Okay, so yesterday I realized it has nothing to do with updating Tiger for Mobile Me. I could just go on using the .mac service like I always had. The only thing I had to do was open the settings on the iPhone and activate synchronization for the calendar and contacts on the .mac account. It now works fine. I think Apple has been a little evasive regarding this piece of information, don’t you?
Well, it was easy enough when I realized what to do. … tsk… and I call myself a geek…
LATER NOTE: Despair not! There is no problem using Mobile Me on Tiger. Read more here
Is it just me or is there not a Mobile Me update for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)? Everywhere I read it says that an update can be found that will replace the dotmac icon in system preferences with a new Mobile Me icon, but I can’t find any such update. Thus I cannot sync my calendar and contacts with my iPhone without plugging it in and doing it via iTunes.
It works but it annoys me. That was one of the things I was really looking forward to when I was standing in that long dorky line waiting for my iPhone 3G. Being a travelling consultant it has it’s advantages being able to sync the phone while not at the office.
Any news on the progress there would be highly appreciated.
Long had I waited, and when it appeared I rejoiced. It came to me in splendor and bliss. And I was glad because it had showed itself to me and I had seen the light. And thus it was mine.
Being a computer nerd I love the gadgets and clothing found at ThinkGeek. My most recent fascination is with the interactive T-shirts. Can it be cooler? I want them all! Just haven’t decided which one I’m going to buy 
This guy seems quite happy with his shirt:
Update Jan 24 -09: The Flash Tracer that works with Firefox 3 has to be downloaded from the creator’s own site. The one at Mozilla Addons doesn’t work with 3.x (yet). In the instructions below I have therefore used the link to his own site.
If you’re developing for Flash/Flex the FlashTracer can be quite a nifty plugin. It lets you see the flash player trace output directly in a sidebar in you browser. Outputting debugging info is something I use all the time while developing and I have tried several times to get FlashTracer to work, but haven’t managed, so I usually have a textarea inside my flash/flex project with a custom debug output. I guess I have been too impatient before but today I sat down and read through some posts about it. This is how I eventually got it to work on my Mac:
1. Make sure you’re using the latest Flash Player Debug version. Download it here
2. Install the plugin (of course)
3. Open the FlashTracer sidebar in FireFox. Click the Preferences button.
4. Under the area named “Select output file” click browse and point the plugin to the flashlog.txt file your debug player outputs. In my case (being on a mac) it was here:
/Users/{username}/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt
The plugin will ask if you want to replace the file, which is stupid because you will want to read from the file, not write to it, but that’s just how it is. Don’t let it scare’ya.
5. Save/close preferences.
6. Restart FireFox.
That should do it.
When I first discovered the Spry Ajax framework by Adobe I was jubilant. It gives my HTML applications a similar functionality to the Flex applications I so love. For those who haven’t yet discovered Spry I can tell you it’s a collection of APIs, tools and widgets that make it easier for you to implement ajax functionality on your web site. Many of the widgets are useless (to me) but in general it’s excellent. You can more or less just associate a set of graphics (like rows in a table) with an array (imported externally or built into the page) and the graphics repeat themselves according to the arrays rows. You have to try it to understand its brilliance.
The downside
The documentation is very thorough, but very badly structured. As an example the API documentation does not include the events that can be “listened to” by observers. One has to browse through the Overview document and make much use of the “find” feature of the browser (thank god I’m using Firefox) to find such things.
Another problem is that it sometimes just don’t work. The framework has a really nifty debugging tool built into it, but sometimes errors don’t fire. Simply nothing happens and that makes me furious! I’ve been trying to solve such a problem all day today, but simply can’t find what’s wrong. Firebug (a must-have tool) tells me my dataset has all the data. If I look through the page’s DOM I can find the object there, with all the data in it, but the {labels} I have used in the code are replaced by… nothing…
I’m tired…
Yesterday I tried to install the flex sdk apache module on the linux server of one of my clients. Note “tried”.
Problem 1: The Java JRE isn’t super easy to install. Well, actually it is, but you just have to realize how to do it and the information out there is quite misleading. I’m no Linux nerd although I can handle a linux server fairly well. This server was a Debian Etch server, so my hopes were quite high. Apt-get is a good tool. The reason the info was so misleading is that all the articles I could found out there in “space” told me you cannot use apt-get to install the Java run-time because of some Sun legal policy. This is not correct. Since sometime in 2005 you can use apt-get to install Java, however you have to add the non-free repository to the sources.list file. Finally I found out how to do it.
Problem 2: The information in the Flex SDK about the apache module is slight to say the least. It is almost essential to find a third party tutorial on some blog to figure out how to set it up. One thing I hate about Adobe, which could be a result of the multitude of information they’re hosting, is the fact that all pages refer to other pages, and some of those pages refer back to the first page and so on and so forth.
Final problem: So I finally performed a manual install of the Flex SDK for Linux! Wohoo! or… not…
The final step is to restart the Apache server. “Nope. I won’t restart” he said, sneerfully. “You are missing an essential thing called GLIBC_2.4. You need that to be able to run the mod_flex.so! Ha ha!”.
In search of such a thing and why it wasn’t already there I found out that the glibc library only exist up to version 2.3 for Debian.
Conclusion
I can’t use the f*king apache module at all and will have to compile my Flex application locally and upload to the server. Too bad, because that will not be easy giving the fact that I’m not alone in this project. The whole idea behind this new project we’re on was creating an online application we could build together.
If someone out there has made this work and can help me out… PLEASE HELP!
Chears
Daniel
