The Saj - S.A.S.S.I.E.

Look, we have one cursor….not six! Let’s keep it that way…

Here Sprint does a great little digital mock-up of the upcoming Palm Centro. Lots of nifty “positive” effects and info. But it’s all lost by a really stupid idea to have six cursors show the user where they can click (as if “Click Here” is not enough). Nope, we want to confuse you to the point where you don’t even know which cursor is yours anymore. The effect itself is really nifty, and had they chosen something other than cursor arrows I’d have no issue.

http://www.moreyous.com/?id12=UHP_PhonesTab_092707_CentroPre

Recently I encountered a situation in which the XML feed was being cached by the browser. Thus when the XML feed was updated my app was failing to reflect the changes.

I decided that I would pass a random foo variable over the URL string to encourage the browser to refresh. In order to do this I wanted to use a GUID (or a close approximation of the concept). A GUID for those who do not know is a reference term for “Guaranted Unique IDentifier”. Though truthfully, like most guarantee’s, it carries little weight. That said…it is fairly unlikely to generate a duplicate GUID in limited use.

In order to generate the GUID you must import the following class package:

import mx.utils.UIDUtil;

After that you simply call the class and method as seen below:

“myXMLFeed.xml?foo=” + UIDUtil.createUID();

Note, in the above example I am merely appending the returned GUID value to the end of my XML feed as the value to my parameter “foo”.

Hope you find this little bit helpful.

- The Saj

My friend Jim Robson has posted an insightful blog regarding the use of Flash CS3 integration with Flex 2.

http://jimrobson.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/flash-cs3-flex-2-butterflies-part-two/

Besides, there are butterflies!

- Saj