Flashmech

Need I say anything more?
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As a side note, I simply adore the illustrative designs of the Download Day website! *~thumbs up*

I love to evangelise about tools, frameworks or books that had aided me in my course of work. After my recent project, I feel the need to write this post about jQuery to spread the love that it had given me.

It was simply too impressive; jQuery opened up the world of client-side scripting for HTML for me after investing just a day to learn about the language’s selectors. What followed was just referring to the documentation, coding out the desired, and the magic happened!

May I add that it had been 5 years since the last time I touched JavaScript too, and the only ones that I used back then were downloaded from Dynamic Drive.

To me, jQuery is a language that made a whole lot of sense, hid away the extraneous that normal JavaScript requires, and so all that is left is a language that is very easy to code and maintain.

I am no JavaScript pro, and I know it. Yet, in a few lines I was able to create what I could only used to dream of. The ease of use and learning only quickens production time, leaving more space for exploration and fun.

The key in making jQuery such a blessing, is that it is truly browser independent. There were some situations when maneuvering around CSS browser quirks would take too much time, so I turned to jQuery’s CSS for help. With another line of code, it got the job done perfectly, and placed a grand smile on my face.

This was the first time I had experienced joy while writing JavaScript. Might be biased for me to say since I have yet to try other JavaScript frameworks, but jQuery, you’re the best.

For years I had this thought that since Flash is so much more superior to HTML, there’s really not much point in learning the ins-and-outs of HTML. At that time when this thought first seeded, CSS was something that was not ubiquitous, and browser quirks seem to be the cause that drained the life source out of every web developer’s soul. To avoid that same painful road that many took, I stuck on to that thought and pursued Flash till it’s what I’m doing best today.

Well I guess in my line of work, HTML is something that you cannot run (much less hide) from forever. It was about to be my first HTML website in 5 years, and web standards must have grown so vastly over all this while. After my thoughts had settled, I decided that this would be the best opportunity to relearn my skills.

Instead of using my existing knowledge of using tables to layout the content, I wanted to use some CSS to give order to them, so I picked up "The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design" from the library as a starting point. Just after reading the first few chapters, I had already realised what I had been missing out all this time.

Given that the deadline was just 10 days away, I was virtually working on the book everyday after work, and improving on what I had the following day. When the project finally went out to the client for approval, though brain-drained, I was glad.

I’ve learnt a whole lot about usability, accessibility, semantic and clean markups, SEO, the quirks between browsers that I have to look out for, breaking down layouts to implement CSS for XHTML based on the design, and I managed to do it all without using a WYSIWYG tool (e.g. Dreamweaver).

As an interactive developer, I feel more empowered now that I know these technologies. Yes, Flash can do a whole lot of things and lets you escape those problems that you would otherwise have to face with HTML, but still, knowing XHTML and CSS is something else altogether.

With many thanks to Oliver Goldman from the Adobe AIR Engineering, I’ve finally solved my problem. Quoted from his email, here’s how you uninstall Adobe AIR if it does not appear in the Add/Remove Programs control panel:

Download the latest installer and then pass it the "-uninstall" flag from the command line, like so:

AdobeAIRInstaller.exe -uninstall

After uninstalling it successfully, I re-installed again and now, the "Adobe AIR" sits in the Add/Remove Programs list. I assume any last remnants of any Apollo runtime had been uninstalled as well. Coolness~

I’m shouting "help" here, so if anybody knows the answer to my hair-pulling problem, please save me. How I land myself in this situation may or may not be important, so unless inquired, let’s skip it for now.

The methods to uninstall AIR/Apollo as described in the AIR release notes doesn’t work for me, why? Because in my Add or Remove Programs control panel, there is neither "Adobe Apollo 1.0 Alpha1", nor "Adobe AIR 1.0 Beta 1" nor "Adobe AIR"!

Now, just how do you uninstall Adobe AIR when there is no such available option?