Things That Work

A couple weeks ago I needed to easily convert HTML entities in a string back to their normal representation, but I didn’t really find anything nice, and wound up just using str.replace(/&/g, "&").replace(/'/g, "'"); since those were the only characters I was having a problem with at the time.

But today I went searching again for something better, and found a really great way to escape and unescape HTML entities. Not sure why I didn’t find his post the first time, I guess my Google-fu was weak that day.

Anyway, I’ve wrapped his methods up in a little helper class, and it works great:

package com.grooveshark.utils
{

    public class HTMLEntityUtils
    {
        import flash.xml.XMLDocument;
        import flash.xml.XMLNode;
        import flash.xml.XMLNodeType;

        public function HTMLEntityUtils()
        {
        }

        public static function htmlEscape(str:String):String
        {
            return XML(new XMLNode(XMLNodeType.TEXT_NODE, str)).toXMLString();
        }

        public static function htmlUnescape(str:String):String
        {
            return new XMLDocument(str).firstChild.nodeValue;
        }
    }
}

Hope it helps someone else!

Grooveshark Lite is now officially live.

Grooveshark Lite takes all the long-tail P2P musical goodness of Grooveshark.com and distills it in a handy quick interface to find and listen to whatever you want. Unlike the main Grooveshark site, you don’t have to have an account or install our Sharkbyte client in order to listen to music. However, signing up for an account (it’s super easy!) allows you to save playlists, and your login will work for both Lite and the main Grooveshark site.

We’re hoping that you’ll find Grooveshark Lite to be the easiest way to listen to whatever you can think of.

We have tons of things planned that didn’t quite make it into this iteration, so keep an eye out for exciting new features over the next few weeks. And if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, wishlists, problems, or just want to say hi, drop us an email at feedback@grooveshark.com. Or you can leave me a comment here and I’ll do my best to answer you personally.

We just upgraded a few other systems at the same time, so if things are a little shaky, just give us a little time and things ought to smooth out.

I’d love to talk more about Grooveshark Lite, but I’ve been here at the office for over 18 hours straight now, trying to make sure my baby gets off the ground right, so I’m not entirely lucid anymore.

Enjoy the music!

This was extremely frustrating, so I’m posting in the hopes that I can save others the same frustration.

So as you may know from my recent posts, I’ve been working on a huge Flex app for Grooveshark. We’re getting ready to launch it (probably in the next few hours actually), and our lead designer John and I were going through the app for some final visual tweaks. Button labels and input boxes were lovingly pushed a pixel here, a pixel there, until they looked just right.

Then we saw the app on Linux. It looked HORRIBLE. Half the text was far too low. You couldn’t even see the tails on letters like ‘g’ and ‘y’. Suspicious, we checked it on a Windows machine. The text was also lower than on my Mac, though not as bad as on Linux. Windows only was only lower by about 4 pixels, Linux more like 10-15. I was baffled. Flash is Flash is Flash, right? The font was an embedded OpenType version of Helvetica that we bought just for this purpose. Why would the font render differently depending on the operating system?

I read about Flash’s different font managers, and thought perhaps the issue was that using an OpenType font forces the use of the AFEFontManager instead of the BatikFontManager. So I tried embedding a TrueType font instead, but it made no difference. The text was still just as skewed in Linux and Windows as it was before.

Eventually I found this blog post and decided that embedding the font via SWF was worth a try. I had originally decided to embed via a font file instead of swf because swf seemed to add more bulk to the compiled app, and honestly, this app is already huge.

Anyway, I embedded Helvetica via SWF instead of OpenType, and it worked! The application now renders identically cross-platform. So if anyone else out there is having trouble with cross-platform font rendering in Flex, try embedding your fonts via SWF.

Just over 1 Month…

Average of 67.5 hours a week…

Over 21,000 lines of MXML and Actionscript 3…

Me and Jay have been working our asses off for the last month, and all that effort is about to pay off. I’m going to sleep for days…

So for the longest time (a few months now), I had *not* been able to get Flex Builder to play nicely with version control. At Grooveshark we use Subversion.

First, naively, I tried just committing the whole project folder to the repo. Then I realized all the various hidden files that Eclipse makes (like .project, etc) would also be committed, and if any other developers also starting committing work, we’d break each others projects every time one of us updated after the other committed.

So then I committed only the /source folder where the actual code lives. However, then all the hidden .svn folders that SVN created showed up in the tree view of Flex Builder’s Navigator. I could ignore that, except it also completely broke Flex’s code hinting, Outline view said nothing but ! Root, and Design mode (which I almost never use, but still…) would say nothing but, “An unknown item is declared as the root of your MXML document. Switch to source mode to correct it.”

Looking up the Design mode error on Google found a lot of people mentioning it, but no real solutions, except really stupid stuff like, ‘delete all the whitespace in your code.’ (Which, when I tried it on a small test project, surprisingly did work, until you closed Flex Builder and opened it again. Then you’d have to delete all your whitespace all over again. Obviously, this is NOT a viable solution.)

The only solution I found that looked promising was to install Subclipse into Flex Builder, and create a new project by checking the code out from the repository. So I went about trying to install Subclipse.

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