How to make Safari 4 open tabs at startup

I decided to give Safari 4 a try and the inability to set it to open the last set of tabs at start up is driving me crazy. I found a solution that, although not ideal, works well enough to get me by until Chrome comes out for Mac. Its an easy enough solution:

1. Create a new bookmark folder
2. Add the tabs you want to be opened to this folder and order them
3. Goto preferences and set "new windows open with:" to your startup tabs folder

Now when Safari starts it will load those tabs. Unfortunately, these tabs will also load when you open a new window. And if you happen to have a tab open that you wanted to keep and you close the app its gone. You can go to "History->Reopen all windows from last session" in desperate situations. This isn't as nice as just remembering the tabs that were open (like every other modern browser), but its passable.

Caching Images to Disk with AIR

In an application I'm currently working on, I create images within the application and want to store them to load later. Because I store the image data in a model object that might be used many places in the running application, I keep the data in memory as a BitmapData object. This turned out to be a problem because you can't write BitmapData objects to disk. Instead you have to write the data to a PNG or JPEG and then save the byte array from that object, and reverse the process to load the data. There may be another way but this is the only solution I could find. Here is my class:

package com.effectiveui.models.widget
{
    import flash.display.Bitmap;
    import flash.display.BitmapData;
    import flash.display.Loader;
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.utils.ByteArray;
    import flash.utils.IDataInput;
    import flash.utils.IDataOutput;
    import flash.utils.IExternalizable;
   
    import mx.graphics.codec.PNGEncoder;
   
    [RemoteClass(name="com.effectiveui.models.widget.WidgetCategoryDataModel")]
    public class WidgetCategoryDataModel implements IExternalizable
    {
        public var imageData:BitmapData;
       
        protected var loader:Loader;

        public function WidgetCategoryDataModel(){
            loader = new Loader();
            loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(
                   Event.COMPLETE, handleBytesLoaded);           
        }

        public function handleBytesLoaded(event:Event):void{
            imageData = Bitmap(loader.content).bitmapData;
        }

        public function writeExternal(out:IDataOutput):void{
            var encoder:PNGEncoder = new PNGEncoder();
            var bytes:ByteArray = encoder.encode(imageData);
            bytes.position = 0; // may not be necessary
            out.writeDouble(bytes.length);
            out.writeBytes(bytes);           
        }
       
        public function readExternal(input:IDataInput):void{
            var length:Number = input.readDouble();
            var pngData:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
            input.readBytes(pngData,0,length);
           
            loader.loadBytes(pngData);
        }
    }
}

You can download the class here.

Traction update

I added some screen shots to the Traction website.