Blogs

I read an interesting tidbit today about the whole “click to activate” issue that has plagued the Adobe Flash community for the last year or so.

First some background.. a while back, a very litigious and selfish patent holder EOLAS sued Microsoft because embedding a flash movie or other component in a webpage appeared to be a violation of their undeveloped patent. The result was the Microsoft had to add a mouse-click requirement in order to activate Flash movies (and other media objects) on a page.. at least ones that weren’t generated by script.
Now that we’re up to speed, the news is that Microsoft has licensed said technique from the patent holder, EOLAS and will soon be releasing a patch to fix IE. Yay! This greatly simplifies the use of Flash in webpages again.

Many months ago when the first beta of Aptana was released I blogged about it thinking wow, this could be something special. Certainly for the non-Dreamweaver or Visual Studio crowd, Aptana provides a real alternative with many features you would expect in a web-oriented development tool.

Recently, Aptana went 1.0, and after finally downloading it (had quite a few failed attempts with their EC2 server) was impressed with the overall level of quality and polish.

Here are some of my favorite features:

• RadRails plugin – Native support for Ruby on Rails development, including a TAIL on the development log, syntax highlighting, rake task support, and more. Find out more here.
• Code assist – intelisense for JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and so-on. It even shows you what browsers certain CSS or JS attributes are available on.
• SVN Support
• Firebug integration – Live integration for troubleshooting JS issues.
• IE Debugging (Pro version only) – Havent actually tried this yet but I’m anxious to give it a whirl once I get a license.