Sold Out Activist

I'm a huge whore for Actionscript, but I'm only a new fan of Adobe AIR. But there are some annoying pieces of functionality not yet available to Actionscript 3 in AIR 1.1. The main two issues I've come across: inability to specify a default name in the browseForSave dialog and creating system alerts from Actionscript. I'm going to tackle alerts in this post, the first problem doesn't have a hack far as I can tell.

Now yes, we can create a flash-based alert. It can be pretty, it can be awesome, but it won't steal focus from the application itself. And it certainly won't keep the user from using the application's menu. While you could remove the event listeners for every single object in your flash movie, you would have to add them all back afterward. And it still wouldn't keep the user from playing with the menu. There is a better solution: use Javascript inside HTMLLoader. (more...)

Long story short, if you use NSURLConnection in order to send a GET/POST request, it will not activate the EDGE network if a wireless connection is not present. Google is practically useless in discovering how to activate the EDGE network specifically. The answer is retarded, but thankfully simple. (more...)