Tim Wilson (tvwonline)

I often hear people asking why I didn’t use XML RPC when I created my Wordpress - Flash Blog.

I thought I needed to explain my reasoning.

First up, Wordpress’s XML-RPC API appears to designed mainly for Creating Editing posts, not designing a front end. So you need to think about that fact when looking at my reasoning. For backend integration, it is alright… I guess.

My main criticism of the XML-PRC process is how verbose the XML requests and responses are.
By knowing exactly what information I need to make a database request, and exactly what information I need back, I can simplify the xml requests and responses to make them, smaller, faster, and simpler to understand and work with.

Here is a samplexmlrpc response, and a samplepressconnect response. The Press Connect response is half the size of the xml-rpc.

I know there are advantages to the xml-rpc specification, but I can’t personally warm too much to something that verbose when I can write my own function which does the job in half the time, and something which I find easier to work with.

Out of no-where I designed a new look for my website. I had been playing around with a few designs for the last few months, but at the end of last week, I finally hit a new design a liked, I hope you like it to.

I also have a few more blog posts planed and maybe even some new Flex code for the lab.

I am still selling the .fla template I used for my last site. I have no plans to re-sell this template at the moment.

I also must apologise for what I consider a usability flaw with the site, and that is that it doesn’t reset the scroll position when you change pages, but I had to disable that functionality because of a really bad redraw bug with Firefox on the Mac. - gee I hate Firefox on the mac! As always, I recommend Camino - but it is afflicted with the same bug because it uses the Mozilla engine. If anyone has any tips for a work around please share. (basically if I reset the scroll position using javascript, the flash movie goes white, except for any areas which have redrawn - like a button, or loading icon, but the rest of the movie remains completely white!!!)

For new visitors, this is a flash blog, which uses a Wordpress backend. I have developed my own php scripts to extract the data (which you can get for free from my lab), and just incase you are wondering why I don’t use XML-RPC, I plan to write about my reasons soon… hopefully.

Enjoy the site

I have recently completed a project to build a web app for the iPhone.

I used Apple’s own Dashcode software (provided in the iPhone SDK) to develop the app.

I now understand why Apple originally thought people should be developing Web Apps for the iPhone instead of Native apps. Obviously there are loads of advantages to a native app, however I was surprise, if not amazing at what I was able to do in the browser.

Using Dashcode I was able to create an app which looks just like a native one! CSS transitions and animations provide simple methods to replicate the sliding menus of the iPhone, plus rounded cornered css properties make interface design even easier.

Dashcode provides several components, like the header bar, and list menu devices, so there are no excuses in failing to match your interface to the app

There are a few short comings. One, there is no way to control what sort of keyboard input you want, eg, number, email etc… Apparently there were some methods to achieve this, but they were lost in the Firmware 2.0 upgrade.

Also, Dashcode’s code is huge, I found by the end, it was best to turn off the auto code generator and hand code for a while to optimise what was happening. It is important to understand what it is doing, and manually override it at times

If you are interested to see what I created, you will need an account with http://lifetick.com or watch the tour at http://lifetick.com/tour.html

I have just returned from a 3 week holiday through the US. I traveled through LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York and Washington DC.

It was an amazing trip and I hope to put some photos up on Flickr at some point.

I recently had trouble using the Flex Email validator in Actionscript.

Therefore, I thought I would post the function I used to get it to work so it can save some of you the time and effort. When you look at it it is rather simple, but the documentation didn’t seem as straight forward when explaining how to do it in actionscript.

public static function validateEmailFormat(string:String):Boolean
{
var validator:EmailValidator = new EmailValidator();
var result:ValidationResultEvent = validator.validate(string);

if(result.type == ‘invalid’)
{
Alert.show(result.message);
return false;
}

return true;
}

I am happy to announce that after 8 months of hard work, I (along with a friend) have launched a new Flex based Web application. It is called Lifetick and it allows you to set goals online.

From a technical perspective, I consider it a great example of what flex can achieve. It features a clean design with frequent use of Charting for Visualisation, along with bright widgets, deep linking and an emphasis on usability.

Check it out, spread the word and find out what flex can really achieve when its done right

I was doing some designing in Fireworks today, when I kept feeling unhappy with the colour choices I was making.

I thought the colour was fine the Mac osx colour picker (opened from Fireworks) however, when I select the colour and it is used in Fireworks, it is the wrong colour.

Fireworks appears unable to get the right colour from the Mac OSX colour picker.

Am I going mad or is this happening to other people too?

I am running Fireworks 8 on Mac OSX Leopard. (with an External monitor.) Also, I selected different colour profiles from the picker with no luck.

Ricky Gervais has started a blog about his attempts to get Karl to do another Podcasts.

Apparently Graham, sorry, Karl is holding out, worried about what people are saying about him.

Come on Karl, don’t worry about what people are saying, we just want to hear more.

And think about it, now you have three houses, there are three sets of boilers which can break and you can moan about.

Hey, now that you have all those houses, are you now more worried about things like stopping wars? Because (and to quote you), “there is more chance of them being damaged an’ that.”

So as Ricky asks, do what ever you can to spread the word about Karl.

More information and lots of cool links from and inspired by the podcasts, visit: http://www.rickygervais.com/chimpanzee_karl.php

When Designing Websites and Application Concepts I always use Adobe Fireworks.

I think its great, or was great. Let’s Face it, it hasn’t seen a proper update for far too long, especially on the Mac.

I recently tried Fireworks CS3 and it was embarrassing, I can’t believe they released it with a new number.

So I was thinking, there must be an alternative to Fireworks (not Photoshop), one that runs on the Mac.

If you know one, please post the details in the comments.Thanks.

Since this is a Flash blog, many of you might wonder if it is visible to Search Engines. Well I am happy to say it is. It is a rather simple thing but one I felt I needed to explain.

When you arrive at http://tvwonline.net, you are met by a page which redirects you to /flash/. However what you don’t know is that on my domain’s default page there is a link to the real wordpress site. This may not be noticed or looked at by visitors but it is by Google.

So if you find a link to my site on Google and click it where do you go? Well you end up on the Wordpress Blog, but, because of my Wordpress configuration, any link you click will take back to the Flash version, AND, you get taken back to the correct page on the flash site. (At this point I would like to direct you to the browser’s address bar. You will see that everytime you change pages, the site url is changed. Allowing for Deep Linking, Back/Forward and Google Analytics Statistics to work.

So landing on the Wordpress Blog from Google is not always ideal, I could redirect the user using Flash, so they come to the Flash site automatically, but I have left it as a manual process. Recently I had the opportunity to speak to a optimisation expert from Google who advised the same.

So there you have it. Please direct anyone who says with Flash you don’t get Search Engine Visibility/ Back-Forward Support/ Deep-linking or Website Statistics to this post and this Blog.