Brian Behrens

Apple released the iPad last week as many of you well know.  I had little interest in the device, but still see some great potential in the world of tablet computing.  After all I’ve seen and read, I feel the device, where it stands, is a great tool for someone like my parents but nothing more.  As it stands, it will be a great tool for the basics (email, calendars, and simple web-browsing).  I don’t think this hardware will be a great e-book reader.  The Kindle is good for a reason… it’s not a back-light LED display.

Either way, these are where I feel the iPad has fallen short:

• No Multitasking
• No Camera
• No Flash
• Over all UI Design of the OS (identical to the iPhone)
• Closed Platform (Apple controls which applications developers can deploy)

With that said, I still have hope for the iPad.  I also think it’s exciting that all my iPhone developer friends are now developers for the iPad as well.

There are 3 short articles that I found good reads on this same subject at Gizmodo, idsgn, and Mike Chambers.

Enjoying the cool mist off Lake Michigan

Originally uploaded by Brian Behrens

I had an amazing trip back home to Milwaukee. I got to spend a lot of time with my family and old friends I miss. Living in Seattle, I definitely find myself missing Milwaukee. I think it’s mainly friends and family. Milwaukee is still a beautiful place. Maybe it’s just nostalgia. I took some photos on my iPhone:

View Photo Set on Flickr.com

We’re starting to see mobile devices supporting flash content within webpages on our mobile devices. When is apple going to jump on this? Will Apple ever support flash on the iPhone? Check out the video below featuring flash on the new HTC Hero:

Broken Disco 2.0 @ Chop Suey

Originally uploaded by Brian Behrens

I picked up the new phone on Friday just before lunch at the AT&T store in downtown Seattle. There was no line when I arrived, but one formed shortly after. With there being no line and AT&T stating the only phone left in stock was exactly the one I wanted, I figured it’d be best I purchase it.

Either way, the big reason I was stoked on getting a 3G S was for the new touch to focus camera features. With that said, the camera definitely lives up to what I was hoping for. Still no zoom, but other than that it’s amazing! The touch to focus works great. The macro focus is amazing. The clarity and color are better and I believe it’s an extra mega pixel.

Most of all I’m surprised by the speed of the new phone. The 3G S is much faster than the 3G. Kudos Apple.

I love this picture (taken with 3G S).

oh yeah, the video rocks too.

Ride back from maple leaf.

Originally uploaded by Brian Behrens

Buying a bike about 3 weeks ago now was the best thing I could have ever done. I’ve gone the past year in Seattle without a car. Now owning a bike, I have the freedom, adventure, and transportation.

I suggest everyone rides a bike more!

So today I ran into the issue of getting superscripted ® and TM characters within dynamic text fields.  The  doesn’t work for this within flash, neither will any CSS trickery.  So I turned to font embeds after reading through some other blog posts.

I found 2 fonts in a blog post at blog.ggshow.com: GG Superscript and GG Subscript.

After embedding the superscript font in another dynamic text field you’re able to reference the font face and assign it to the characters that need the superscripting.

Like so:

var myString:String = “This is superscript® in a dynamic text field!”;
myString = myString.replace(”®”, ‘<font face=”GG Superscript”>®</font>’);
myText.htmlText = myString;

So today a co-worker of mine and I were trying to figure out why he couldn’t clear the display of an image in the video object on his stage.  The Adobe documentation states that if you use the clear method of the Video class that it should do the following:

“Clears the image currently displayed in the Video object. This is useful when you want to display standby information without having to hide the Video object.”

Well… when having smoothing enabled, this does not work.  It’s a known bug, and I believe it has to do with smoothing caching the video as a bitmap.  I’m not fully sure how smoothing works, but it makes sense that this would likely be the problem.

So to clear the video object that has smoothing enabled, you need to disable smoothing then clear the object.  After it’s been cleared you can turn smoothing back on.

If you’re looking to get FLVs to playback in Quicktime I believe your best route is Perian.  It installs a preference pane in your System Preferences.  It’s simple to install and update.  Another great thing about installing Perian is you can convert FLVs to other formats using Quicktime Pro.

Also if you want to quickly preview FLVs from within Finder using the Quick Look feature try using this Quick Look plugin.  Place the flv.qlgenerator file in your Library/QuickLook folder.  This can go in your root library folder or your user library folder.

Hope this is helpful, I use it everyday.

I’ve been working at POP for over 6 months now. It’s been an exciting experience. POP had been planning a move from Interbay to downtown before I began employment here. 1 week ago it happened. The space has been a great inspiration to us all.

Check out the blog from Dave Curry, our group creative director:

http://www.davecurry.net/2009/01/25/inspirational-workspace-pop/

From what I gather, any external ActionScript script you may have that you are linking to through an #include statement, you may need to use this code to allow certain characters to be read in the document as UTF-8.  I ran into this issue about a month ago, and a co-worker of mine knew the solution.  It’s something I find is rarely used and easily forgotten:

//!– UTF8

Taken from adobe.com:

To create a document that contains multiple languages, use the #include action.

Use an application that supports UTF‑8 encoding, such as Dreamweaver, to save the text file in UTF‑8 format.

To identify the file as Unicode to the Flash authoring tool, include the following header as the first line of the file:

//!– UTF8
Note: Include a space after the second dash (-).

I hope that helps some of you who may have struggled with this .