A Flex Growl Notification Component
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 10:58a Mark Barton Unobtrusive notifications are all the rage now in web apps (check out Google Chromes method for asking to remember passwords). Rather than have an alert dialog which forces the user to lose context and actually click something to clear it, its sometimes better to have a notification which clears itself after a short amount of time.
The Mac has the Growl framework and Windows has the system tray.
For the web – JQuery has a plugin which seems to work well.
For Adobe Flex, tho [read] Keywords: css
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5
A New Year a New Machine
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 10:58a Mark Barton Finally took all of the advice given and took the leap to a Mac Book Pro.
Currently creating this weblog from MarsEdit – not as good as Windows Live Writer though.
Theres some odd stuff but so far loving it – I am basing my setup on Ben Poole with whom I have the pleasure to be working with.
Will try and give an objective view of the pros and cons once I have used it a bit more in anger. [read] Keywords: mac
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Authenticated Multi File Uploads – A possible solution
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 10:16a Mark Barton Jake has been work hard on building some excellent Flex components which play nice with Domino.
One issue he has hit is with a bug in the Flash Player which means for non IE browsers session authentication is not sent with the fileupload HTTP Post. This means currently only anonymous individuals can upload attachments on non IE browsers. This of course could be a real problem for applications which require users to sign in – is there any that don’t?
To get around this I have been [read] Keywords: agent
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7
Flex on the iPhone
Tue, Oct 6th 2009 7:54a Mark Barton Looks like Adobe has not waited for Apple to allow the Flash plugin on the iPhone.
This page describes a new feature in CS5 Flash Professional which allows any Flash game / application to be targeted at the iPhone. NB Its actually created as a native application and published through the app store.
In conjunction with a new mobile Flex framework which is due 2010 it looks like it will not be long before our Flex apps are available on the iPhone and nearly every other mobile device. [read] Keywords: apple
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Animoto – An effective way to create video shorts
Thu, Aug 6th 2009 7:55a Mark Barton Ferdy’s request for a decent video creation tool made me remember about Animoto.
Animoto is one of those hip web 2.0 sites that does one thing very well. It allows you to upload a series of your photos, add some text and either select a soundtrack or upload your own. The result is a powerpoint / slideshow on steriods.
There is a charge if you want longer videos or to be able to download a DVD quality version but have a play with the free version and see what it comes u [read] Keywords: javascript
web 2.0
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Riding the Wave
Mon, Jul 27th 2009 5:56a Mark Barton Got my invite to the Wave Sandbox and APIs.
Lets see how this bad boy plays with Notes – really interested to see if its possible to integrate Notes email / documents etc with Google Wave.
If you can’t beat them, join them! [read] Keywords: notes
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7
To Hide Passwords?
Wed, Jul 22nd 2009 8:57a Mark Barton There is some debate at the moment that suggest that over the shoulder password copying is not the problem it used to be and by obscuring the password using * actually deters people from using more complex passwords in the first place, it also goes against usability guidelines.
I recently had to create a login dialog for a Flex application – to log into Domino using Session based authentication and wondered if there was a better way.
I liked the look of this idea – allow the password t [read] Keywords: domino
application
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Debugging Adobe Flex with a log file
Tue, Jul 7th 2009 6:59a Mark Barton Just found an way for debugging Adobe Flex applications which I wasn’t aware of.
If you are already creating Adobe Flex application then I assume you already use Flex Builder 3 and the debug versions of the Flash Player but what you might not be aware of is an inbuilt way of sending debug messages to a local log file – just like log.nsf.
Configure the Flash Debug Player
First you need to locate a configuration file – mm.cfg and this is dependent on which operating system you are using [read] Keywords: roaming
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Backing up – an automatic solution
Thu, Jul 2nd 2009 9:54a Mark Barton Currently working on a personal project which involves Adobe Flex and Lotus Notes and I have become slightly paranoid with regards to backing up my source files.
I have to admit I can be a little slap dash with backing up my data so I needed something to do this automatically and ideally in real time – rather than a scheduled backup.
The solution I came up was to use a combination of Drop Box and the Link Shell Extension.
Drop Box is a free (max 2Gb – paid accounts available) cloud based s [read] Keywords: document
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Rapid file searching
Tue, May 12th 2009 4:51a Mark Barton I came across a great free utility which is probably the fastest tool for finding files on your PC and its free and lightweight.
