Tim Wilson (tvwonline)

I have just returned from a 3 week holiday through the US. I traveled through LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York and Washington DC.

It was an amazing trip and I hope to put some photos up on Flickr at some point.

I recently had trouble using the Flex Email validator in Actionscript.

Therefore, I thought I would post the function I used to get it to work so it can save some of you the time and effort. When you look at it it is rather simple, but the documentation didn’t seem as straight forward when explaining how to do it in actionscript.

public static function validateEmailFormat(string:String):Boolean
{
var validator:EmailValidator = new EmailValidator();
var result:ValidationResultEvent = validator.validate(string);

if(result.type == ‘invalid’)
{
Alert.show(result.message);
return false;
}

return true;
}

I am happy to announce that after 8 months of hard work, I (along with a friend) have launched a new Flex based Web application. It is called Lifetick and it allows you to set goals online.

From a technical perspective, I consider it a great example of what flex can achieve. It features a clean design with frequent use of Charting for Visualisation, along with bright widgets, deep linking and an emphasis on usability.

Check it out, spread the word and find out what flex can really achieve when its done right

I was doing some designing in Fireworks today, when I kept feeling unhappy with the colour choices I was making.

I thought the colour was fine the Mac osx colour picker (opened from Fireworks) however, when I select the colour and it is used in Fireworks, it is the wrong colour.

Fireworks appears unable to get the right colour from the Mac OSX colour picker.

Am I going mad or is this happening to other people too?

I am running Fireworks 8 on Mac OSX Leopard. (with an External monitor.) Also, I selected different colour profiles from the picker with no luck.

Ricky Gervais has started a blog about his attempts to get Karl to do another Podcasts.

Apparently Graham, sorry, Karl is holding out, worried about what people are saying about him.

Come on Karl, don’t worry about what people are saying, we just want to hear more.

And think about it, now you have three houses, there are three sets of boilers which can break and you can moan about.

Hey, now that you have all those houses, are you now more worried about things like stopping wars? Because (and to quote you), “there is more chance of them being damaged an’ that.”

So as Ricky asks, do what ever you can to spread the word about Karl.

More information and lots of cool links from and inspired by the podcasts, visit: http://www.rickygervais.com/chimpanzee_karl.php

When Designing Websites and Application Concepts I always use Adobe Fireworks.

I think its great, or was great. Let’s Face it, it hasn’t seen a proper update for far too long, especially on the Mac.

I recently tried Fireworks CS3 and it was embarrassing, I can’t believe they released it with a new number.

So I was thinking, there must be an alternative to Fireworks (not Photoshop), one that runs on the Mac.

If you know one, please post the details in the comments.Thanks.

Since this is a Flash blog, many of you might wonder if it is visible to Search Engines. Well I am happy to say it is. It is a rather simple thing but one I felt I needed to explain.

When you arrive at http://tvwonline.net, you are met by a page which redirects you to /flash/. However what you don’t know is that on my domain’s default page there is a link to the real wordpress site. This may not be noticed or looked at by visitors but it is by Google.

So if you find a link to my site on Google and click it where do you go? Well you end up on the Wordpress Blog, but, because of my Wordpress configuration, any link you click will take back to the Flash version, AND, you get taken back to the correct page on the flash site. (At this point I would like to direct you to the browser’s address bar. You will see that everytime you change pages, the site url is changed. Allowing for Deep Linking, Back/Forward and Google Analytics Statistics to work.

So landing on the Wordpress Blog from Google is not always ideal, I could redirect the user using Flash, so they come to the Flash site automatically, but I have left it as a manual process. Recently I had the opportunity to speak to a optimisation expert from Google who advised the same.

So there you have it. Please direct anyone who says with Flash you don’t get Search Engine Visibility/ Back-Forward Support/ Deep-linking or Website Statistics to this post and this Blog.

After receiving many requests for my website’s .fla file, I have finally decided to make it available on my site - but for a price.

It is the same .fla this website is based on. You can find it here (along with an example of what you get)

I offer it in two prices, one for personal use. i.e. for your own site, and a commercial version for multiple customer’s of yours.

My reasoning for selling it is to try and recoup my hosting costs, and because people offered my money for it - and who am I to say no

Anyway, I hope this makes it slightly easier for other people wanting to make a website like this.

If you don’t want to pay, there is still free code available, including the php backend which extracts the data from wordpress and some clever actionscript 2 classes which should make the job easier.

All the details and conditions are available on the link.

I have just updated the server to run PHP5, MYSQL 4 and Wordpress 2.3.1

I still have more upgrades to do and more testing. So don’t panic if you see error messages around over the next couple of days.

Open Letter to Apple:

Hurry up and announce/release the new MacBook Pros.

My G4 is struggling to keep up…. I can’t wait much longer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!