hurl: Simple service to initiate HTTP requests and trace its response

hurl Ever needed to examine a response for a given request? Here we go! hurl is a neat and simple web based service which allows us to initiate a customized HTTP request and presents the resulting response in a nicely formatted manner. Free, responsive and several configuration options.

This is how Chris and Leah – the creators of hurl – put it:

Hurl makes HTTP requests.

Choose the request method, customize headers and POST parameters, add basic authorization, and even follow redirects. Then view the nicely formatted request and response.

It’s the perfect tool for testing APIs. Just enter a URL and click send.

hurl0

Formatted request details (incl. followed redirects!)

hurl1

Formatted response example

HTC Magic VS HTC Touch HD

I’ve been using my HTC touch HD for almost 2 months now, it’s about the same period of time my friend’s been using his brand new Android powered mobile phone, HTC Magic. Ever since we started using our new phones, we’ve been having several discussions trying to figure out which smartphone is worth the money spent for it.  Many people especially developer or techie might ask “why wasting time comparing these 2 phones?” because they would vote for HTC Magic anyway.  Anyhow, my intention in writing this review is just to provide you with the truth about the phones through my own personal experience. So I decided to make a comparison between these two devices –“HTC touch HD”, one of the most complete multimedia supported phone available in the global market and “HTC Magic”, the one that is expected to be an iPhone killer.    

magic_vs_touchHD     

Overview

If you have owned a Windows Mobile device for the past 4-5 years, then you are familiar with Windows Mobile tab style user interface and its sluggish-paced product development (from Windows Mobile 2003 to Windows Mobile 5 and later on Window Mobile 6)……. Continue reading

Testing code changes, bugfixes, new features, …

When you implement a new feature somewhere, when you change just some bits of your code, when you fix a bug, or you just change a common text in an app… What do you do afterwards? Do you really check the result or do you trust yourself that it works fine 100%. It is an interesting thing to talk about… Continue reading

Flex Style Introspection

If you have ever used the Flex introspection method describeType(), you certainly have noticed it doesn’t output any style metadata. The only way I found so far was to instantiate the UIComponent type I’m looking at and call the function regenerateStyleCache(false). The entire list of available styles is then accessible via the properties inheritingStyles and nonInheritingStyles. Generating the style cache is computation-intensive so like most reflection and introspection operations make effective use of it :)

Some code example after the jump… Continue reading

Publishing Flex applications to Google Code SVN repository

I’ve been struggling with this one a couple of times, so I thought I should share how I solved it.

Problem:
You are hosting or contributing to an open-source project on code.google.com using SVN as source control.
You would like share Flex applications (and View Source) by accessing their public SVN URL.
Applications pages (HTML) show raw text.

Solution:
Make sure you set the SVN property svn:mime-type for each file:

  • *.html: “text/html”
  • *.css: “text/css”
  • *.zip, *.swf, *.png: “application/octet-stream”

9 free must-have apps to pimp your Android phone

android_pimp The Android platform is gaining popularity every day and so are its applications. More and more applications are being added and keeping track of them can be really difficult. Especially if you are looking for apps which are useful and not only fun.

I have been using my Android (HTC Magic) for almost 3 months now and would like to present you my 10 must-have applications. Continue reading

Siam Flex framework | 0.1.0 Alpha Released!

Today I released the first version of Siam Flex Framework! The project can be found at http://code.google.com/p/siam-flex/. Please try it out and let me know what you think. It’s an Alpha release, in other words it’s not fully tested and there is little documentation. But starting with the Getting Started section on the project page should help you get an understanding of the framework.