Writing about web page http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player9_security_update.html

This is just a heads-up for myself really – there’s a Flash Security Update coming in April, and one of the changes might affect any uploading functionality we intend to use because we’ll need a policy file to POST and GET with additional headers:

The April 2008 Flash Player update adds a new security feature to perform a cross-domain policy file check before allowing SWFs to send headers to another domain. This change helps improve web site security by helping to defend against malicious HTTP headers sent by content from other domains. The feature will also help to mitigate a potential UPnP issue (VU#347812) in which routers fail to correctly handle unexpected header values. In order for a SWF to send a header anywhere other than its own host, the origin domain of the SWF must have explicit permission from the host to which the header is being sent, in the form of a policy file. The existing policy file model will apply, with the same file locations and ActionScript APIs, but a new syntax will be required. To specify header-sending rights, use this new tag:

<allow-http-request-headers-from>  

.

Follow-up to No Flash Player for iPhone? from [Ux]

I knew there was more to it than performance, and while much of the iPhone SDK stuff was genuinely impressive, now I think I was right to say that Apple wants complete control over its vertical sales model. However, multitouch games on iPhone, Spore, EA, Sega, OpenGL, Exchange server support, Cocoa Touch; awesome moves. And with the Nokia S60, tie-in MS is using every available resource and tactic at getting Silverlight adopted. Despite the release of AIR and Flex last week I think Adobe has to move fast to ensure its product line remains dominant. Heady stuff.

On a related note, some people have suggested that Apple is holding onto its $multi-billion reserves in order to commence a takeover of Palm or Adobe. I particularly liked the suggestion that if it took over Palm, they could rename the company Pomme (it’s all in the pronunciation).

Writing about web page http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/05/steve_jobs_pans_flash_on_the_iphone.html

It looks like the iPhone won’t be seeing any Adobe Flash action anytime soon if Steve Jobs’ recent words are anything to go by – I’m not expecting to see any support in the iPhone SDK announcement. Battery life and performance are valid concerns of course, but there many ARM devices available that offer FP9 already (many with lower core specs than the iPhone), and I think there are other factors at work here – one reason might be that because Flex delivers rich applications, enabling Flash Player would essentially enable ‘unsigned’ RIAs to run via the Player. I can’t imagine applications designed for the web scaling well on an iPhone anyway, but you could imagine Flex apps designed for the iPhone screen that offered a similar experience to the native UI. Shoring up Quicktime, HTML5 (when it finally gets here) and WHATWG all probably play a part too, but I think for iPhone users it’s a shame Flash isn’t there – advertising aside there are many great games, application and video sites iPhone users can’t access.

I came across a problem yesterday where I was using CairngormEventDispatcher to dispatch an event each time a button was clicked. I defined a Cairngorm event instance then triggered it on the click event:

import uk.ac.warwick.recorder.control.StopEvent;
private var myEvent:StopEvent = new StopEvent();
<mx:Button id="stopBtn" label="Stop"
height="25" width="55" click="CairngormEventDispatcher.getInstance().dispatchEvent(myEvent);"/>

Which seemed to work fine, until I pressed the button again, at which point the debugger threw this exception:

TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert flash.events::Event@91ce331 to com.adobe.cairngorm.control.CairngormEvent.

The reason for this is that Flash creates an internal clone for an event that has already been dispatched, and importantly the redispatched event is no longer a Cairngorm Event, it’s now just a Plain Old Event. This is true for any custom event in Flex/Flash. One workaround is to generate a new instance of the event type each time it needs to be dispatched, like this:

import uk.ac.warwick.recorder.control.StopEvent;
<mx:Button id="stopBtn" label="Stop" height="25" width="55" click="CairngormEventDispatcher.getInstance().dispatchEvent(new StopEvent());"/>

There are other ways to do this, including overriding the event clone method, but the above solution worked for me.