Armand Niculescu
Why I still love AIR
Upon Adobe’s PR aftermath regarding the future of Flash player on mobile, I wanted to write a long piece and detail how great AIR is and why developers should love it. Half-way through it, I gave up. Instead, I grabbed my camera and after a few hours of preparing, shooting and editing, I came up with this image:
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A simple server-side dashboard for Union Platform
Union is a development platform for creating multiuser applications. It contains a server written in Java and client libraries in AS3, Javascript with Websocke and even server-side with Node.js. The communication protocol is XML-based and open so anyone can write a custom client in any language. In fact, in this article I’ll show you how Union can talk with PHP.
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The “right way” to handle file downloads in PHP
I’ve seen many download scripts written in PHP, from simple one-liners to dedicated classes. Yet, at least half of them share common errors; in many cases programmers simply copy the code from something that works, without even attempting to understand what it really does. What follows is not a complete working download script, but rather a set of issues you should be aware about and that will allow you to write better code.
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Fancy Javascript slideshow – no framework required
If you thought having broadband makes page size irrelevant, you were wrong. Bandwidth costs money and a few saved kilobytes over a million impressions means real savings, not to mention that Google ranks sites based on their speed too. I’ll show you how you can create a fancy slideshow in under 2KB, rather than about 100KB for JQuery + JQuery Cycle plugin.
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Should your CMS be allowed to do that?
I happen to love WordPress. Its features and sheer variety of plugins makes it ideal not just for blogs but for a whole range of sites. Having worked with many CMSes, both opern source and proprietary, I think WP strikes the best balance between features and ease of use. However, recently there has been quite [...]
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A Simple Twitter Search Parser with PHP
I was recently asked to aggregate tweets based on their hashtags using PHP (no Ajax), so I decided to turn this into a small tutorial that will hopefully enable you build all sorts of XML parsers in PHP.
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I love Tagul
I don’t like tag clouds. Not in the way they’re usually implemented anyway. They are dull and ugly, really nothing more than a list of words of varying sizes. And yet, properly designed, they can be great infographics – beautiful and informative at the same time.
I discovered Wordle a few weeks ago and I found it fun for doing a little literary analysis, or comparing the spin on the news from different news sites (say Fox vs. CNN.) Still, I was unhappy with its lack of flexibility and options – not to mention that’s not a real, interactive tag cloud. Then I heard about Tagul.
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Adobe CS5 just around the corner
You may remember that Adobe had promised a public beta of Flash CS5 for December 2009 but they changed their mind, leaving everyone to guess when the new suite will come out and what new features it will have.
After a long wait, hints are being dropped left and right for an imminent release of their next Creative Suite.
Just this morning, John Nack hinted that CS5 will be released within the next 30 days:
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The (sad) state of web fonts embedding
In case you think embedding fonts in web pages is something new, I made the first font embedding experiments in browsers in 1998. It was working – cross-browser too: Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4. See, EOT from Microsoft is quite old (introduced in 1996) and Netscape had their own format, called .pfr, based on the TrueDoc technology developed by Bitstream. So how comes that more than a decade later we still don’t have a fully working way of using custom fonts on the web?
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flashCHESS III in Google Chrome OS
A truly humbling moment: Google has selected my flashCHESS III flash chess game to be included with their Chrome OS. Here are some screenshots – apparently the guys at TechRadar like the game as well considering the number of screenshots of the chess app
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