Bits and pieces that will likely only ever amuse me

How serious is Flex as a RIA platform?

On many fronts I am sooooo happy with developing in Flex to produce Application style … er, Applications (as opposed to websites). However, one thing drives me absolutely nuts.

Why the hell is there no good
mouse support?

I was going to limit that out burst to just ‘on the mac’. But it seems it’s across the board. It’s definitely ‘worse’ on the mac, but still not brilliant on other platforms.

So, what erks me?

On the mac the Flash player does not detect scroll events in web browsers. Insane! Yes, I know there’s a JavaScript hack. But that’s all it is … a hack. It works brilliantly well, but I don’t understand why on earth this problem hasn’t been solved in the flash player??

Furthermore, there is no proper way of detecting a right mouse click. This seems to be cross platform.

Apple keyboards look fantastic, feel fantastic and I love using them. However, with every day use in busy, messy developer office are they practical?

Don’t mix with water (or coffee)
All it takes is a few too many crumbs and a small spill of coffee and it’s all over. Not only do the crumbs make their way to the bottom of the keyboard, where they take up permanent residence, but the smallest splash of water (or any liquid) and it’s all over. Most likely the spacebar will stop working all together.

There is talk on the internet of being able to put your keyboard in the dish-washer to clean it. There is absolutely no way that would be possible with the mac keyboard.

The company I work with (Smartpath) has had 2 apple keyboards die from the smallest amount of water and the second with coffee. By small amount I’m talking about 2 tiny drops.

The water is enough to make it’s way to the bottom of the keyboard and seemingly instantly corrode some of the connectors.

Fixing the keyboard is no easy task. Most PC keyboards have a rubber membrane that covers the entire keyboard. However, the Apple Keyboard has an individual rubber nipple beneath every key. Don’t go loosing those suckers!!

Bluetooth dyslexia
I’m yet to find out if this is a problem that happens with all bluetooth keyboards … or just the Apple one. Every now and then (at least every second day) while typing the keyboard will actually jumble the letters up when sending it to my lappy.

eg. if I slowly type “Business” I’ll sometimes get a short pause half way through and I’ll get rendered to screen something like “Ubsinses”.

I know you’re all thinking it’s just me … but it’s definitely happened even at times when I’ve been typing slowly and deliberately.

Another problem is often using the SHIFT key modifier. It will occasionally either be sticky or capitalise the wrong letters.

eg. nEWspaper