Plastic Sturgeon

At last, Air for android and iOS delivers what it should have all along: decent performance.
With the introduction of OpenGL graphics for both mobile platforms, flash is suddenly a contender for creatign your games!

Check out the slightly cheezy demo video on youtube.Air 3.2 Demo

If you haven’t heard, RIM is offering a free playbook to every android developer who ports their android  app to the about-to-open android blackberry app world.  If this sounds familiar – it should. They offered a similar deal when they first launched playbook to flash developers.

Well, I tried that one, and encountered enough problems to abandon the process. The vendor registration was onerous. And the VMware distribution the shipped for testing and developing flash for Blackberry caused my computer to crash. It took over four hours for me to get the machine to boot again.

So I abandoned their generous offer. Then playbook came out to little applause and I forgot all about it.

Fast forward almost a year, and they have added support for android apps. and they make a similar offer for android developers. Well – I’m an android developer – I thought. So off I went again to try my luck another time.

In the back of my mind, I remebered a saying George W. Bush once mangled, something about “Fool me once”. I wondered, would this time be diffferent? Had RIM fixed the many many problems with their vendor portal that stopped me cold before? Read on gentle reader to find out…

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I’m not sure I would want to try and pronounce the name of this open source project in mixed company. But next time you need to debug a website running within a mobile browser, you might want to whip out your weinre.

Rock Out With Your Weinre Out

The Weinre name is an acronym for WEb INspector REmote. And they give a couple of guesses at how to pronounce it. But other than that it does what it says on the label: It lets you use Chrome debug tools on a desktop to debug a live site running in a webkit browser on Android or iOS.

To use it, you run a small app on your computer, and then place some javacript on the page to be debugged and you’re in business.

Its not trivial to setup and use, but its a huge step up from the guess-upload-reload options alternative. Hopefully in future builds they will find a way to make it even easier to use, and hey maybe also change the name.

I suggest “Dachshund”.

At some point it was trivially easy to add a facebook app to a page you controlled. You just clicked the “add to my page” button in the Marketplace page.

But this is facebook, and nothing that works is left unbroken. So they retire the market page, and lo! There is no longer a way to easily add you app to a page, unless you create a page that others can use to add you app to a page.

Well, that’s slow and tedious, and what is worse, you will forget how to do it each time. So until facebook fixes this, here is the Facebook Tab Adder. It’s a very very simple swf that you use to create an add to page dialog in your browser.

To use it, just add you app ID (not your secret key) and then add a URL on the same domain where you app is hosted, and click “Add It”.