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For the last month my flatmate has been pulling his hair out trying to make a showreel DVD. He’s been working in Encore CS3 on XP and has come across no end off issues, from random interactions and lack of help to unhandled C++ errors that crash the whole system. Even after contacting Adobe support there seems to be issues that no-one has heard of or has fixes for.

Today he took is project to a friend using DVD Studio Pro on OSX and got done in 3 hours what’s taken him weeks in Encore. Everyone he speaks to seems to use Final Cut Pro, and he’s a hairs breadth away from jacking it all in and buying all new Apple hardware and software simply so he doesn’t have to use Encore any more.

My argument many times has been ‘user error’ (at least to some degree), he only uses the software to do a new DVD once a year and I find it hard to believe that one of the premier software packages from Adobe simply doesn’t work? But am I right, is he just doing something wrong, or is FCP really that much better?

This is an honest question, don’t want to start flamewars just get some opinions from people in the know.

Cheers

oldskool73 Adobe/Flash/Flex, hints & tips

(related to a tip I found, but for Flex 3 and my own memory…)

In Flex3 you can be notified of changes to selections in your datagrid from using listeners to either the ‘click’ or ‘change’ events, the difference being that if you only listen for click events you won’t be notified when the user navigates or selects with the keyboard (obvious, but confused me for a bit). This seems a shame given Flex’s pretty good handling of keyboard navigation, so unless you only want mouse click events use a ‘change’ handler as standard.

Using a Click Handler:

<mx:DataGrid id="DG1" click="clickHandler(event)"/>
<mx:Script>
  public function clickHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
  {
      someControl.text = event.currentTarget.selectedItem.someDataField;
  } 
</mx:Script>

Using a Change Handler:

<mx:DataGrid id="DG2" change="changeHandler(event)"/>
<mx:Script>
  public function changeHandler(event:Event):void
  {
      someControl.text = event.target.selectedItem.someDataField;
  } 
</mx:Script>

oldskool73 Adobe/Flash/Flex, Work, hints & tips

**note** – I would have posted this in the bug list, but I can’t find it, the link from the FAQ just goes to the products page?

**fixed** – Ashutosh from Adobe provided a working fix in the comments below, nice one!

After installing the new Alpha of Adobe Air for Linux yesterday on Ubuntu 7.1 the mime types for .zip files seem to be broken and I can’t figure out how to fix them. When I clicked on a standard .zip file it used to open in FileRoller, it now gives me an error that the filename indicates it’s a zip but the contents indicate it’s an Air Application. I need to use ‘Open With’ to select FileRoller. Not the end of the world but a bit of a pain. Also, the files have a zip icon but this changes to a .air icon when I click it.

Poking around a bit I found xdg-mime included in the files installed with Air (side note, why? I’ve already got these installed, isn’t that the point of using the package manager to install this stuff?) and also an accompanying AdobeAir.xml file…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
 
  <mime-type type="application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip">
    <comment>Adobe AIR Application</comment>
    <glob pattern="*.air"/>
    <magic priority="100">
      <match type="string" value="PK\003\004" offset="0"/>
    </magic>
  </mime-type>
</mime-info>

…not sure what the magic stuff does but it looks ok? Also testing with xdg-mime seems to point to the mime types being correct?

adam@ubuntu:~$ xdg-mime query filetype ~/Desktop/08_04_02.zip 
application/zip
adam@ubuntu:~$ xdg-mime query default application/zip
file-roller.desktop
adam@ubuntu:~$ xdg-mime query default application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip
AdobeAIR.desktop

There’s also an air.mime file that also looks ok to me..

application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip
        ext: air

I’ve also just spotted, the files have been simlinked incorrectly into /usr/share/mime-info/ …

ls -la /usr/share/mime-info/air.*
 
adam@ubuntu:~$ ls -la /usr/share/mime-info/
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root      54 2008-03-31 20:26 air.keys -> /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/support/air.keys
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root      54 2008-03-31 20:26 air.mime -> /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/support/air.mime

the links should be to /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/* , no xdg-utils, so I’ve tried …

adam@ubuntu:~$ sudo unlink /usr/share/mime-info/air.keys 
adam@ubuntu:~$ sudo unlink /usr/share/mime-info/air.mime 
adam@ubuntu:~$ sudo ln -s /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/support/air.keys /usr/share/mime-info/air.keys 
adam@ubuntu:~$ sudo ln -s /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/support/air.mime /usr/share/mime-info/air.mime

but this doesn’t seem to fix anything. Any other ideas anyone?

———
note to self, may be time to look at a liquid layout for the blog

oldskool73 Adobe/Flash/Flex, Linux

check me and the power I wield… no sooner had I had a little moan about FB3A2 expiring than we get not one but 2 new toys on Labs…

Flex Builder 3 Alpha 3 for Linux and
Air for Linux Alpha

According to the FB release notes nothing much has changed except the addition of Air support, but at least I can keep on working without it expiring.

oldskool73 Adobe/Flash/Flex, Linux

I’ve been using FlexBuilder on Ubuntu for several months now, it’s got it’s oddities and the design view is missing but it mostly works fine. I’m currently using Alpha2, and it’s now telling me it runs out in 18 days. The fcsh says it will expire in 3 days. The discussion group on Labs seems to have been wiped recently and there’s zero feedback from Adobe there. There is currently no option to buy FB for linux on the Adobe site.

So Adobe, what’s going on? Is there going to be an A3? B1? Are we ever gonna get design view? When can I buy the damn thing? Is anybody out there??

oldskool73 Adobe/Flash/Flex, Linux