I almost forgot to post anything about this until KeithÂ’s post reminded me. I’m heading out to San Francisco tomorrow to attend Flash Forward. This time I won’t be exhibiting or speaking so I should have a lot more time to attend sessions and hang out with people. I will try to blog some of the event and take a bunch of pictures. If will be out there make sure to say hello!
I will also have my laptop on me for anyone looking for a demo of BLDoc or our 3.0 release of the Charting Components
We won’t be posting this often, but since it’s the first update since the release of PrimalScript 3.1 I thought I would mention it. Sapien has released an update to PrimalScript that addresses some issues. You can find full details of what has changed here. In the future you can check if you are running the latest version of PrimalScript by select HELP > Check For Updates from within PrimalScript. Sapien released updates regularly so it’s good to get accustomed to checking for updates once in a while.
PrimalScript doesn’t have automatic update notifications so if you want to be notified of updates you can do this with some browsers. I added a bookmark to the change log and told FireFox to notify me when it changes. Instant update notifications.
When updating an existing installation, you only need to select the “Repair” option during setup. The installer will automatically update your existing installation.
A little update. I wonÂ’t be speaking at MXDU as originally planned. I was really looking forward to it but my visa has yet to arrive from the Australian Embassy. Geoff has been really understanding about it and will have some contingency plans in place. Maybe IÂ’ll make it next year, and Peter take lots of pics!
Last week I got my first PocketPC for some development work and ran into some issues that I havenÂ’t seen mentioned. The PocketPC is a pretty powerful little machine, but what I didnÂ’t realize at the beginning was that Pocket Internet Explorer and most browsers for other pdaÂ’s, and slimmed down devices do not support any JavaScript.
This may not seem like a big issue, but if you visit any of your projects that were working before applying a workaround, you will probably find that the project does not anymore. It really depends on what kind of work-around you implemented. The most widely suggested work around seems to be a JavaScript re-write of the object/embed tag. Which works great, but as you probably guessed it completely fails under Pocket Internet Explorer and will fail under other slimmed down browsers/devices. So what is the best work around?
I would recommend a combination of server-side and JavaScript. On the server-side you would check to make sure that the user is a desktop user using the value return by user agent propert, and if so present them with the JavaScript workaround (You can even isolate IE users if you wanted). If they are not a desktop user, then present them with a static version.
Hope someone finds this information useful. This should be good workaround until Microsoft ends up changing Pocket Internet Explorer 
Maybe I’ll provide full code in a future entry.
Update: Thank to Chris Brandt for pointing out that Pocket IE does support some JavaScript. From my testing the Eolas workaround I had implemented was failing. I will have to track down the exact reason specific to Pocket IE. I would still reccomend the same workaround though as there are bound to be more browsers out there with no JavaScript support.
The documentation says the “import” statement in Flash is just a convenience for programmers so we don’t have to specify a fully-qualified class name in our code repeatedly. The “import” statement isn’t supposed to have any real effect on the generated code. It’s supposed to be optional.
Turns out when developing components, “import” is required!