Right now video is a bit of a mess on the web.

The most widely supported platform for playing video on the desktop is Flash. But some devices notably the iPad and iPhone don't support Flash. If you want to be able to play your video on multiple platforms and devices what can you do?

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Here's the list of useful Flash Builder plugins that I use on a daily basis when working on Flex projects.

What Flex Builder plugins and tools do you do you use on a regular basis?

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cf.Objective(ANZ) was on a couple of weeks ago in Melbourne Australia. This was my third cf.Objective() event that I've spoken at and attended (two here in Australia and one in the US). I almost didn't make it due to an unschedule stop in Iceland but managed to catch my connecting flight with minutes to spare.

There was a wide range of sessions showing at cf.Objective(ANZ) covering new programming techniques, performance, security, frameworks and a lot more.

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Here is the pdf of the slides of my talk on Risk Management and ColdFusion Security at cf.Objective(ANZ) in Melbourne Australia. Download a PDF of my talk (480 Kb) or view on slide share. More information on some of the topics covered can be found in the related entries below. Any questions on my talk just comment below or email me.

I was running FlexPMD the other day over some code and it brought up this warning: "HeavyConstructor. Constructor must be as lightweight as possible. No control statement allowed, whereas a cyclomatic complexity of 2 has been detected. The Just-In-Time compiler does not compile constructors. Make them as lightweight as possible, or move the complexity of the code to a method called by the constructor. Then the complexity will be compiled by the JIT."

Huh? That's news to me, actionscript constructors are not compiled if they have a conditional statement in them?

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A little while ago I wrote some type safe binary classes Byte and Word for a CPU emulator I'm working on. The classes worked correctly and were good fit for what I needed but something bothered me about them. The Word and Byte classes had a lot of common code. This was not really a surprise because I first wrote the Byte class than did copy and pasted and made a few changes here and there to make the Word class. For just these two class that's probably OK, but I now needed a third class (a Nibble or 1/2 a Byte) so it was time to refactor.

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I been working on a CPU emulator in ActionScript recently more as an exercise in how to write good code, try some methodologies and tools than I've not been using in other projects and improve my understanding of the CPU's instruction set. Someone will hopefully find it useful when I open source it.

We all know that code should be tested and that best practice involves writing unit tests and/or test driven development. Both Flash Builder and Flex Builder make it easy to write and run unit tests with FlexUnit so there's really no excuse not to. Despite that is the Flex SDK itself not having unit tests unit tests and the countless projects I've been involved in for one reason or the other that don't have unit tests (usually the excuse is we don't have time or budget to write tests - doh!), but that's another story.

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One of the more subtle changes in FlashPlayer 10 vs FlashPlayer 10.1 is that the behavior of the IN operator has changed. The IN operator when used to loop over the properties of an object will return it's keys in a different order each time you run a program.

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This is my third 360|Flex event that I've attended, the others (that I spoke at) were 360|Flex unconference at Adobe MAX last year and 360|Flex San Jose earlier this year.

It was actually nice not to speak for a change. I got a lot more out of this conference than other conferences I've been to in recent times. The 360|Flex speakers are the best in their field and the sessions go into a lot of depth. There were a couple of unusual sessions this year as well.

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