According to bloomberg (Re: Apple IPhone With New Camera May Be Released by June), Apple "may feature a touch-sensitive casing".

Have you ever used an application that displays detailed and interactive graphical information? Maps perhaps? What if you need to deal with a very specific point in that data? Your hand obstructs the most important information, and potentially interferes with the rest.

The smaller the device, the greater the benefits of this technology.

Offsetting the "pointer" so that your finger doesn't hide it isn't ideal at the boundaries of the display because the touch sensitive surface may run out before you can position the pointer over the desired area.

Imagine being able to grab the pointer "from the back", as you drag your finger across the rear of the device, the pointer moves with your touch across the screen, allowing and accurate and unobscured view of your information.

Additionally, from a user experience point of view, and the mechanics of the human hand, providing a touch interface on the back of the device makes it easer to interact with the device.

Picture trying to look up your flight number standing in an airport with a suitcase in one hand and iPhone in the other. As you navigate the application, cupping the phone in your hand, your thumb is required to stretch across the face of the device, affecting your grip and increasing the likelihood of dropping it.

With a touch sensitive surface on the rear of the device, it is much simpler to grasp the lower edges of it and slide your finger across the casing.

The obvious downsides are the use of protective cases and conversely damaging the device through wear and tear during its lifetime.

It's just one extra thing to break, but I think the pro's outweigh the con's.

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There are a number of long winded title case functions out there available for ColdFusion, so I thought I would share a short one.  ColdFusion has a couple of interesting back reference characters for regular expression replaces (documentation here).

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So I've been digging through Mate (like "latte", but less expensive and more useful), and comparing it to Cairngorm which I have the most experience with.  So far, way to go asfusion!  I haven't completed my review yet so I don't want to give a list of all of my impressions but so far it looks really good.  It scales better than the existing Cairngorm implementation, and the documentation is somewhat geared towards Cairngorm developers without actually saying so.

The one thing I've already been wanting is a strongly typed implementation of EventHandlers.

So here you go: TypedEventHandlers.as @ github

Now you can do this without your EventHandler catching ResizeEvent.RESIZE events:

<TypedEventHandlers eventType="{NativeWindowBoundsEvent}" type="{NativeWindowBoundsEvent.RESIZE}">

<!-- Store the size of the window in SettingsManager -->

<PropertySetter generator="{SettingsManager}" targetKey="windowWidth" source="{event.afterBounds}" sourceKey="width" />

<PropertySetter generator="{SettingsManager}" targetKey="windowHeight" source="{event.afterBounds}" sourceKey="height" />

</TypedEventHandlers>

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When updating text via data binding in Flex, JAWS (or other screen readers) will not automatically read the change. Imagine a Flex application where every time a visual String was updated, the screen reader read that change. It would be worse than being in a theatre before the curtain rises! However, after data binding has occurred, you can use your screen reader shortcuts to move back and forth through the accessible properties and hear any changes that have been made.

The best way to review what text should be read is to use an accessibility inspector such as Inspect32, or Accessibility Explorer (both available from Microsoft). You can step through the MSAA properties and review the descriptions and names. I find the easiest way to ensure you're looking at just Flash Player is to use Accessibility Explorer and use the select with mouse tool and click on an instance of Flash Player within a browser.

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Ok, so I've been trying to get some technical knowledge off my chest for a while, so I'm going to be posting some fairly quick notes. You can always comment and I can try to be a little more verbose :)

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If you're using JAWS, and are experiencing unusual behaviour reading your mx:Text controls, it may be due to an issue in Flex SDK 3.0.0 (or Flex Builder 3.0.0). There were a number of Accessibility updates released in Flex SDK 3.1 (or Flex Builder 3.0.1). Since then Flex 3.2 and Flex Builder 3.0.2 have been released, and official support is offered for those products, try the latest Flex SDK Mileston release available here:

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3

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So, this doesn't seem very obvious. If you want to enter forms mode in JAWS 9, you either need to hit numpad-plus, or for those of you who are numpad-challenged, the other obvious combination is capslock-semicolon.

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