The FlashCanon

I was sent a link today (thanks Josh) and I wanted to go ahead and pass it on. The link was to the new Tour de LiveCycle. It looks pretty slick and I’m looking forward to really digging around in it.

What is it?

Tour de LiveCycle is a desktop application designed by the Adobe Evangelist team to serve as both an introduction to Adobe LiveCycle ES and an extensive reference tool.

You can (and should) install it from the Tour de LiveCycle badge below and you can (and should) read about more it on the Adobe site or on Greg Wilson’s Ramblings.

A funny thing that I find about this line of work is when I learn about things that have been there all along but went unnoticed. Whether it's an entire section of a framework that you just never had an opportunity to utilize or a single line of code that does a little bit more than you thought. The latter is the subject of this quick post (which I started to write back in March but forgot to finish). The line of code in question here is very simple and it even has a name: "Mark of the Web".

So what is the Mark of the Web? Well, as Microsoft puts it:

The MOTW is a comment added to the HTML markup for a Web page. When a user opens the Web page from their local machine, Internet Explorer references this comment to determine the security zone in which it should run the page.

Here is the line as I most easily recognize it (although it can be modified in several different ways):

So why am I writing about it? Because I removed it from the HTML of a project I was working on. After I removed it, I started getting security errors when I tested my project locally in IE. It took me a while to find out what was going on and I hope that maybe this post will help others find it more quickly. So anyway, there it is. The Mark of the Web. I hope this post saves someone a little time tracking down their local security errors in IE.

I don't have a huge post to write here, but I did want to share that I took the exam a few days ago (Friday, Feb. 27) and I'm very happy to report that I am now a Flex 3 with AIR Adobe Certified Expert.

According to a couple of things I've read this morning, it looks like we might be a step closer.

Adobe and Apple are working together to create Flash for iPhone, according to Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen. Despite it's not so easy and really up to Apple, but Narayen said that he was "pleased with progress".

So I finally got an iPhone and decided right away that I'd like to jump in and try my hand at doing a little dev work. I've looked around a bit on Amazon and a few other places trying to read up on customer reviews, ratings, etc, but I wanted to see if I could reach out to anyone that might be reading my blog and get your thoughts as well. I've looked a little at the iPhone Dev Center and the iPhone Developer Program but I know that sometimes people know of better places to get started. Also, is it mandatory/necessary/worth it to pay to join the program?

Before anyone asks, I'll go ahead and answer what I assume will be the first question asked: "What's your development background, Jason?"

Well, I learned to program in Flash. I've been working with ActionScript for just over 10 years now and I've touched on a couple of other things like Java and PHP in the past. I understand both procedural and object oriented programming and I feel like I would just need to learn the syntax when it comes to Objective-C.

Thanks for your thoughts!