Author Archives: Doug

Flex/Flash/Actionscript

Ready for 360Flex and a bit about my session

Well, almost ready. Mohawk? Check. Silly shirt with my silly face on it? Check. Presentation? Ummm, it’s coming along…

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Here’s the brief description I finally wrote up about my custom component development session:

This session will focus on advanced component development techniques. We’ll cover some of the basics to make sure everyone’s up to speed, but the focus will not be on updateDisplayList() or createChildren(). Topics that will be covered include: diving deep into the framework to find the meaning of life, overriding the framework to create the components you actually want, using events to communicate from your components, using styles and setting default styles for your components, ‘underriding’ base framework classes like UIComponent, MXML templating, how to deal with pesky private variables when overriding a class, and how to steal other people’s ideas (and code) to make you look smart.

I’m still working on the presentation and I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to take up an hour and 20 minutes. Like that description hints at, I’m going to try to focus on what I consider the “non-standard” stuff in component development. I’m not going to make a Hello World Flex component. I’ve got a few cool tricks to show (at least I think they’re dorky cool), and I’ll cover some of the harder stuff like doing good event dispatching from your components and using styles correctly. If I run out of content the session will devolve into a “bitch about what you don’t like in the Flex framework” session, and I have a feeling we’ll be able to fill up a substantial block of time with that.

Want to hang out? Come to 360Flex.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

The making of TileUI

I’ve posted a video that shows the progress that I made during the first 12 days of working on TileUI. For about the first 2 weeks I saved a snapshot of the progress I had made (I tried to save a snapshot each day, but I missed a few). The video below is a combined video of each of these, it starts at day 1 and goes through day 12.

I stopped taking daily snapshots (and I stopped making much progress) after the first two weeks because I started working on a contracting gig. I’ve gotten much further with the software now (as the previous AIR demo video shows). But I’m not making the day to day advances like I did the first few days (man, if only I could be unemployed forever).

Here’s a quick breakdown of how things went:

Day 1: Learn Actionscript Physics Engine. By the end of the day I had a decent physics simulation running that allowed me to throw around particles. Prior to this project I had never worked with APE, it’s a solid physics engine (my only complaint is how CPU intensive it is).

Day 2: Learn PaperVision 3D. Combine PaperVision with APE. Prior to this I hadn’t played with PV3D and I figured it was about time I learn. By the end of the day I had figured out the basics of PV3D and managed to map APE particles to 3D tiles in PV3D. Damn, these libraries are good.

Day 3: I got the tiles to display images. And I got the basic selection system working where you can lasso a set of tiles and they get grouped. The group was just a messy group of tiles, but it was a start.

Day 4: Added Flickr support to load tiles straight from Flickr. Added dynamic sizing of tiles.

Day 6: Made grouping tiles put them into 3D stacks. Added double clicking tiles to do something based on the tile content, ie open larger Flickr image. (I don’t remember why I don’t have a day 5 or 8 snapshot)

Day 7: Improved Flickr support, ability to page through results, load multiple search results, etc. Added spiral stack.

Day 9: Added the menu system. Added the twist menu item to twist a stacked pile. Allowed breaking piles you made.

Day 10: Added the fan layout method.

Day 11: Added the grid layout method.

Day 12: Added the leafing layout method.

So what?
I thought this was cool because it shows a) how awesome and fast developing in Flex/AS3 is and b) how badass open source community libraries for Flex are. I was able to grab these open source libraries and within a few days have something pretty sweet to show for it. A big thanks to everyone behind the PaperVision project, and to Alec Cove for the APE engine. You guys make this stuff easy.

At last count I am using 10 different open source libraries in the TileUI project in one way or another.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

Coming to FlexCamp at Adobe?

I’ll be at Adobe this Friday for the FlexCamp event. If you’re there then find me and say hi (sadly no mohawk at the moment, so I’m not as easy to spot). I’ll probably be one of the people drinking in the back. I don’t know how the whole sessions thing is going to work. I suggested a session on the FlexCamp wiki to talk about Flex community libraries (like FlexLib, Papervision, etc). So I have no idea what the deal will be in terms of these attendee-suggested sessions, but people on the wiki have shown some interest in the community library session, so if you want to come talk about all the cool libraries that are available I guess we’ll try to do that at some point in the night.

If you want to play with tileUI I’ll have a demo (both as a web-based Flex app and a desktop AIR app) you can try to throw tiles of your face all over the place.

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

I’m on the Flex Show!

The Flex ShowThe first half of my interview for the Flex Show is up online. Listen to me blabber. We go over 360Flex, FlexLib, a bunch of open source Flex libraries, and I talk about my thoughts on Flex component development.

We had some technical issues (all my fault). My mic wasn’t nearly as good as Jeff’s, which is pretty clear in the audio. And my internet connection was piss-poor, so while he could hear me just fine, I only heard bits and pieces from Jeff’s end, which made it a little difficult to have a conversation. I think Jeff edited it a bit to make it sound like we were actually talking, but often he asked a question and I waited for him to type it out before I could answer it. And to top it all off my recording program froze up before the end of the interview, so the last bit is a backup recording that Jeff thankfully made. But what else do you expect from a tech podcast? 🙂

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

FlexLib in the wild

I’ve started noticing FlexLib components out in the real world. It’s a pretty cool feeling to launch some Flex app and suddenly realize that some component you wrote is being used. Here are a couple of screenshots of a few Flex apps that I’ve seen using a few components from FlexLib.

salesbuilder_flexlib_supertab.jpg

Salesbuilder demo app by Christophe Coenraets
Uses the SuperTabNavigator. This is a great use the SuperTabNavigator. By setting the tabs to be rectangular and skinning the close button on the tabs, it ends up looking great. Download the air app, play with it, and notice how super the tabs really are.

synchronicity_flexlib_supertab_prompting.jpg

Synchronicity by Eric Cancil and team (sorry, I only know the name of the guy who blogs it)
I was using this app to test it out and watch some recorded performances and then I noticed that the tabs use the SuperTabNavigator (see those blue tabs with the close button?). I also noticed that the form fields use what looks like the PromtpingTextInput control (see the fields that say Firstname, Lastname, and City?).

agile_flexlib_accordion.jpg
AgileAgenda by Marc (don’t know last name)
Uses the Horizontal Accordion.

Also, I just started a contract working with a Flex startup here in the Bay Area. When I got set up with the project files I noticed that in the /lib directory was flexlib.swc 🙂 They’re using the Highlighter component.

If you’re using a FlexLib component in a Flex app, I’d love to know about it. Send me an email if you want. It would be interesting to try to figure out which components are used most.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

tileUI Desktop demo video

Here’s a demo video of tileUI Desktop running as an AIR app. The video shows drag and drop of local files into tileUI, drag and drop photos from iPhoto, using motion detection on a webcam to take pictures, extracting contents of a zip archive and removing a subset of tiles from a stack.

Audio is kind of low, sorry about that.

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