Aching Brain » Uncategorised

The march of progress

ktm — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:56:10 +0000

Today I received my lovely new Sony Ericsson C902 couriered straight to my desk. It was very painless: Orange rang, I'm a valued customer, they offer me a new piece of kit and a sexier calling package for less money. I wasn't expecting much, just a new, smaller, shinier phone and it is just that. However, it has one thing that most phones don't and that is a mini-jack connector for the headphones. No need to use the rubbish headphones that come with the phone, I can plug whatever I want into it. Now that is what I call progress...

Flashpaper

alex — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 08:09:47 +0000

Adobe have despatched Flashpaper to the same grave of irrelevant products as FreeHand and ImageReady. Considering Flashpaper was made by Macromedia before their assimilation, it was kind of on the cards due to it's competition with PDF.

From the article the CEO a doomed startup whines:

What about all the websites that have been storing all their documents with Flashpaper? It will be a major job having to transfer all those documents to a new solution

Perhaps if instead of willingly submitting to vendor lock in they stored their documents in a recognised, open standard that's widely implemented by multiple vendors they would not have this problem.

FlashCommand

alex — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:45:55 +0000

I found this excellent command line tool to compile Flash movies the other day.

It works like this:

flashcommand -p -s /path/to/fla

The -p switch means 'publish' and '-s' specifies the path to the source .fla file. It works by opening Flash CS3 in the background and instructing it to compile the movie, consequently it will respect the publish settings you've defined in the .fla so the generated .swf file will end up in the right directory.

Combining this with Flash CS3's ability to import an external AS3 file to use with each movie means bar the initial .fla file creation you'll never have to use Adobe's painfully bad authoring environment ever again.

UK communications database

alex — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:24:46 +0000

The latest krazee plan from the Home Office's policy department seems to be a massive database containing the details of every phone conversation and email sent in the UK.

Assuming it works (it won't) then at least they'll realise just how bad the spam situation is.