If you care at all about developing good websites, then you test on platforms other then the one you chose. These days, this includes mobile and tablet devices. I’m lucky with my latest projects, the target browsers are FF6+, Google Chrome, Safari 5 and iPad iOS5.

I usually host sites I’m developing locally, a simple LAMP setup. I then add a pseudo-domain to my hosts file /etc/hosts along these lines:

127.0.0.1       portfolio.dev
127.0.0.1       blog.dev

This is all well and good when I’m accessing the server from my own machine (which relies on this host file before DNS servers), but when inside a VM (Virtual Machine, I use VirtualBox running Win XP/7 and Ubuntu) testing, you have to mess about doing the same hacks to the windows/linux hosts file, and working out what the IP of the host OS is. I got sick of doing this.

And to top this off, when I got an iPad for testing, upon realising there is no hosts file, had to find another solution. This is where a local proxy server comes in. I’ve used Charles: Web Debugging Proxy for years. It’s perfect for inspecting requests and responses, can handles many types of data, AMF, JSON etc. Basically, it makes web application development a hell of a lot easier!

I then googled a bit, and found that if I set an HTTP proxy on the iPad, it would route DNS requests through there too. So the hosts file on my development machine, would work on the iPad!!! Simply start up Charles, then go to your WiFi settings on the iPad and configure the HTTP proxy. By default, Charles uses the port 8888.

You can also add these settings in any Virtual Machines you’re running on your machine. I’ve tested this in Windows XP and Windows 7 running on Virtual Box. If anyone tests this on Parallels, please let me know if it works.

Here’s some example configs on iPad and Windows 7 running in Virtual Box.

Please have a go and let me know if it works ok on Snow Leopard, and also older OSes, if there’s problems, comment here, and I’ll try and rectify any issues.

You can download it here.

There’s now two examples in the zip, one for use with SWFObject 1.5, and a totally re-written version for use with SWFObject 2.0 (formerly SWFFix)

All you have to do in your main application class (or document class) is

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import com.pixelbreaker.ui.osx.MacMouseWheel;
 
MacMouseWheel.setup( stage );

You can then add listeners to TextFields, Sprites etc etc as you normally would any other MouseEvent.

Example JavaScript to be used with the dynamic embed method

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var vars = {};
var params = { scale:'noScale', salign:'lt', menu:'false' };
var attributes = { id:'testObject', name:'testObject' }; // give an id to the flash object
 
swfobject.embedSWF("test_as3.swf", "flashContent", "100%", "100%", "9.0.0", "js/expressInstall.swf", vars, params, attributes );
swfmacmousewheel.registerObject(attributes.id);

I have updated the SWFObject 2.0 version to be more compact, and it also falls inline with the code style of SWFObject2.0. see swfmacmousewheel_src.js for the uncompressed version, deploy swfmacmousewheel2.js on your site.

Download source and demo here or view the demo online

A lot of people had been asking for this as a widget. So i’ve put together this version for the OS X Dashboard. The options are limited to language selection only.

Download:
[zip] PolarClock OSX Widget 356Kb

I had no idea how widgets were built until this morning, and to my pleasant surprise, they are basically Safari (WebKit) running on a transparent background. A good place to start is on the apple site.

The PolarClock widget is basically a blend on HTML, JavaScript and Flash, embedded using SWFObject. The one major issue was that I couldn’t get Flash movies to display in my widget. All you have to do is add an extra flag in the info.plist file named “AllowInternetPlugins” and set it to true.

[xml]
AllowInternetPlugins

It’s all done!

Re-worked from the ground up in ActionScript 3, this release should be much less CPU intensive, and has had heaps of new features added. Read all about it at it’s new permanent home.

PolarClock Home

I’ve ported 90% of the engine to actionscript 3.0 now, and begun implementation of a config panel built using Flex Builder 3 (Moxie). I’ve now got the following language implemented: English, Afrikaans, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portugese, Portugese (Brazil), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Slovakian, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese.

I have spoken to a guy at ScreenTime (who make screentime for flash) and they are sending me an updated version for windows in a couple of days, to match up the sizes of the config panels with the latest release for mac. Yeah, I bought screentime for mac + windows!!!

I’m hoping to launch version 3 of the clock on of before 21/07/07. Keep checking for updates!

So far there have been over 40,000 downloads of v1 and 2, it’s much much more popular than I ever expected!

It’s straight forward to implement. Download SWFMacMouseWheel here.

Within ActionScript, you’ll barely notice any difference. Only that instead of using Mouse.addListener(), you’ll refer to my class instead.

Example code:

[as]
import com.pixelbreaker.ui.MouseWheel;

class Example
{

function Example(){
MouseWheel.addListener( this );
}

public function onMouseWheel( delta:Number ):Void
{
// do something with the delta value
}
}

[/as]

All the javascript is included in the zip, with an example html file.

You simply have to add one line of code to the javascript:

[js]
var so = new SWFObject(‘test.swf’, ‘website’, ’100%’, ’100%’, ’8′, ‘#FFFFFF’);

so.useExpressInstall(‘js/expressinstall.swf’);

so.addParam(‘menu’, ‘false’);
so.addParam(‘scale’, ‘noscale’);
so.addParam(‘salign’, ‘lt’);

// CHANGE BELOW
if( so.write(‘flashcontent’) )
{
var macmousewheel = new SWFMacMouseWheel( so );
}
[/js]