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If you use the excellent Postman for testing and developing your APIs (and if you don’t yet, please give it a try!) you may find this little node script helpful when generating documentation. It simply converts your downloaded Postman collection file to HTML (with tables) for inserting into documentation or sharing with a 3rd party developer. The Postman collection is perfect for sharing with developers as it remains close to “live documentation”, but sometimes you need a more readable form. ...

Earlier today Paulo Fierro blogged an example of how to build a dynamic application cache manifest for HTML5 web apps using Ruby. A cache manifest is a text file that browsers look for in order to determine which files to store locally on the device, this lets you open the site/app offline, great for web apps (on iOS bookmarking a site to the home screen also let’s you specify an icon and removes browser chrome). Creating a cache manifest dynamically means that you don’t have to worry about modifying a text file every time you add or remove a file from the app. ...

Yesterday Google unveiled the Chrome Web Store. In a nutshell this is an App Store for the Chrome browser and a critical component in the upcoming Chrome OS. The Chrome browser is found on all major desktop operating systems, on the enormous numbers of Android phones and tablets, and the new TVs and set top boxes from companies like Sony, Logitech and reportedly the biggest of them all, Samsung. Chrome OS is a desktop operating system replacement designed to operate entirely in the cloud, using web technologies, with almost negligible startup times for the instant-on, always connected generation. Chrome touts automatic synchronisation of everything from bookmarks, to auto-fill info and passwords, and preferences. ...

This relates to using ASDoc to generate documentation for a Flex or AIR project that uses conditional compilation (read more and see tip at end). Conditional Compilation Just for some background, the Flex compiler supports what is known as conditional compilation. This allows you to set one or more constants via a compiler flag which is then made accessible from anywhere in your code. This may be a boolean, a string, a number and so on. Within your code you can read this value and switch between using certain methods, or execute blocks of code depending on the value it contains. ...

I’ve just migrated from an old MacBook Pro to a new one using Apple’s Migration Assistant. I then thought it’d be a great idea to perform some manual cleanup and accidentally deleted a keychain (in KeyChain Access) which was used by an AIR app I am currently developing. After doing this I started getting the following error when running my app, as soon as it accessed EncryptedLocalStore: Error: general internal error<br></br> at flash.data::EncryptedLocalStore$/processErrorCode()<br></br> at flash.data::EncryptedLocalStore$/getItem() ...

Just a very small post here because I had trouble finding a solution myself. Users of OpenOffice for the Mac may experience odd-looking bullet point characters when opening and saving MS Word .doc files. The character looks like a W inside a box. Anyway, the problem is due to MS Office not encoding the character correctly when saving the file, but the temporary solution is to use OpenOffice’s Font Replacement feature (see Preferences), to replace “Symbol” with “OpenSymbol”. ...

This post describes how to filter data for use with any component that displays hierarchical data, such as the Tree, AdvancedDataGrid, or your own custom component. For the purpose of the post I’ll just consider the Tree, but the same technique applies to the others. Background Suppose I have constructed a “Library” of Folder and Leaf nodes and I want to display that in a Tree. Each Folder node has an ArrayCollection called “children” which contains any child Folders and/or Leaf nodes. ...

Today I had a bit of a nightmare with regards to loading SWFs into AIR. Specifically, I am loading my SWFs from somewhere inside app-storage://, and those SWFs use Flash CS4 UI components. These components extend UIComponent which accesses the stage object. When you attempt to load and add this child SWF to the display list of your AIR app, it generates a SecurityErrorEvent which stops things, dead. The AIR app owns the stage object, there is only one Stage instance, and depending on what security sandbox the content SWF is loaded into, the child SWF is not allowed access to that stage because it could run amok. ...

Via Andrew Shorten, Flex Builder Professional is free to students. You can sign up for a copy here. Edit: Also free to those unemployed, limited time only on this one I would think.

Short and sweet, if you want to know the Unicode ranges for various glyphs, such as Latin 1, Cyrillic and so on, open up flash-unicode-table.xml from your “Flex SDK/frameworks/” directory. You’ll find everything listed, and it’s a good way to save on font size.