Open Source Flash on Mac OS 10.5 Leopard

I haven’t written for a while but there’s no time for apologizing.  I decided (after years of swearing I never would) its time to learn flash.  I’m doing this totally open source, so I’m going to post all the steps it takes to get up and running in sequence, post by post.  I’m following the installation instructions from the free downloadable chapter of “The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development.”  This is available here:

http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430209935

There are several resources out there but this is the only clear getting-started guide I’ve run into.  Plus, my friend Moses was a contributing author!  He developes on a mac and is a has worked on some very high profile flash projects.  Thanks Moses!  I swear I’ll buy that book if I get this to work.

Here is a rundown of my system that I will be attempting this on:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name:    MacBook
Model Identifier:    MacBook2,1
Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:    2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors:    1
Total Number Of Cores:    2
L2 Cache:    4 MB
Memory:    4 GB

The text editor I use is TextMate, and the browser I use is Firefox 3.  If I use it, you can assume that I highly recommend it.

MilhollandCycles.com

This is a progress report on MilhollandCycles.com, website I am building for my brother Greg, who builds bicycles in our house in Portland. His bikes are great. He built me the coolest fillet braised mountain bike that languishes in the basement while I try to save enough cash to get paint and parts on it. I think about it every day, and when the sun is out and I’m not at work it kills me that I am not mountain biking every second.

So I built Greg a theme for wordpress. It was pretty straight forward. I love wordpress. The code is elegant and extensible, and you can do whatever the hell you want to with it. I built Greg’s theme on top of the default theme that comes with the wordpress download. switch around a few php include tags and give it a new style.css document and you’re in business. I host my sites in the webserver document folder on my laptop because I can’t get virtual domains to work, but that’s another post. Anyhow, its a great testing platform because I can view the sites as they are served from the apache server on my laptop. Most of the time its just like they are live on the ‘net. Not always though. Some of the plugins (lightbox in particular) didn’t work quite right.

Thankfully when I uploaded the site to godaddy (I know what you are thinking, don’t judge me!), everything miraculously worked. Plugins, pages, everything. Except pretty URLs, that broke everything. But it wasn’t THAT hard to fix, you just have to erase all of the stuff that wordpress adds to the .htaccess file and replace it with a clean one.

The thing that vexes me is no shell access. I didn’t even think about this when choosing hosting services, but godaddy does not allow shell access. That means that you have to manipulate SQL tables with phpMyAdmin. I do not like this program. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the hands-approach. I just don’t trust the GUI to be messing with my SQL. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. WordPress has done a fine job all on its own. But I am worried. Enough so that I won’t host another site on godaddy again. Sorry.

What this is all about

This is my first attempt at a blog. I plan on being faithful to it.

The point of this blog is to write about my journey from aspiring web designer to the real thing. By “real thing” I mean making my living designing and developing websites. I’ve been working on this goal for, oh, prolly six months now. Seems longer. That actually makes me feel better about myself, calculating that it has only been six months. I spend a lot of time feeling hopelessly behind. Everything I learn makes me realize how much more I have to learn.

Here is where I’m at after six months:

• I develop on my white 13″ 2.16ghz MacBook with 4GB of RAM. I do my coding in TextMate, my graphics in Inkscape and Gimp, and my testing in Firefox first, then in IE6 and IE7 using a combination of ies4mac and a desktop running windows XP that my friend Lee gave me, god bless him. Fetch is my FTP program. I have strong opinions about all the aforementioned software and hardware so I’ll undoubtedly be posting about them in the future.
• Whenever possible, I use standards compliant code. If its not possible I will look for a way around non-compliant code for days and hours before I give up, and even then it haunts my dreams. I kind of love standards. My girlfriend would say its because I’m a virgo.
• I’m a whiz at html and css up their current versions. I’m looking into CSS3 right now and I’m psyched about it like only someone who spends all their free time thinking about backgrounds and borders can be.
• A couple years ago I learned a little php and MySQL, which has come in handy with things like creating wordpress themes. I would describe my relationship with php and MySQL as a “working knowledge”.
• I also have a “working knowledge” of javascript, but perhaps not quite as working as php. I can manipulate the DOM to create simple things like image rollovers. Honestly, javascript intimidates the hell out of me. Its my next big mountain to climb after I complete all the websites I’m working on right now and go back into sweet sweet study mode.
• I just started using version control with Bazaar, which I highly recommend.
• I don’t know jack about Flash, and honestly, it doesn’t do much for me. I read to many blog posts about accessibility to be excited about it. I’ll look in to flash after I learn Javascript and mod_python.
• Oh yeah, mod_python. Don’t know much about it honestly. But from what I hear, its a server-side scripting language like php, but without all the putting code into html documents. That’s cool, cause as much as I like php, complex apps can become a huge mess. And apparently it plays well with MySQL, allowing you to make complex database queries easily. I am totally in to that, but mod_python will have to wait until I learn javascript. Baby steps.

There is probably more. But that is what a blog is for right? Right.