Visible Certainty - The Verifiable.com Blog

Modifying context menus with Flash Player 10 while avoiding crashes under Windows XP

(This is a post on coding.  It has little to do with charting, but we ran into this problem and thought someone else might too)

In our app, we like to modify the context menu (what you get when you right-click) to have context-useful items.  Not exactly groundbreaking.  This has worked great for months.  But recently, we received a bug report from a Windows XP user.  It seems that the most recent versions of Flash Player 10 (we haven’t yet isolated when this bug started appearing) contains a bug that can get tickled when modifying the menu.  The symptom is simple: a user right clicks, selects an item from the menu, and their browser crashes.  That’s right: the browser crashes.  Woot!

We discovered the underlying cause, which as far as we can tell, shouldn’t cause problems (according to the Flex documentation), but it clearly does.  The cause is assigning contextMenu more than once, or removing items from contextMenu.customItems.

Therefore, the fix is straightforward, if a little ugly(?): Assign contextMenu and populate customItems with all your potential context menu items only once. Disable or enable individual ContextMenuItems in contextMenu.customItems based on the context.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

— Jason

Verifiable Pro: Private Content, Chart/Data Sharing, and More…

We’re proud to announce the release of our Verifiable Pro product today, allowing you to upload, visualize, and share private data with only those you wish.

We tried hard to get the details right.  Namely:

• You can specify whether all new content should be private by default, so you’ll never accidentally publish something you didn’t mean to.
• You can share private charts two ways: either by adding any individual email address to the full, interactive chart’s user access list, or by giving out a unique, hidden URL.  The former requires viewers to create a Verifiable.com account if they don’t already have one, but it ensures that only they can see the content, and that they have full access to the tool.  The hidden URL makes it easy to share a private chart image with anyone, but you can’t stop them from passing along the link to others.
• You have fine-grained control over whether others can simply view, copy, and/or edit your content, and you can authorize different operations for different people.  You can even delegate to someone else the power to invite new people to see a given chart or data set.
• Priority Support: we work very hard to deliver first-class support to all our users, but we’ll prioritize requests from our Pro customers, and guarantee our response time.
• A no-fuss, no-muss, no-asterisk, no-exception, no-gimmicks satisfaction guarantee.  If you’re not happy, and want your money back, you can ask for a full refund at any time.

The Pro product also includes a powerful new feature allowing you to use an existing chart as a template for a new chart with different data.  No more need to repeat the same careful layout operations over and over again.  Just “Copy -> Using Different Data” in the File menu of any visualization.

We want to take this opportunity to reiterate, however, that the basic Verifiable product isn’t going anywhere, and will continue to be improved, not crippled.  We will always have a free service that encourages people to upload data and make public charts.  That’s why we got into this business, and why we continue.

In that spirit, new this week for everyone is a host of updates, including:

• auto-detection of column names when importing data
• more powerful filtering (now located in the sidebar for easier access)
• better binning: specify your own custom bin size for numeric variables
• dozens of small bug fixes and tweaks to make everything smoother