Strict XHTML target=”_blank” replacement

Occasionally, just occasionally, web standards really annoy me. Not because of what they stand for, but because of the stupidity of the people who came up with them. Case in point, if you want a link to to launch in a new window/tab, all you have to do in HTML is type…

target="_blank"

in your <a> tag. But I’ve just discovered that this doesn’t validate in Strict XHTML 1.0, the W3C recommended doctype. Read the rest of this post >

Flash on the Beach 2010

Tickets for Flash on the Beach 2010 were released this morning and are selling like hotcakes. For those of you that don’t know, Flash on the Beach is the definitive conference for all things Flash/Flex/Design/Actionscript Development/General Web sexiness.

If you’re in the industry and have never been:

1. Shame on you;
2. Buy a ticket NOW;
3. Shame on you!

I can’t stress enough how much of a great time you’ll have. To give you a taster of what to expect, check out my review of Flash on the Beach 2009.

Hope to see you there!

Warning 1090: Migration issue

Actionscript 3 errors and warnings are not always easy to understand – especially if you’re teaching yourself and aren’t completely up on all of the terminology. Sometimes I scream for the error message to be plainer English and spend far too long googling the solution. So from now on if I get an error and found that the solution was simple but took a while to find, I’m going to blog it here. Hopefully it will help somebody else too! Read the rest of this post >

Actionscript 3 getURL() class

I don’t know about you, but one of the things that I miss most about AS2 is the simplicity to use…

getURL("http:www.mysite.com", "_blank")

…to launch a web address.

Read the rest of this post >

Fixing the Windows 7 64bit Preview Pane for PDFs

I installed Windows 7 64bit edition a few weeks ago and I’m loving it. But one of the things that’s been bugging me for ages is that the “Preview Pane” doesn’t recognise PDFs, even with a full version of Adobe Acrobat installed. As I have a quite a lot of PDFs on my hard drive I sometimes have to plough through them all individually to find the one that I want…but if the preview pane was working properly my working life would be a heck of a lot more efficient.

But now I’ve found the fix…and it’s an easy one… Read the rest of this post >