Background thinking

Broken charts in Apple’s iOS Stocks app

backgroundthinking — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:08:28 +0000

Not sure if someone else noticed it, but some charts in Apple’s Stocks application got broken recently. Looks like last data point is always 0.0000, which causes charts to get distorted and unfortunately useless. Issue seems to affect currency exchange rates, but only for some pairs and only for periods >= 1m. For example GBP/EUR: …

How to remove old version of Java 7 from your Mac

backgroundthinking — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 10:32:33 +0000

Few days ago a new Java vulnerability has been discovered that affects all versions of Java 7 on most browsers. Luckily Oracle addressed it quickly by releasing an update. Since I previously had JDK 1.7.0_04 installed, I had to manually switch to use latest version by going to Applications > Utilities > Java Preferences and changing …

iCal shows duplicate reminders after enabling iCloud

backgroundthinking — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:59:30 +0000

Today I launched iCal and noticed that all my entries were duplicated. Removing unnecessary copies would be so time consuming it’s not even funny. After I opened Calendars List, it showed two sets of calendars – On My Mac and iCloud. Unchecking every calendar in one of them, even thought seemed to help, was not …

Flex: Where are you headed?

backgroundthinking — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:50:45 +0000

I read an interesting post on official Flex blog few days ago. Flex: Where we are headed tries to summarise Adobe’s view on Flex framework and it’s future. Unfortunately my comment has not been approved for about two weeks now (holidays?) so I decided to post in on my blog. Hopefully some of these concerns will be …

Changing default workspace in FB 4.5.1

backgroundthinking — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:01:55 +0000

I find it really annoying when applications I use keep creating their own folders in my Documents directory. Luckily some applications can be configured not to do it. Today I was fighting against Flash Builder, trying to make persuade it not to create workspace in Documents (I have separate folder for development). Using File > …

Performance of Google’s Protocol Buffers in Flex (redux)

backgroundthinking — Mon, 24 May 2010 21:14:54 +0000

Atry pointed me to latest release (0.8.7) of his protoc-gen-as3 library. I re-ran my tests to see if it brings any performance improvements – and it does! Deserialization times are very similar to 0.8.4 which I used previously. I would assume any differences are statistical errors. Deserialization AMF 3 Protocol Buffers Class: Small Medium Large …

Performance of Google’s Protocol Buffers in Flex

backgroundthinking — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 21:13:59 +0000

Update: I ran tests again using newer version of protoc-gen-as3. They can be found here. For last couple of days I have been investigating Google’s Protocol Buffers with intention to use it in Flex application. While in Flex world such idea instantly raises at least a couple of questions, let me explain our situation a little …

Simple solution for parsing dates in AS3/Flex

backgroundthinking — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:09:23 +0000

I’ve recently had to parse dates and it turned out that Flex is not very good at it. According to specs, Date.parse() only handle following formats: MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD HH:MM:SS TZD Day Mon/DD/YYYY Mon DD YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD Day Mon DD HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY Day DD Mon HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY Mon/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS …

Inconsistency in handling width and height for rotated components

backgroundthinking — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:33:51 +0000

I’ve been recently working on a component that contained rotated label in it and I discovered that using width and height attributes (MXML) in such case might result in unexpected behaviour. The problem occurs when you start using absolute values for these properties. If for example you set height to be 100% then actual height …

Autocomplete Parsley tags with SourceMate

backgroundthinking — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:20:16 +0000

Update: Because the server where I was hosting the file was shut down, I created a gist on github.com. You can access it here. I am using SourceMate with latest prerelase build of Adobe Flash Builder. It still has some issues but otherwise it’s quite cool. It adds features that most Java developers can expect …