The next Midlands Flash Platform User Group meeting is tomorrow, at Warwick University, Ramphal Building room R.0.21. Hopefully it’ll be a good one as I’m helping organise it and we intend to run more over this end of the Midlands in future, possibly in September and November. I’m going to demo some of the apps we’ve built with the marvellous people in the web-dev team at Warwick University during my secondment there, including our AIR Media Converter Client, the Files.Warwick Desktop Client, a nice combination of MySQL, BlazeDS, Lucene, Spring, Flex 3.0 and Cairngorm by Rob O’Toole and maybe if I get time, our media recording applications in Sitebuilder, the University’s CMS.

Our MOO cards arrived today and very swish they are too. This means I can now go to all the cool places and not be the only one without a business card to put in the prize draw bucket.

MOO is a great service as well – the easy upload and design process is one thing I think is well-executed, but most of all I just like the language used on the site and in all its communications, warm and friendly without being patronising. Take ‘Little MOO’ for instance, the bot that confirms your order that freely admits it’s a piece of software, but says it will look after your order while it’s processing:

Hello, I’m Little MOO – the bit of software that will be managing your order
with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will
print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done
and on its way to you.

and when the order was done:

Hello, it’s Little MOO again. I thought you’d like to know, the following items
from your order are now in the mail…

I don’t know why, I just like that. Maybe that approach is dependent on your company persona to some extent but for me it felt more fuzzy and friendly to get an email like that from what is in fact just an automated system. Positive vibes, positive experience.

Whenever I use Flex Builder I don’t like the standard Courier or monospace font used in Windows or OSX. Instead I prefer to use the excellent Proggy Programming Fonts – they are excellent, concise fonts designed to be readable while remaining compact enough to allow me to see more code at the same time. Up until now though I’d only installed the fonts on my PC development setup, so today I thought I’d do the same on my iMac Flex Builder setup. For OSX, installing the font is as easy as downloading the font(s) you want, and dragging it to /Library/Fonts. To get it working in Flex Builder, go to Preferences > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > Text Font, and change the default font there to the one you want.

However on OSX I did this and hit a snag – the Proggy fonts are designed as pixel-fonts, that is they don’t look very nice when anti-aliased, so on OSX Flex Builder they look a bit rubbish at any size, even the 16pt they were designed for. One option is to turn off the global font-smoothing for 16pt and below in OSX’s System Preferences, but because that’s a global option it will affect the appearance of all fonts, and I didn’t want that. Fortunately I’m not the only one to have hit this problem, and I’m grateful to dispatchEvent() guys for their ingenious solution, involving resizing a whole set of Proggy font glyphs to something massive (you can download the fixed Proggy font from the post), which then allows you to set the actual size to 4pt in Flex Builder, thus bringing it under the default font-smoothing threshold in OSX. Works a treat! In their post on the subject some people also contribute some other solutions, including a command-line fix.

So now I have my favourite font working in OSX Flex Builder, I can get back to work…

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