Adobe AIR Beta 3 Available for Download!
So there was supposed to be some big news from Adobe tonight @ 9:00 PM PST, but here it is, 7:30 PM PST, and it looks like Adobe Labs might have jumped the gun. You can download Adobe AIR Beta 3 right now!
So there was supposed to be some big news from Adobe tonight @ 9:00 PM PST, but here it is, 7:30 PM PST, and it looks like Adobe Labs might have jumped the gun. You can download Adobe AIR Beta 3 right now!
Official Flex/AIR evangelist, Ted Patrick, has put together a simplified generated template project for Flex components (called FXWidget) in an attempt to make it easier to use flex as page-components rather than full applications. It includes the SWFObject library from Geoff Stearns and reduces the line count in the out-of-the-box index.template.html file from 108 to a mere 26. It’s far from complete, but a definite step in the right direction.
I’ve put together an extension of this library to add some more functionality and to restore the browser-history feature of flex that is included in the original template file. In my extensions, I’ve side-stepped the IE7 issues people were having in relation to loading the SWF in a script tag by loading it by preloading it through prototype.js’s Ajax.Request method and used an onComplete closure to trigger the loading of the SWF object. I have yet to add deep-linking back to the template (Flex3).
This marks my first contribution back to the Flex community, to which I hope to contribute as much as I can. My updates this site have been… well there just hasn’t been any for a while. I’ve been “heads-down” programming at my new job since December, up to my eyeballs in Flex and FDS. Things are settling down now, so I hope to have more time to share what I’ve learned.
Click here to download the Flex2 project.
Click here to see the output examples.
Good work, Ted!
Sergio Pereira has updated his documentation site of Prototype.js to include the latest build (1.5.0_rc2).
I also stumbled across a png cheat sheet for Prototype.js by Johnathan Snooka.
Great job, guys!
David Wallace @ SearchEngineWatch.com has written an interesting article on the effect of new-age web technologies like AJAX and Web2.0 on search engine crawlability. While I wasn’t aware of the impact of CSS on search engine behavior, and the impact of Web2.0 applications like Wikis and other community-driven technologies is somewhat obvious, he makes a very good point of the potentially negative impact of AJAX (or excessive AJAX) on search engines’ abilities to crawl and index your site. Wallace points out that because of the nature of AJAX, and the inability of search engines to interact with JavaScript, AJAX enabled websites will experience some hindrance of crawlability. While this is true, this can be minimized by following some basic guidelines when implementing AJAX on your web application:
If used properly AJAX can significantly improve a user’s experience by adding standalone application feel to an otherwise boring web site. If used improperly, AJAX can severely hurt your site’s potential by cutting off search engine indexing.
Please feel free to suggest more best-practice guidelines to append to this list.
Thomas Fuchs of Mir.aculo.us has posted some examples of the new Morphing effects in Scriptaculous’s 1.7 beta effects library. Looking good ![]()
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