I have just created a new Firefox Ubiquity plugin command named “fyi”. The command makes it super simple to email info about a web page to anyone. I wrote the command because I am often finding myself forwarding URLs to friends and co-workers. This is normally much more tedious than it needs to be, involving the following steps: Copy the URL from the browser Switch to mail client Create new Email Paste URL into the email body Switch back to the browser Copy the post title Switch back to email Paste the title as the subject Switch back to the browser Copy a snippet from the page Switch back to the email Paste in the snippet Enter the TO email address Finally send the email Phew…

Just a quick note, but I updated turl last night. turl is a command line tool for Mac OS X that uses online services to shorten urls. There are a couple of minor changes, but the main new feature is that I added support for bit.ly. Here are the changes: Added support for bit.ly Made bit.ly service default (urltea appears to be down / gone) Add some error checking to make sure a URL is returned You can download turl, and the source from here.

Just a quick note, but I have updated my Wowhead launcher to work with Adobe AIR 1.0. This is a simple application that allows you to quickly launch searches into wowhead.com (for World of Warcraft). You can find more information, as well as grab the air file from the Google Code project page.

I have been getting a bunch of email that the links to my FlashCommand for OS X download was no longer working. FlashComamnd is a command line tool written in python, that allows you to launch Flash authoring to compile FLAs. Well, I found the files, and have re-uploaded them. You can find all of the information, including how to use and download the tool from here. I have not tested this with Flash CS3, so if it doesn’t work, let me know on the FlashCommand page.

Two of the most requested features for Adobe AIR have been the ability to launch native executables from an AIR application, and the ability to integrate native libraries into an AIR application. Unfortunately, neither feature will be included in Adobe AIR 1.0. However, this does not mean that you cannot build an AIR application that has closer / tighter integration with the underlying operating system. This lower level of integration is possible, but it requires some work on your part.

I have just released a simple Mac OS X app named “turl”, that provides a command line / shell interface to online URL shortening services (including urltea.com and tinyurl.com). Usage is pretty simple: turl URL For example: turl http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/ will create: http://urltea.com/g88 There are a number of other options, including the ability to specify which URL service is used. Source is written in Objective-C and released under an MIT License.

Over on the on AIR bus tour blog, I just posted about a new app that Lee Brimelow and I put together on the bus, called flump. It is a simple AIR application that will download all of the public images from a Flickr account. You can find more information, as well as download the app from here (source included).

Well, I know it took forever, but I have finally released the source and an AIR file for Ascension, an Apollo based mp3 player and music explorer. You can download the latest AIR file, as well as grab the source, log bugs, and discuss the player from the Ascension project page at Google Code. All of the source is included, and is released under an open source license. I am sorry it took so long to release, but I am usually reluctant to release source code that I feel needs more work.

I have created a simple plugin for Spotlight search on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), that allows Spotlight to index ActionScript files. This will allow you to use Spotlight to search for terms / functions / code, etc within ActionScript files on your system. NOTE, THIS CODE AND PLUGIN IS NOT SUPPORTED BY MACROMEDIA. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. This is a very Alpha version of the plugin. You can download the plugin from here Installation instructions are included in the readme file within the zip.

Well, as many noticed last week from the Flash Platform whitepaper, we have released a beta of the Flash / JavaScript Integration kit. The kit allows you to call functions from Flash to JavaScript and JavaScript to Flash, all while working cross browser, and supporting passing complex data types. Here is a list of the data types that the kit supports: Object Array String Number Boolean Date null undefined Here is a simple code example that show a call to a JavaScript function from within Flash: