I’ve been wanting to check out contribute ever since I purchased CS4 a few months ago. I found, however, that Contribute was very unstable and was hanging upon each attempt to connect to a Web server.  I found a KB article which described exactly what issues I was experiencing.  You can find it here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/408/kb408112.html .

Here are the conditions as referenced from the above article:

Adobe Contribute hangs when you start it on Mac OS 10.5.x.

Details

You are either using Safari version 3.2.1 or the Safari 4 Public Beta

Reason

This is due to a change in the WebKit behavior while working with Safari version 3.2.1 or the Safari 4 Public Beta

This was exactly my situation.  On the downside, the fix discussed that the problem will recur if Safari 4 Public Beta was reinstalled following the update.  This was the case for me as I installed Safari after Contribute prior to realizing there was any problem.  I updated Contribute and then found the item which I had not previously been aware of.  It was necessary to create a file and place it inside the plugins directory.

Here are those instructions from the article:

Create a file “ContributeMacOptions.override” in the location Application > Adobe contribute CS4 > Configuration > plug-ins.

I simply opened up my text editor, TextMate in my case and created an empty file names as specified and saved it to the appropriate directory.  As it seems, this has resolved my issue and since I am a Firefox user, not having Safari isn’t really a big deal to me.

Contribute,Tools,Blogging

A reader asked me a question about taking a date stored as a string and manipulating it so as to remove sub-strings. This is really simple in ActionScript, using the replace method. The replace() method is used to find a match in a particular string and then replace it with some other string inside the parameters of the method, such as string.replace(pattern, repl);

From Livedocs ( http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/201/langref/String.html#replace() )

replace(pattern:*, repl:Object):String
Matches the specifed pattern against the string and returns a new string in which the first match of pattern is replaced with the content specified by repl.

The reader needed to take a date formatted as such - 15:07:47.001.850.000 and end up with a string formtted like the following - 50747001850.
As I said this is really simple using replace and just a little bit of RegEx:

private function init():void {

    var dateStr:String = "15:07:47.001.850.000";

    var d:String = stringReplace(dateStr);

    trace(d); // Output is 150747001850

}

    private function stringReplace(value:String):String {
    var v:String = value;
    v = v.replace(/:/g, "");
    v = v.replace(/\./g, "");
    var re:RegExp = new RegExp("000$");
    v = v.replace(re, "");

    return v;
}

In the init method, I’ve set the variable dateStr to the value of the string that needs to be manipulated. Next, I’ve set the variable d to the value of the result of the stringReplace() method which follows, passing in the original string. In the stringReplace() method, which accepts the string parameter named value, I assign value to the variable v. Next, using the replace() method, I search the string for any ‘:’ characters. The reason it will search the entire string is that I’ve used the global (g) flag in the expression. Then note that the second parameter of the replace method I’ve specified an empty string. This will replace any ‘:’ with “” (nothing). I’ve done the same in the second replace() method, only removing periods from the string and replacing with an empty string. The next line I create a new RegExp object so that I can use the following RegExp(”000$”) in order to remove the trailing 000. The $ in the expression applies the pattern match to the end of the string, so as to not remove any instances of 000 that might exist anywhere other than the end of string. This way if the original string is provided from a dynamic source there is no worry of removing zeros anywhere other than the end of string. I then run the replace() method a last time and apply the RegExp as the pattern and replace it with an empty string. When I return the modified string the result is the formatted string as needed for other parts of the application, shown in trace output.

TweepJob

TweepJob is a service who’s goal is to bring job seekers (#tweepseek) and organizations, recruiters, and individual’s, termed as Hunters (#tweephunt),  who have open opportunities for employment or conrtacts, together using tweets as a means to communicate.  The TweepJob application can find user’s tweets by using the special hashtags and then notify the users that there is a potential match by tweeting such needs or opportunites so that followers, and the public time line, will be alerted to new leads for available employees and jobs.

TweepJob was conceived out of the experiences of our developers in harsh economic conditions, especially in technology fields, where unemployment rates were hitting mid to high 12% ranges.  It stood to reason that since we were already using Twitter, were familiar with the API, and enjoyed using the service for personal and business networking, that we should incorporate our enjoyment of the service with an application which attempts to help others in a valuable way. As such, we’ve created TweepJob as a free resource for seekers and hunters so that we might be able to help you find each other.

TweepJob cares immensely about the quality of our application and finds a great deal of satisfaction in watching it grow through increasing adoption, feedback, enhancements, and contributions of our community.  We are looking forward to improvement of the application over time to better meet user’s needs by listening, watching, analysing and under standing how our user’s interact with the service, how the service performs, and what the service offers functionally to the user.

So keep posting to Twitter using our hashtags and we’ll hook you up!