Recently, I had to detect where my Flash application was being loaded. This was because it behaved differently when it was on the site or embedded externally. It seemed silly creating a whole new application for the sake of one or two views, so I figured the best way was to detect the application’s current location.
Now reading through the Actionscript 3 documentation leads you to believe that you can figure out the applications current URL through the “LoaderInfo.loaderURL” but all that presents you with is the URL from where the application is being loaded not the browser’s current URL.
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So recently I published a post that contained a quick and simple browser detection snippet for jQuery. In that snippet, I accidently left a reference to a function called “initSafariSearch()”.
This function simply replaces the standard boring input text box with the nice Safari style one.
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Update: I’ve added a little example below…
As most of you know there lurks browsers that we don’t really like building web sites for (*cough* Internet Explorer) and there comes a time in any developers work when they need to detect browsers. jQuery has a really nice API for detecting browsers, but sometimes you want to go a bit further.
The snippet I’m putting on this page will detect the browser and OS for you and add a nice little CSS class to the body tag, thus allowing you to write up all your CSS ready for users of different browser and OS creed.
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So recently I’ve been playing around with GZIP compression on Apache and PHP to see how fast I can get my assets to load. Now I’ve written a post already on how to compress sites with GZIP.
Now I’ve taken my script to a new level, that is the asset loader script that compresses text-based assets using GZIP. I’m not using any sort of code compressor on the assets, yet, as I’ve already compressed the scripts using YUI. More importantly, I’ve now added the ability for me to cache a number of files into one rather than loading several, as we all know: less HTTP request = more fun.
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This is a really handy tip if you use jQuery frequently and are receiving JSON data back. jQuery’s “$.post” allows you to do a POST call to your application and get the data back, but you have to flag the type of data being received by jQuery so that it can parse it.
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Web sites need to be fast! Recently I’ve had some time on my hands so I’ve done some tests to see which is the best solution. I’ve had a read about different ways that web sites can be sped up, from compression before you upload files to server side compression.
Whenever it comes to speeding things up, I always remember the saying that “loading data from a flat file is slow, a database is slower, but memory is the quickest”. So that means if you’ve using server-side scripting such as PHP or Python, the best thing to do is to use memory caching such as APC or MemCache.
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Recently I joined a debate started by the editor of Flashtuts+ regarding coding conventions. Now I’m a strong believer that if you’re going to code, you best do it right. Yet on a day to day level I still see sloppy code. Gone are the days of Actionscript 1 and 2 coding when you didn’t have to declare variable’s type or a function’s return value, but still people continue this in their coding of Actionscript 3.
The fun doesn’t stop there. I admit, when I first started coding yes I was very sloppy with my convention, but I’ve cleaned up my act, honest. With other languages such as PHP and JavaScript, you see how easy it is to just keep typing and typing and through any sort of convention out of the window. But when the client turns around as says: “Why can’t that be 3D?” you’re then going to have to go through all your sloppy code and make it 3D.
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