notboring dev blog

A non complete list of cms controlled ipad/iphone magazine apps, aimed at publishers, not users.

Rob Rhyne, the author of Briefs, gave up getting his mockup App approved after a year of trying. The reason the app didn’t get approved? It saved it’s data in XML files which could be traded. Apple decided to label that as “running external code” which is not allowed in the AppStore.

Here’s what the author says – and a download link for the source code of Briefs,

http://blog.robrhyne.com/post/4179305832/always-a-bridesmaid

A friend asked for some help with displaying content only on the first visit of a site. This is the example I wrote for him:

// request the flash cookie/local shared object with the name "someCookieId"
var myFlashCookie:SharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal("someCookieId");
// check if the field "isFirstStart" is set
if(myFlashCookie.data["isFirstStart"]==undefined){
    // the field "isFirstStart" is not set, set it now
    myFlashCookie.data["isFirstStart"]=true;
    // write cookie
    myFlashCookie.flush();
    // jump to a frame with the label "help"
    gotoAndStop("help");
}else{
    // the flash cookie "isFirstStart" was set, that means we don't need 
    // to show first time help, go right to the frame with the name "start"
    gotoAndStop("start");
}

Google finally added the long awaited in app purchases to the latest version of their Market.

Read more about it on their blog:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/in-app-billing-launched-on-android.html

The article links to an sample app and full developer documentaion of the in app purchase payment process.

If you develop for the Blackberry Playbook you are required to use Flash Builder. Since I had a row of titles have been written for Flash and there’s no easy way to convert the code in between those two development solutions I tried to load the compiled Flash SWF into Flash Builder. After a few tries and wasting far too much time on Actionscript-Loader-Variation I found out that the SWFLoader clearly is the best component for the job.

Here’s an example:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<s:Application
xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009″
xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark”
xmlns:mx=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx”>
<mx:SWFLoader id=”contentLoader” source=”MatchIt_blackberry_playbook.swf”/>
</s:Application>

When exporting your projekt for the playbook make sure you bundle your loaded SWF. Otherwise you will just get a monochrome colored screen.

Since Adobe brought out version 2.6 of AIR, the links for AIR 2.5 got removed. Luckily there’s an archive for old versions of AIR:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/853/cpsid_85304.html

Here the direct download links:

http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/2.5/AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2

http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/mac/download/2.5/AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2

http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/win/download/2.5/AdobeAIRSDK.zip

If you run into this issue make sure you:

• Give the virtual machine at least 8GB of harddisc space
• Give the virtual machine at least 1GB of memory
• Activate the graphics hardware acceleration

You can only modifiy those values when the VM is powered off.

One of the main annoyances for power users is Firefox 4′s changed behaviour on close/restart. While the old version showed a warning, giving the user to save the state of his open tabs the new version just closes and is empty on restart.

To get back your old tab states you can use Firefox -> Chronic – > Restore last session.

Since it’s annoying to do that on ever start/restart of Firefix there are many posts of users trying to figure out how to get the old behaviour back. For that you need to fiddle in the internal settings. Enter “about:config” in the adress field and confirm that you know what you are doing. Then go to the entry “browser.showQuitWarning” and click it to change it from false to true. After that all should be working as expected from Firefox 3.

If you are developing HTML5 Apps like Apple asked you to, you might have noticed that HTML5 inside the safari browser is noticable faster then what a local webapp does. The reason? Apple blocks your Apps from using the new fast Nitro Javascript engine.

Read more on this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/15/apple_ios_throttles_web_apps_on_home_screen/

Since Apple screwed up the XCode 4 device driver installation you won’t be able to do a backup/sync using iTunes anymore.

Luckily there’s a guide on how to fix this:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1747?viewlocale=en_US