timwalling.com

Everypoint is a company I’ve been aware of for a little while now and I’ve been waiting until they released more information on their site before blogging about them. They have some very interesting technology which allows companies to deploy real-time mobile content to a wide range of java enabled phones. In addition they’ve developed their own vector rendering engine which from some of the screenshots and demos, looks to offer some great looking graphics.

Yahoo looks to be one of the first customers using this technology with an upcoming World Cup soccer application called Matchcast. There’s also a demo of an application using the technology here.

I think many people are still trying to write off J2ME and companies like Everypoint are interesting in that they are providing viable solutions for real time mobile content delivery. I think it also requires us to revisit some Flash Lite vs J2ME comparisons.

What’s this mean for FlashLite and FlashCast? Hopefully companies like Everypoint push Adobe harder to make the best product they can. I’m all for having choices and alternatives when it comes to making a decision on the best technology to use. I’m by no means biased towards using Flash Lite over J2ME just because of my Flash background and experience. Personally I want to use the best technology for the job and if one allows me to offer my application now to existing java enabled phones vs later to upcoming, Flash Lite enabled phones, my decision is going to be strongly influenced by the now option.

Has anyone come across this error in testing their Flash applications?

The instruction at “0×01203e8d” referenced memory at “0×01203e8d”. The memory could not be “read”.

It’s been a frustrating bug to address. The actual memory address changes from time to time. I’m only able to reproduce this on a few machines at the office and it only occurs after the browser has been exited. I’ve been able to reduce the frequency of the error by re-working some sound objects that had “onComplete” handlers, but I’m still seeing this after I’ve played an FLV in the application. It seems like something that the application has done, doesn’t mesh well with IE shutting down, cleaning out the activex objects, etc, who knows.

I originally thought it was tied to some bad sounds or bad FLV’s, but I’ve tried the same media files in other swf’s and haven’t been able to reproduce the error. I also have gotten the error when I didn’t play any FLV’s at all, but was using an “onComplete” event like I said above.

It’s been a fun Friday, commenting out code, ripping parts of the app out in an effort to locate what strange combination of events is causing this…

Curious if anyone has had any recent experience with something similar. I’ve googled of course, but only found some older references to similar issues. Figured a plea post for help might be worthwhile.

The FlashDevelop team is getting close to a 2.0.0 release and just put up RC1. If you haven’t tried it yet, download it and see what you think. It’s matured quite a bit in the past year and I’m extremely happy using it on a daily basis for various projects. Keith has posted one or two items regarding the editor if you’d like to read some more opinions on it. Details on the latest release are here.

I can’t say enough good things about the tool and the team working on it. I had a few issues using the Project panel on a large project and Nick, who seems to work on that portion of FD, was happy to take any debugging info I could give him and was able to get some fixes in that made it into the latest release. Thanks Nick!

As far as free actionscript editors go, I’d rank this above the rest. I love using SE|PY also, but at times I’ve had issues with it recognizing the different classpaths for flash 7 vs flash 8. FlashDevelop just seems to do a better job at knowing where these are and also using these paths for autocompletion better than SE|PY. Not to take anything away from it, it does have a few more tools available for it, such as the SO viewer, I just have had better experiences with FD.

Donation information for the FlashDevelop project can be found here.