Unlike desktop search utilities like Google desktop this tool does not index the content of the files, only the filename. But more often than not I know at least part of the filename and this tool fully support wild card syntax.
Another amazing thing it can do is run a local HTTP server which allows anyone who has access to perform a search across the network (a [read] Keywords: desktop
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2
Here come the girls
Wed, Mar 25th 2009 8:52a Mark Barton Sorry couldn’t resist the title
The chickens turned up this weekend and have settled in fine. There are 4 in total – 2 brown ones.
We haven’t thought of names yet – my suggestions for food based like “Chinese” and “Stir Fry” have been rejected.
They have settled in so well we got out first egg yesterday.
Normal service will now resume – got a little blog / article on using JQuery as the basis for a Domino Login box – basically an enhancement on the original article [read] Keywords: domino
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Under Construction (Chicken Run)
Mon, Mar 16th 2009 8:51a Mark Barton After Bills comments I have decided to give up Notes development and become a Chicken farmer
The new bits and pieces for the Chicken run arrived over the weekend.
So far so good.
The chickens + house turn up next weekend. Lovely fresh eggs. Anyone buying? Got a mortgage to pay. [read] Keywords: notes
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Website performance monitoring
Mon, Feb 23rd 2009 5:53a Mark Barton Whilst trying to determine if this blog was performing badly (or not) I came across this great site - monpage.com
Its free to use and will provide a graphical representation of the availability of servers and the responsiveness of webpages.
I configured it to monitor this domain, another domain hosted with the same provider and the same virtual machine which is also a Wordpress blog but not using a cache plug-in - markbingley.com who’s a friend of mine and then for comparison I added Jer [read] Keywords: domino
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8.5 Calendar overlay feature exposes dodgy ACLs
Tue, Feb 17th 2009 9:53a Mark Barton A bit of an odd one this and it could be specific to the way mailboxes are configured in our environment.
I started to play with the new Calendar feature in 8.5 which allows you to subscribe to other peoples calendars including Goggle calendars. In this instance I was overlaying a colleagues Notes calendar and just to see what happened I attempted to delete one of his entries. NB Our production environment is still 6.03 hence the need to change versions.
Lo and behold I managed to delete his mee [read] Keywords: acl
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2
Perforce & Designer 8.5 - Anyone done it?
Fri, Feb 13th 2009 4:53a Mark Barton Let me start by saying I know the best version control software for Notes is Teamstudio’s CIAO, but in a large corporate environment there tends to be a standard for software version control.
Now if your like me and you want to try and encourage senior management to view Lotus Notes development as part of the Enterprise (rather than an oddball tactical development solution - not my opinion) then we need to play ball with these other Enterprise tools.
We had a demo yesterday of the 8.5 Desi [read] Keywords: designer
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6
How to Geolocate your website vistors.
Thu, Feb 12th 2009 10:55a Mark Barton Where in the World are you coming from?
Got a website?
Want to restrict / customise your site based on where in the World they have come from?
Don’t want to pay or host your own IP / Country database table.
Then maybe this is the solution for you.
Geolocating an individual based on there IP address is not an exact science, there are various things that can get in the way e.g. proxies, javascript turned off or even a spoofed IP addresses.
Therefore always assume this might not work and hav [read] Keywords: document
javascript
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database
google
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4
Snowed in again!
Mon, Feb 9th 2009 3:19p Mark Barton Well the novelty is truly starting to wear thin.
Yet again got up this morning to try and get to work, which involves a 20min ride on my scooter to the train station.
There’s one drawback living here in the North Cambridgeshire Fens - they don’t bother to grit the road and its a mile to the end.
Aerial Shot of Bleak House
It was only after I got out of bed put on all my biking gear did I realise it was sheet ice. Oh well another day working at home [read] Keywords:
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Its alive!
Wed, Feb 4th 2009 10:21a Mark Barton After putting it off for too long I have decided to restart my blog. My previous blog was built using Ferdy’s Domino template but this time I thought I would give Wordpress a go.
So far it seems impressive.
This blog will cover technical stuff - mainly around Lotus Notes, Domino, Adobe Flex and other web stuff but will occasionally include some personal stuff - to stop it becoming to dry.
I hope to produce some more articles in collaboration with Jerry as our last ones seemed quite popu [read] Keywords: collaboration
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