It's been two weeks? 2007/07/05

Time flies at Flickr.  I am sure this is not due to my frequent absence for things like getting parking passes, meeting the Comcast guy, and meeting the (very late) movers.  It's because the place is just awesome.  Never have I encountered a smarter group of people -- it is downright intimidating at times.  But intimidation never lasts because of how welcoming they have been and how frequently "real work" is interrupted by a finger-rocket war.

Though I just got my MacBook Pro today and still don't have access to my work email, I've been quite busy, learning the ins and outs of XULRunner and Apollo.  Apollo is actually made up entirely of new and exciting contradictions that prevent any real web-like development of desktop apps.  XULRunner, not to be outdone, provides the developer an exercise in divining best-practices from partial examples, partial documentation, and partial Firefox builds.  (Tomorrow will be fun.)

Back when Apollo still seemed promising (yesterday) I was going to write an entire entry about how to work around a major shortcoming in the platform, but since it seems likely I won't be doing much Apollo work, I thought I'd share this little tidbit here.  You cannot embed a Flash movie in an HTML Apollo app as you would in a normal webpage, meaning that hybrid HTML/Flash apps aren't possible.  The workaround, if you really need Flash, is to build the entire app using Flex.  I know, it'll feel like developing Javascript in 1998 when there weren't good libraries like jQuery, what with all the click="foo();" attributes scattered about.  It's OK, though, you'll make it just like I did.  More to come on XULRunner as I learn.