Archives for May 2010...

Sequal Pro - Impressive!

Mon May 24 01:11:56 2010

I've been working a lot in PHP lately and almost always to connect to a mySQL database. I'm used to working in Terminal and the command line to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) my web pages and for people just starting out with mySQL, there is of course the more user-friendly phpMyAdmin. However, I've been mooching around the net and stumbled upon something I now don't know why I hadn't searched for before - Sequal Pro.

So what does it do?

Sequal Pro is a database management software and it's quite quite slick, let me tell you. There is virtually no wait time for pages of information to reload/refresh, as opposed to using phpMyAdmin, and it's more visually convenient than using the command line as it has a really easy to use GUI which allows you to view databases, tables and their contents with a few clicks of the mouse. The best thing of all is that it's free. You can check it out here on the Sequal Pro web site.

I am so impressed with this little gem that I wanted to post a recommendation here to urge everyone who uses mySQL to at least try it out.

Loading Fonts at Runtime with latest Flex 4 SDK

Tue May 11 03:27:29 2010

I wrote a post a while back about loading fonts at runtime. Nothing there has really changed, but I did want to clarify one thing on here. I just discovered that when embedding fonts with the latest Flex 4 SDK, I got an error with the following

[Embed(systemFont='OCR A Std', 
fontName="OCR",
mimeType="application/x-font", 
unicodeRange="U+0041-U+005A")]

The error read:
Error: exception during transcoding: Cannot embed local font 'nameOfFont' as CFF. The CSS @font-face 'local()' syntax is not supported. Please specify a path directly to a font file using the 'url()' syntax. For [Embed] syntax the 'systemFont' attribute is not supported. Please specify a path directly to a font file using the 'source' attribute.

I found that adding the following solved this problem.

[Embed(systemFont='OCR A Std', 
fontName="OCR", 
embedAsCFF='false',
mimeType="application/x-font", 
unicodeRange="U+0041-U+005A")]

" No transcoder registered for mimetype 'text/fxg' " Error

Sat May 8 17:43:39 2010

Well, this has really bugged me for a while now... I've been using an older version of the Flex 4 SDK until recently and have never had this problem. When I downloaded the latest nightly, I was struck with the fear that I would never again be freely able to use FXG the way I had previous. I just couldn't understand why the Flex 4 SDK wouldn't be able to transcode Adobe's shiny new toy - FXG. It just didn't make sense. I actually wrote another rather popular post about how to embed FXG in ActionScript which showed the following method of using FXG.

[Embed(source='Flower.fxg')]
private var Flower:Class;		
private var flower:Sprite = new Flower();

But why wouldn't something that worked before, work now? For a moment, I thought it was a way to make you buy software that supported this feature, but that didn't make sense either, since the SDK is free as well as having an open source version.

Then it hit me. I'd remembered watching a video that someone from Adobe (at least he said he was) had posted online. The video showed something along the following lines

import Flower;
var flower:Flower = new Flower()
addChild(flower);

I could never get this to work in the older versions of the Flex 4 SDK but that's right folks! What was pretty simple before has become even simpler! Now just treat the FXG graphic as you would any other class and the magic is retained. In the words of David Bowie, "Wham bam thank you mam!"