native Cocoa application); but I’m planning on adding filtering and searching features which should make finding the right help pages alot easier. If you have any feature requests or bug reports please let me know!

Dreamhost Review

Ok, so heres my mini review of Dreamhost. Dreamhost is definitely not as easy to use as my previous host, alot of features that were provided automatically with hostm.com have to ‘manually’ configured. For instance, hostm.com had a 1-click install feature for blogs and forums. Now dreamhost claims to have a one click install, but it really isn’t one click, dreamhost simply sets up the mySQL database and automatically fills out the database config file, Hostm did everything for you. However, dreamhost provides alot of power with their hosting. Since you have SSH access to the server you can compile custom versions of PHP, or any other command line application you need. I compiled CSS Optimizer on dreamhost without any problems…

Woops: Software Versions

I accidentally uploaded older versions of all the software on this site over to the new server. If you downloaded any of the software on this site within the last few days, you probably downloaded an outdated version. Just wanted to give everyone the heads up 🙂

Switched!

Everything has been successfully switched over to the new Dreamhost server! So far so good, the only gotcha I came across was that Dreamhost has disabled allow_url_fopen for security reasons, so including files in this fashion would not work, all paths had to be relative: [code lang=”php”][/code] I ended up adding the root server directory to include_path to allow me to reffer to files with an absolute filepath without using the http://blabla.com. Other than that everything went pretty well, Dreamhost has a very extensive k-base and wiki which helped me very quikly resolve other small issues that I came across…

Latest Posts