The operation couldn’t be completed. (NSURLErrorDomain error – 1013.)
The operation could not be completed

After much research I’ve come to the conclusion that our authenticated media host is having issues with the updated HTTP Request behavior in iOS5′s version of mobile Safari. iOS5 now uses its own flavor of HTTP Pipelining to speed up data transfer and my theory is somewhere along the line our host’s web server is disagreeing with it.

Since mobile networks usually have very high latency HTTP Pipelining allows the HTTP client to avoid round trips to the server by send multiple requests on the same connection without waiting for the server to respond. You can read up on iOS5′s version of HTTP Pipelining and the concept in general here:
http://www.blaze.io/mobile/ios5-top10-performance-changes/
http://www.blaze.io/mobile/http-pipelining-big-in-mobile/

We’ll be reaching out to our media content provider today to validate but I figured I would throw up a place for others experiencing the same issue to discuss as I am not seeing other posts about it yet.

In Google’s words:

Google Chrome Frame is an open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer.

In my words: Hello IE 6 render my shit automagically using Chrome.

Once installed, this meta tag in your html will tell IE to use Chrome’s engine to render the document:

Don’t have Chrome Frame installed yet? These few lines of condition IE logic will check and prompt:

Chrome Frame is installed at the user level if the user does not have admin access (Win!). The documentation states a restart isn’t even necessary once installed but I’ve found in my tests that the browser does need to be fully restarted so I’ve included a post-install alert specifying so in my code.

Forcing a user to install a plug-in to see content is usually a no-no but when it comes to all-or-nothing HTML5 CSS3 webapps that need to span all browsers an devices with a single codebase sometimes those IE6 users can use a little prodding. To clarify, Chrome the web browser does not have to be installed beforehand and installing the plug-in does not install the Chrome browser. Chrome Frame’s name is a bit of a misnomer as the structure of your document is not modified and no DOM frame is used–everything is just rendered beautifully even in IE6 using Chrome’s versions of the WebKit layout engine and V8 JavaScript engine via the IE plugin.

AddType video/ogg ogg
AddType video/webm webm

For WebM support you can download the installer here.

For OGG dowload XiphQT.component from here and put it in your /Library/Components folder

Its worth noting that this will also add Webm and Ogg support to the html5 video tag in Safari.

Other things I’m not a fan of:
- Minimizes the use of scrollbars to the point where you can’t tell if you have scrollable content unless you try to scroll
- Greyscales all Finder’s color icons in the left side toolbox so you can’t tell them apart without looking at them closely
- Puts your hard drives last in the order stuff on the left hand so its often not even on the screen (apparently you can’t even change this)
- never closes files automatically in Quicktime, so as you open videos and command-q the app they just pile up forever.
For the quicktime weirdness, you can type this in Terminal to permanently disable the “resume” feature:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

For a linear right-to-left gradient you could define percentage points like so:
-webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 50%, 100% 50%, color-stop(0, rgba(80,80,80,1)), color-stop(1, rgba(80,80,80,0.5)));
Which reads “start the gradient at wherever “0% width and 50% height” is and end the gradient at “100% width and 50% height”.

This is easy enough to calculate by hand but if you have a project with a ton of regular gradient rotation styles already defined you’re going to need to convert via javascript and some Trigonometry which is the situation I was in. A bit of googling turned up no clear cut method of converting a gradient rotation value to a pair of percentage based X and Y values so here is what I came up with. First the code:

//webkit has updated syntax from -webkit-gradient to a much more sensible -webkit-linear-gradient with angle but
//this is only supported in Safari 5.1+ nd Chrome 10+ so we’ll have to do the math to convert gradient rotation to
//start and end points on a circle
var gradientRotation = 0 – (node.gradientRotation%360);
var centerPoint = {x:0, y:0};
var rotatedStartPoint = KickUtils.pointOnCircle(50, 180-gradientRotation, centerPoint);
var rotatedEndPoint = KickUtils.pointOnCircle(50, 360-gradientRotation, centerPoint);
rotatedStartPoint.x = Math.round(rotatedStartPoint.x+50);
rotatedStartPoint.y = Math.round(rotatedStartPoint.y+50);
rotatedEndPoint.x = Math.round(rotatedEndPoint.x+50);
rotatedEndPoint.y = Math.round(rotatedEndPoint.y+50);
return ‘background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, ‘ + rotatedStartPoint.x+’% ‘+rotatedStartPoint.y+’%, ‘+rotatedEndPoint.x+”% “+rotatedEndPoint.y+’%, color-stop(0, …

Since a numeric gradient rotation value defines a gradient that passes through the center of a circle, you can use the trig function above to calculate the 2 points that line intersects the radius of the circle. Defining the center of the circle at 50, 50 you can get values returned in the -50 to +50 range. Add 50 to that value and tack on a % and voila your 2 percentage based points start and end values are defined.

There doesn’t appear to be a work around..other then not using html text event links.

Usually with any new Adobe/Flash related news comes a Techcrunch article to surmisely bash it with questionable ferocity. These are usually followed up by a ton of anonymous comments on the post echoing the same sentiments. It’s interesting to note that now that comments on Techcrunch are authenticated by way of Facebook’s commenting API practically every single comment is the reverse, as Steven Sacks says in the comments of the article above:

This is interesting. Ever since TechCrunch switched to Facebook comments, all their anti-Flash posts have a slew of comments supporting Flash. Prior to this, all the anti-Flash post comments were predominantly anti-Flash. Good to see all those anonymous posters don’t have the guts to post under their real names AND can’t write negative comments under numerous names.

The real public has spoken.

The first is FZip which can load modify and create zip files in Flash.
Perks: FZip parses ZIP archives progressively, allowing access to contained files while the archive is loading.
Detractors: If not used in an AIR environment which provides a low level deflate method it can’t unzip compressed zip files without your manually injecting an Adler32 Checksum to the file ahead of time. They provide convenient Python and Java code to unobtrusively inject Adler32 checksums in your zip files.

The other is nochump.com’s AS3 Zip Library.
Perks: Can unzip files without the need of injecting Adler32 Checksums ahead of time.
Detractors: Slow as balls.

For a project I’m working on where I have a ton of zip files to parse I find myself using the first and falling back to the latter if the Adler32 Checksum is not found. I’m far from a command line exert but here is a handy line you can place in terminal to recursively scan the working directory for every zip file and add Adler32 checksums via FZip’s handly fzip-prepare.py python script (note that it is only checking for zip files above 1MB):
find . -size +1M -iname “*.zip” | sed -e ‘s/.*/”&”/’ | xargs -I {} python /fzip-prepare.py {} -L1