Easytech blog

Yesterday Adobe released the first alpha of Adobe Air for Linux. I played with it for a while and was quite impressed with it. The installation went along flawlessly on my Fedora Core 8 and I downloaded a couple of applications that worked quite nicely. In the release notes they mentioned that transparency works when using a composite window manager. I switched on the ‘desktop effects’ (as they are called in FC8) and indeed the apps worked perfectly!

The apps I tried where: kuler and Pixel Perfect. Kuler is an application which stores several hundred color combinations which are all very pretty. Pixel Perfect is a simple application which draws a translucent ruler on the desktop. The ruler can be moved around, resized and you can even change the transparency using the mouse wheel. All worked perfectly under Linux. You can download the source and read the article of how it works here. I still need to test local applications tht make use of Air’s features like the local sqlite database, etc.

What really interests me is to use Air and Flex to build cross platform widgets as well as desktop applications. It seems to me, after having a quick peak at the code that Adobe is really pushing this technology under Linux and is not just writing a half working port for Linux.

I will continue to test is and update this post (or create a new one) with the news. For the moment you can learn more at Adobe labs

Sometimes when programming, you have to debug your application. Yes, even when using Adobe Flex. The problem (and on the other hand, the good thing) is, that living in a Linux world makes you the one responsible for enabling every feature you need.

In this case, as mentioned, the feature I needed was to enable the trace() method for debugging Flex applications. To achieve this is actually quite simple. You just have to create a file in your home folder, named mm.cfg. When enabled, tracing is done automatically to the file $HOME/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt (you can, however, modify this location in the mm.cfg file).

The content of a simple, yet functional mm.cfg file sample is given below.

TraceOutPutFileName=$HOME/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt
ErrorReportingEnable=1
TraceOutputFileEnable=1

There is one more caveat though. The trace() method only works when viewing your flash application in a debugging-enabled
version of the Flash Player (or the flash plugin in mozilla).

As an added bonus, there is a plugin for Firefox, Flash Tracer, that will display a sidebar with the output of the trace() calls. This can be quite handy so not to have to open a terminal just for viewing the log file.

Now that you know the truth, off you go, and happy debugging!

As we have often said, we are very fond of vim here at Easytech. Even though it is an incredible editor I sometimes miss some features of editors like GEdit, Coda or TextMate. I don’t miss too many things, but some things are simpler when you have a good GUI. One example is browsing files and managing several open buffers. Another is SVN integration (another tool we use here).

After a while looking at ways to integrate Vim into GTK applications and when I was just about to start a project myself I found the solution to my ‘itch’: Pida. Pida is basically an IDE for Python. The really cool thing about it is that it allows you to choose which editor to use. You get the only two real choices: Vi or Emacs.

In addition to having the editor window with all the powerful editing capabilities of Vi or Emacs you get a side panel which has a list of buffers to edit, a list of projects and a view of the filesystem of the selected project. This way you can easily navigate the filesystem of your project and the open files. If you are using SVN then the state of each file is also displayed and you have a popup menu so it’s easy to do SVN operations on files or directories. By installing a plugin you can also watch pending tickets if you use Trac (which we do). Finally, the icing of the cake is that the applications is written using Python and GTK (PyGTK + Glade to be more specific) and with its plugin system its very easy to extend. If you like programming with Vi then Pida is definitively for you. Check it here: http://pida.co.uk/