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In a nutshell: Don’t try to use Windows TTF files when embedding fonts in Flex on OSX, possibly a CFF thing. Long version: I had a strange problem with font embedding in Flex Gumbo on OS X when trying to embed the following character ranges (using CFF): // numerals, full stop, lower, upper, punctuation, basic latin [Embed(source='ttf/arial.ttf', fontFamily='Arial', unicodeRange='U+0030-U+0039, U+002E, U+0041-U+005A, U+0061-U+007A, U+0020-U+002F,U+0030-U+0039,U+003A-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A,U+005B-U+0060,U+0061-U+007A,U+007B-U+007E', cff='true')] public static var Arial:Class; The first range (U+0030-U+0039) contains the numerals 0 through 9, but they were not being embedded in the resultant SWF. The TTF font I was using was Arial (regular) from my XP machine, this is because on a Mac you get a totally opaque “suitcase” file (dfont) for the whole family. ...

Back in October 2007 I wrote a post entitled “Does Flash Lite Have a Future?” which is one of my most popular posts and it sparked some interesting comments. The main argument I had for this wasn’t that Flash Lite was going down the pan, it was simply that we didn’t need it because the full Flash Player would be suitable for mobile due to touch-screen, higher powered mobile devices and lower power requirements for our applications anyway (the argument here is that we only use a tiny percentage of the CPU for most applications now unlike before). ...

A thorn in the side of Flash Lite has been removed. Today Adobe has released a developer redistributable version of the Flash Lite 3.1 player along with the packager tool. This greatly improves the situation of not knowing whether someone has the player, and being helpless to get them it if they haven’t. Read more here. EDIT: I just tested this on my E71 by visiting m.adobe.com (thanks Scott), it works amazingly. Things may have been very different over the last few years of Flash Lite if this mechanism had been around. The application was small, installed quickly with only 1 nag, then prompted me to install Adobe Version Checker which installed Flash Lite 3.1 for me and immediately launched the game I had downloaded (Tower Bloxx). Good work! (Now for a Sony Ericsson version?). ...

This article is about creating Flex Gumbo (Flex 4) application that run in either Flash Player 10, or AIR 1.5. I also describe how to upgrade an existing FP9/AIR 1.0 application to use the new SDK. In my case I also had to upgrade a Flex Library project so that’s also covered. Word of warning: before you jump in please refer to the section entitled “Problem: Losing Syntax Highlighting in Script Tag” near the end. As this could affect you if you make use of Script tags rather than the “code-behind” technique (I now use the former strategy to save on files and promote simpler View classes). ...

I’ve just tested out a couple of new AIR applications using PureMVC from SourceBits, they’ve built up quite a few interesting apps in their portfolio, the two new ones being GoAir and Live Quotes. GoAir is an AIR application designed to provide a desktop Gmail experience, and offline mail support (including sending email when offline, and having it actually send when it detects a connection). This one caught my eye because I also wrote an AS3 Pop3 library and hooked it up to Gmail some time ago, alas mine did not have SMTP so you couldn’t send, and the UI was basic, this one has full SMTP/POP support so you can send and receive. ...

At my last job I met a software architect who, for a Flash project, jumped in and learned ActionScript in what seemed like a few hours so he could work on the domain logic for a complex application. For background, I believe he primarily worked with .NET but this is about portable skills. Suffice to say he was indeed an extremely good coder and I’m grateful he spent some time passing on a few tips and tricks that apply to all languages, and some nice demonstrations using Haskell, ActionScript and of course C#. One such tip was the use of “pure functions” for example, which is always in the back of my mind now. (As a side note, I think learning a very different language like Haskell or in my case Ruby is a great way of keeping your mind open and it will help with your “daily” language). ...

I got a tip from my friend Alex Peretti regarding the built in search in OSX. Skip to the end if you are familiar with the default search pains. I couldn’t understand why, when you start typing in the search box inside any folder’s Finder window, it defaults to searching inside files of the entire computer for matching text, instead of looking at filenames inside the current folder. That means every time I search for something I have to change the settings (they aren’t stored) because 99% of my searches seem to bring up some wordy Nietzsche e-book instead of what I’m looking for. ...

It’s that time of year again. “Give good food to your Mac” is back with another set of software to choose from. The twist is the more you buy, the cheaper it gets, literally. Choose 3 apps, save 30%, 4 gets you 40% but 5+ gets you 50% off. It’s time limited, so 10 days to go. Last year I purchased 10 pieces of software for the price of the 1 piece I actually wanted (Unity 3D). In that package I also got an impressive casual 3D modeler, Cheetah 3D. It won’t replace Maya or MAX, but for a lot of tasks it’s perfect. Yes some of the apps on there are a little gimmicky, some of them you may never use, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re getting the other apps for free (in my case anyway). ...

Just got news from the guys at Xuinet that they’re running a big competition with a cash prizes totaling $10,000. You need to submit SWFs via email by November 3rd 2008 and multiple entries are allowed. Looks like a good opportunity to re-purpose your Flash Lite 2 content. Prize categories include: Blogs and Social Networks Games Images/slide-shows Sports (scores, trivia, fantasy league) On-the-go (travel, weather, news, etc.) I must admit I haven’t seen Xuinet before. It appears to be a distribution platform for Flash mobile applications. By the looks of it the files are converted into a “Xui” which runs Flash 7 SWFs in a custom player on Windows Mobile devices. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s tried out the SDK to confirm the implementation details. ...

Over the weekend I received a copy of the first issue of Unity Developer Magazine, thanks to Charles Hinshaw. I had high hopes for this magazine, largely because Unity has an incredibly vibrant community of developers and artists. I was not at all disappointed. The magazine contains a variety of features, including an in depth look at a big budget Edutainment game “Wolfquest”, incredible artwork created in Unity itself, an illustrated introduction to vectors, A* Pathfinding, creating dashboard widgets and a look at some of the hottest Unity productions from a selection of studios and independents. ...