art, life and software development

I have just succeeded in setting up the Flex 4.9 SDK on FDT 5+. On account of the paucity of support for Linux in the flash player I have most of my workstations dual booting in Win7 and Linux Mint. The machine I tested this on is an Asus G73. I started first by building the Flex SDK in Windows with the SDK installer and tested the SDK in FlashBuilder 4.6 and FDT 5. Ca marche!
Next I logged into Linux Mint, picked up the Windows assembled Flex SDK, copied the SDK across to my Linux SDK folder. Next I plugged it into FDT5 (expecting it to fail). Non, c'est parfait. Worked like a dream.
So it seems that there is the option to build the SDK in windows and just copy the assembled SDK into Linux.

My new painting "Watering Hole" is now for sale on Etsy. It's a single edition of 20 giclee prints. Watering Hole is a painting of an old style well in sub-Sahara Africa. These wells are rarely seen these days as they have now been superseded by boreholes and public taps. Where wells are built they are now constructed with concrete. The painting was created out of a need to visually record some of the old ways in Africa that are quickly vanishing.

These prints are a limited edition and each is accompanied by a certificate of ownership.
The print dimension is 900mm x 600mm ( 36" x 24" )

- The prints are made by Inkjet using the latest Epson 9900 printers with Archival Inks and Fine Art Exhibition Canvas

Flex text controls will not allow clicks on an html link if the control selectable property is set to false. To get yourText controls to work with html links do not set the selectable property to false

I came across this unusual error while I was setting up my Android environment for a new development laptop. I had just created a new image for the emulator in the Virtual Device Manager and when I attempted to run it this error popped up:

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

The problem was the amount of ram I had specified for the emulator image, 1024MB. I reduced it 512MB and it fixed it.Now I need to find out why that is a problem as I have used larger memory allocations on other machines and they worked perfectly

My newest live wallpaper Bizarre Machine I is now live on Google Play. Bizarre Machine I is the first of a series of mystic organic engines powered by arcane forces conjured by ancient West African runes. These powerful rune texts tap into forces temporal and ethereal to create this beautiful bizarre machine. In the runes can be seen influences of the beautiful Nsibidi script of West Africa ( a system that was already in use between 4000 and 5000BC), amongst other secret African writing systems.

This live-wallpaper has been tested successfully on the  Samsung Galaxy Note and S2, the Asus Transformer and the Asus/Google Nexus 7 to name but, a few of the devices tested. Tout ca marche.

Getting the icon for your Android live wallpaper to be displayed in the live wallpaper list is a relatively simple affair. You need to do 2 things, the first is edit your Android manifest and next you need to associate the live wallpaper xml asset reference document to the manifest xml. this is how it works

1. the android manifest xml

manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
package="com.ayobinitie.bizarremachine_i"
android:versionCode="3"
android:versionName="1.21" >

uses-sdk
android:minSdkVersion="8"
android:targetSdkVersion="17" />

uses-feature
android:name="android.software.live_wallpaper"
android:required="true" />


application
android:allowBackup="true"
android:icon="@drawable/iconthumb"
android:label="@string/app_name" >
service
android:name=".MyWallpaper"
android:enabled="true"
android:icon="@drawable/iconthumb"
android:label="@string/app_name"
android:permission="android.permission.BIND_WALLPAPER" >
intent-filter>
action android:name="android.service.wallpaper.WallpaperService" />
/intent-filter>

meta-data
android:name="@string/wallpaperpackage"
android:resource="@xml/wallpaper" />
/service>
/application>
/manifest>

2. the wallpaper.xml - this is in res/xml

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
wallpaper xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:thumbnail="@drawable/wallpapericon"
android:description="@string/wallpaperdescription"/>


N.B: I had a recent problem where inspite of all my efforts I could neither get the icon or the descriptions to show. All I did was delete the wallpaper.xml, rewrite it and all was perfect. I think that in someway Eclipse and the ADT did not register the wallpaper.xml correctly. Forcing it to redo this by deleting and rewriting the wallpaper.xml fixed it.