I blogged the other day about an Office 2007 feature for the tabs that are apart of the ribbon in that you can use your scroll wheel to change the selected tab. I thought this was actually pretty cool.

I decided to implement it in Flex because I figure it would be extremely easy... and it was! Took about 15 minutes total. However, it seems it is having issue when playing without a breakpoint in the code. Just playing through normally, when I scroll up or down, it actually seems to skip a tab when going through them. Yet, if I put a breakpoint at the beginning of the event handler and play through it that way, it goes to the next tab as it should.

Here is a demo of what I have done. Source is included...

http://www.kylehayes.info/tabby/TabThumbWheel.html

Dominos.com now the stick to which all future online pizza ordering systems (and other ordering systems) will be measured. The wife and I received a coupon for Domino's Pizza today in the mail, and while I normally don't go for eating out on a Monday night, she has been busy as of late and I had just gotten home after sitting for quite some time in traffic. I was just going to call in the order but then I decided to order online.

First of all, I immediately realized when I approached their page that they have the "You got 30 minutes" marketing campaign right now. Also, I must say that they have the nicest online pizza ordering site in the industry (though I can only compare it to Papa John's and Pizza Hut). There Web 2.0 look and feel as well as Flash-y elements created great appeal and very nice appearance. But that wasn't the half of it...

Along with their launch of this new campaign came the launch of the "Pizza Tracker". This thing is awesome! A real-time application written in Flash provide a slick interface and virtual viewport of your pizza each step of the way. A large progress bar shows you the status from Order Placed, Prep, Bake, Box, to Delivery all as it happens. In some of the steps, it even tells you who completed that part of the process. It includes a glowing red filler for each of the progress as the bar fills up. This application is a great example of what non-technical companies can do to utilize today's instant gratification technologies like Flash and Data Services.

Here are some screenshots of the process as it was happening:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

After Ted posted his AIR entry on his blog and talked about the various great things about the runtime, he also mentioned that it is important to purchase a signed certificate from companies such as Thawte in order to get the "greatly expanded APIs", I immediately pinged Ryan to confirm this since Ted was not immediately available.

Shocked, Ryan went to check and reported back that it was not the case. Since then, I noticed that the misinformation has been removed from Ted's blog.

The actual question I posed to Ryan was if he thought the $300 certificate cost from Thawte would discourage the development of open source and free applications. He didn't think so due to the ability to self-sign your own applications, however, at the cost of them being labeled as "UNVERIFIED" when the user installs them. Is there a way around this? Such as a certificate for open source applications to encourage this ever-increasingly popular movement?

The Adobe Flash Player is a multimedia application created by Macromedia (now a division of Adobe Systems). Flash Player features support for both vector and raster graphics, along with a scripting language and bidirectional streaming of video and audio content. The player is a virtual machine that runs Flash files, which are often embedded in websites to present animations, games, GUIs, or other visual interestingness. If you're reading this website, you probably know all of this. What you might not know is that Flash sucks. It is the bane of the Internet, and it needs to go away.

Did I get your attention? I saw an article on the Digg and had to read it due to my love and loyalty for Adobe and Macromedia. After reading the article, I agreed with what Mike was saying about some of the stuff, but for the most part, I really feel it is the developer's fault for creating, what he calls, "sucky" sites. Any tools put into the hands of the wrong person will result in garbage.

He cannot blame the platform saying that it sucks because it allows people to create "sucky" stuff. If it was the platforms fault, then we could certainly say just about this of any technology on the Internet. Look at all those sucky HTML pages in the past with flashing backgrounds, movings sentences/images/tables, intricate background textures and table borders up the ying yang.

Saying that Flash sucks because of the reasons he gives is just simply ridiculous. Anybody else have any comments on the matter?

If you agree with me, please bury this article on Digg: http://digg.com/programming/Why_Flash_Sucks

Michael's post on Passing variables to Flex 2 in the embed page (or URL string) really helped shed some light on this issue.

According to the docs, you simply pass the variable via the src attribute in the wrapper OBJECT or EMBED tags. Unfortunately, this simply isn't true because if you open up the html-template file that Flex uses to generate the HTML wrapper page, you will notice that tag is only for "NOSCRIPT" browsers. If you want to change it for any modern browser, then you actually need to pass it in the JavaScript in the header that generates the Flash Object inside the function AC_FL_RunContent.

Be mindful that there are actually two functions that do this, the first one is the object/embed tag for browsers that don't have the latest Flash player. You actually want to append the URL into the function inside the Else statement. Simply append it to the FlashVars Name Value pair. Here is an example: