I’ve seen a number of blog posts floating around today about GMail Desktop Notifications (here, here, here, here and here — did I miss anyone?). I tried them out myself and they are very useful. Being a rich web applications developer I, of course, wanted to figure out how it works and how I could use it for my own apps. Here’s a quick overview of what I found.
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One of the things that separates a good web application from a great one is how gracefully they handle failures. One of the often overlooked cases is when a user attempts to upload a file that exceeds the set PHP upload file size. This article shows how to detect when the user tries to upload a file that is too large and display an appropriate message.
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You are in for a headache if you have try to call a method or create a member variable with the name of a reserved word in Actionscript. It can lead to such fun situations as having variables called: insert; update; deleteSomething. Because calling the third variable “delete” may be logical but it is a reserved word so that is out of the question. It gets hairier when you don’t necessarily have control over the object format (such is often the case with remote calls). I ran into this today when trying to call the “node_delete” (or “node.delete”) method in Drupal via Services and AMFPHP. This is frustrating so I’m going to show two situations where you could run into this problem and how I fixed them.
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Every display markup language has its frustrating moments. Adobe Flex isn’t any exception. I ran into a little trouble a while back when trying to put a drop shadow on a HBox component. Here is the effect that I wanted to achieve:

Flex form with drop shadow header

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