Tour de Flex – The New Flex 3 Component Explorer
I was amazed to find this incredible replacement for the Adobe Flex 3 Component Explorer. The component explorer is a great way for someone who is new to Flex, or is just curious about its does, to see it in action and learn by example. Just click on a component in the list, see a working sample on the right with the code below it.
The original component explorer was great, and this new version is even better. The application showcases core Flex components, AIR capabilities, Flex data access (BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services), numerous coding techniques, cloud APIs, and a growing list of community-developed components, effects, skins, and more. Each sample has a running demonstration, source code, links to related resources such as ASDocs, community commenting, and more.
You can download the Tour De Flex Component Explorer FREE on their website at http://flex.org/tour.
Automatically sync your iTunes library with your music collection
If you’re like me, you have a large collection of music organized in a very specific way. iTunes is fine for playing music, but what happens if you want to keep your collection up to date and you don’t buy your music from the iTunes store? Currently, you have to find your new mp3s and drag them into the itunes window. Depending on how your iTunes is set up, it may even make a copy of the files in another location on your drive (taking up unnecessary space). But if you’re like me, you may just not want to deal with dragging things into iTunes every time you buy new mp3s or rip CDs.
iTunes Library Updater is a free program for windows that will let you choose which music folders to watch and will synchronize them with your iTunes database. It even has some nice options to search through subfolders and clean out old entries.
Free batch photo resizer by FastStone
Every once and a while, the need may arise where someone with very limited computer experience (like your Mom) asks you to send her a good amount of photos from a past event. Burning a DVD and mailing it would take too much time and trying to explain how to download a gigabyte of photos from an FTP site would be too problematic.
I found a great freeware utility called FastStone Photo Resizer. It is an image converter / resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode.
So to make a long story short, I was able to resize the hi res photos to a more managable size, and emailed the file to her. Quick and easy.
Zune MP3 Player Software 3.0 Installation failure under Windows Vista
Trying to install the Zune MP3 player software under Vista turned out to be a mini nightmare. The installation went all the way to 99%, then failed and reverted itself. I read many, many user posts on how to fix this problem, but one worked:
In order to successfully install the Vista Zune Software, the Vista firewall MUST be turned on.
It’s the silliest thing i’ve ever seen. Enjoy.
Hello TechHead.
I’ve decided to start a new section of our blog dedicated to anything technology related that I happen to come across along the way. My hopes are that maybe someone out there will benefit from the pain and agony that I spend in fixing some of the problems that I will be posting about.
That’s all for now.
