Finally got my hands on the CS3, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Dreamweaver.

First impressions: oh my god. Yes, CS3 is indeed a light years leap. New softwares are just so supreme that i just had to make myself a new wallpaper so i can stare at Adobe logo whole day.

( get it at: HERE )

However, i cannot help not to notice that inside Adobe, their developer teams are COMPLETELY not communicating. I even think they hate each other. Illustrator developers HATE Photoshop developers HATE Flash, etc ...

I'll give you one simple example, and stuff like this drags through entire CS3.

First thing i do when i install / reinstall Photoshop and Illustrator, i set the preferences. And in new Illustrator you can make UI darker. Basically, if you work on a dark image, white UI screws your eyes, so it is nice that you can make UI go dark. Photoshop does not have that feature. I mean, come on. Illustrator team makes a nice thing, and then they keep a secret? "Fuck you PS dev team, we got a nice feature, and we are not telling you!"

Entire "suite" is an amazing piece, integrations between softwares are nice, but this is still ages away from being a true SUITE. Nothing is standardized, each software has it's own logic, it's own ideas and it's own features (i am of course talking about logic/ideas/features that can be shared, like color pickers, UI modifications, gradient tools, etc.).

So, in short - awesome software, but still far FAAAAAAR from being a suite.

Oh, and by the way, i really love new icon set for CS3 softwares.

So, anyways, during my state of lucid thinking, it dawned to me, something about pizzas. You know how in the rest of developed world (so that excludes Croatia), when you telephone order a pizza, you do not have to pay for it if delivery took more than 30 minutes. So here is the question: why does the pizza boy deliver it at all? I am certain that he has a watch, or a stopwatch set on 30 minutes, and on his way to you it starts buzzing. Why not just stop right there, open up the box, and munch away and share with a random person that happens to pass near by. He ain't getting any cash for it, might as well eat it. Hm?

Daemon, out.

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It all started when we decided to replace prototype with jQuery on one of our projects. Everything worked like a charm until somebody decided to finally check how things are working in IE. Then shit hit the fan in a form of "Operation Aborted" error. Page started to load nicely, but in the moment of swfobject initialization - the funky error popped out. I really like and support the swfobject project, but obviously, IE hates those two. Luckily enough for us, guy called Luke Lutman made a jQuery Flash Plugin which successfully solved some of our problems. I say some, because using the packed version of jQuery still breaks ActiveX control activation in Internet Explorer. Solution is aether to patch jQuery, or to use uncompressed version. Damn you Eolas patent no. 5,838,906!

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A recent post on the Google Developer Blog announces some enhancements Google's made to MySQL, in hopes that they will be adopted in the next release, and to allow everyone to begin using them. At the moment, patches are available for mysql v4.x only. DO-h!

The error of the day came from the planet php - Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM. An unexpected WHAT? :) (pops up if you have double semicolons).

Next one came from vistas darkest side. I took this screenshot some time ago but the picture got lost in the infinity of my mobile phones memory card. My laptop came with preinstalled Vista. One day, I was just minding my own business, playing some mp3s, chillin... and this baby popped from nowhere and rendered my system unusable. I never, and I really mean NEVER ever, in my entire windoze career saw an error like this. Enjoy! :)

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(System died so bad, that even taskmgr.exe couldn't be started).

Aral Balkan has came up with a new data exchange format for Flash codenamed - SWX. The first beta was released few days ago, and it caused instant contraversy among people in remoting community. Since there are tons of various ways to do asynchronous data communication in Flash (LoadVars, XML, Remoting, JSON, SOAP, XML-RPC, and PHPObject) who actually needs new one? The idea behind it is actually pretty neat, and after some flaming, Patrick and Aral decided to work together (update: As Aral commented my post, it was April 1st joke. Dough!).

SWX uses PHON (PHP Object Notation) which uses native PHP data structure (less serialization and deserialization). Flash sends data to the server with loadMovie() trough POST and receives back SWF file which contains data in native SWF bytecode. After that you can access it just like it was regular data inside loaded movieClip, and you can display a determinate progress indicator on a service call.

I am really interested how things will go on with this project since this sounds like a great way to replace slow XML loading/parsing in Flash Lite apps.

Yes, when I got the call at 8am this morning, I was not only shocked, but still very in my deep REM sleep. The guy at other end of the line was talking about connecting our ADSL. Hm yes, nice wet dream... mmmmm.. adsl. :) REWIND! My gf and I moved to new apartment, and we were offline for A MONTH. 2 days ago we finally got our shit together and went to T-Com and signed few contracts. That was on Saturday (3 days ago). Anyways, it turned that it was not a dream, but the guy was actually standing in front of my building waiting to connect us online again. Yesterday a guy came and installed our fixed line, and today guy came and installed ADSL. Ok, so if you are reading this and you DO NOT LIVE in Croatia, you will find my blabbering boring, but if YOU ARE LIVING in Croatia, this will be shock to you, as it was to me. :) I think that I will soon regret saying this, but until that time comes: GO T-COM! GO! :)