The web site has been quiet...too quiet. This can only mean one thing: the Redbug Team has been hard at work on some great new things. I'm happy to report that they are finally just around the corner. Stay tuned!

Redbug Technologies is moving to Carlisle!

This past week Redbug won the Murata Great Business Challenge. Besides getting a nice prize package, we are being provided with a new office in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The team is quite excited as our present office is a little cramped. Our new headquarters will be in the Murata Business Center which is a business incubator.

Since early January, we have been rewriting Mapwing Flash Viewer. It is a complete rewrite from the ground up. Mark started the coding, and then Nathan took over. Both Nathan and I are learning a lot about Flash and Actionscript, things we like and dislike. I suspect that Nathan will write more on particular issues in the future.

The 1.5 version of MFV is nearly 30% faster at loading projects. It also has several enhancements including tool tips and map dragging. All in all, it is going to be a big jump over 1.0.8!

Last week as Nathan and I were working Mapwing Flash Viewer, we discovered a problem. Internet Explorer was forcing us to click and activate our Viewer instance that was embedded into a web page. This seemed odd, and we soon figured out it was due to a recent change to the browser. This change was made because of a court ruling in favor of Eolas, a company that holds a patent that most modern web browsers are infringing upon. I'm not going to go into detail about the lawsuit, so feel free to read about it on Wikipedia.

We did a bit of research and eventually figured out that we would have to use Javascript to work around the problem. We found a nice pre-built solution called SWFObject. Built by Geoff Stearns, SWFObject uses Javascript to place the Mapwing Flash Viewer instance into a web page. This removes the need for using an EMBED or OBJECT tag and side steps the Eolas patent. We will soon be implementing SWFObject on our web site and including it with future releases of Mapwing Flash Viewer for our users to try. Many thanks to Geoff!