Author Archives: Doug

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didn’t have to install anything my ass

I just had a funny IM conversation with my friend who works at Googs, I sent him the link for the Flash globe from Poly9 that I just saw on MXNA. The description reads “Poly9 FreeEarth is a cross-browser, cross-platform 3D globe which does not require any download.” Turns out it wasn’t quite so easy 🙂

Doug McCune: http://freeearth.poly9.com/ eventually we’ll get google earth in flash

Google Employee: i don’t see anything when i go to the page

DM: ha. really? like nothing at all?

GE: doesn’t look like it’s ready for primetime. no earth

DM: well, so much for that then

GE: do you see anything?

DM: yeah, a spinning 3d earth

GE: using firefox? do you need flash 9?

DM: probably. it’s definitely flash player, probably 9

GE: hold on. geez, didn’t have to install anything my ass

DM: haha

GE: don’t have priveleges. hold on. god dammit

DM: haha, it’s not that cool, not worth the effort

GE: oh, i’m sure it’s not. i just want to show you how big a pain in the ass it is. i’ll tell you when i get it…

DM: I’m timing you. I’ll send the report to adobe

Google Employee disconnected

I assume this was a restart. He didn’t come back on IM though, so god knows. So while us Flash/Flex guys keep bragging about 80-90% flash player 9 penetration, we gotta still remember that we can’t claim that anything we make “does not require any download”.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

There are 287,661 lines of code in the Flex 2 Framework SDK

I did a few calculations on the Flex SDK source code. By my count there are 788 files (.as or .mxml) for a total of 287,661 lines of code. Out of that, 87,216 lines are comments (about 30%).

The top 5 biggest classes are: UIComponent (8,407 lines), ListBase (7,414 lines), Container (5,056 lines), DataGrid (4,885 lines), and AxisRenderer (3,441 lines).

Why the hell did I figure this out? Well, I was preparing for my presentation about extending the Flex framework with custom components for tomorrow’s silvafug meeting, and I got curious just how much code there really was in the Flex Framework. If you’ve ever dug into the source code for the framework you know that there’s a lot there, dig deep enough and you’ll find some monster classes that must have taken a bazillion man-hours to write.

The totals above include every .as and .mxml file that is published in the SDK source. There are some classes that are intrinsic classes in the Flash Player, which were not written in Actionscript, and these are obviously not included in the count. Also not included are the Apollo component source files (in case you’re curious that’s another 9,100 lines of code).

I’ve put together an Apollo app that will scan the Flex SDK source directory and tell you these stats, along with breakdowns by class, so you can see wonderfully interesting things like how many private functions each class includes, or how many lines of whitespace are in each file. I’ll be releasing the Apollo app shortly that you can run on your own code. God knows why you’d want to. I guess this is what happens when I get curious, I make useless pieces of software. Woot woot.

Here’s a little screenshot of the Apollo app in action:
apolloapp2.jpg

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

Where have I been? Where am I going?

I haven’t been blogging too much recently, but I thought I’d do one of those “hey, I’m alive” blog posts, and also a put the word out that y’all should come to the silvafug meeting in SF in May and to 360 Flex in Seattle whenever that is. I’ll be speaking at both those things.

Traveling
I’m currently sitting under a thatched roof in El Salvador, somehow there’s a cat-5 jack coming out of the concrete table. Just got back from a trip into Guatemala, and soon I’m off to sail to Nicaragua or Costa Rica. I’ll get back to SF sometime around the first week of May. No Flex work while traveling, although I did consider bringing my new laptop to Central America.

Worst unemployed person ever
I became unemployed at the end of March, even had a sweet retirenement party to celebrate. Turns out I’m really bad at being unemployed and started doing contract work with Universal Mind for a few weeks. Part of me wanted to just sit back, relax, and forget about deadlines and paying work, but the project they got me working on was really interesting, I got to work with some great guys, and all in all had a blast. At least I managed to do most of the work in my bathrobe.

Silvafug and 360 Flex
I’ll be presenting at the silvafug meeting on March 10 in San Francisco. The session will be about custom component development, and Tom Ortega will be leading a training session on the same topic before my presentation. If you’re in the area, come on by Thursday night and tell me how wrong I am about whatever I’m talking about. And if anyone wants to go out for some drinks afterward, I’m always down.

I’ve also somehow managed to convince Tom that I know what I’m talking about (we’ll see if that changes after the silvafug meeting), so I’ll be speaking at 360 Flex in Seattle. I’ll be working out how that presentation will go over the next few months, but the topic will be similar to the silvafug session, basically how to fuck with the Flex framework classes to make the components that you actually want.

So come by the silvafug meeting on May 10 if you can make it. And I’ll try to get back to blogging more once I get back to the States in early May.

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Blogging while boozing

I was out drinking last night in San Francisco with some people after the Ignite event at the Web 2.0 Expo. We’re in a bar, I’m about 8 beers in at that point (thank god for free beer at conferences), and prolific blogger, Ryan Stewart, is playing with his phone. Suddenly he looks up at everyone and says “Hey guys, WPF is called Silverlight.” It’s almost midnight and some little bird is constantly whispering these tech-geek nuggets into Ryan’s ear. So while in the bar, with a beer in hand, Ryan takes out his laptop and starts writing blog posts. Look at the time stamps for his ZDNet posts. He’s got his Silverlight post logged at 11:49 pm and a post about Philo at 12:23 am.

I guess that’s what separates the casual bloggers from the professionals. I wouldn’t trust myself blogging under the influence. Ryan, I salute you.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

Docking ToolBar from Adobe Flex Team added to FlexLib

The Docking ToolBar component that was released by the Adobe Flex Team has been contributed to FlexLib. This component was originally released on Adobe Exchange. The description from the Flex team:

The docking toolbar component collectively helps managing toolbars in an application.

The toolbars can be docked to the top or bottom edges or kept floating within application area. The contents within a toolbar use a flow based layout approach.

A big thank you goes to Matt Chotin at Adobe for supporting the FlexLib project and getting this contribution into the library.

Future updates to the DockingToolBar will be found in the FlexLib project, and bugs and feature requests should be logged here.

Here’s a sample showing off the Docking ToolBar component:

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

List control for the one-armed man – take two

Here’s my second attempt at making a List control for Flex that has the functionality of using the Control and Shift keys, but without making the user actually press the Control or Shift keys. For those poor programmers who have been crippled by RSI, now you can at least drag around list data with your one good hand.

This version is much better than the previous version. Now you click on an item and drag to select multiple items. You can still drag and drop items from one list to another. The only difference is that you must first select the items, then click and drag to move items to the other list. Control-click functionality is the default if you only click one item. If you drag to select items and try to select below the visible items it will scroll the list into view.

Here’s the source.

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

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I joined Qwitter – you should too!

qwitter

Last week marked the end of my employment at Stanford University. It’s been a great 4 years (wow, 4 years?!). The project I’ve been working on has reached a point where I can comfortably step away. This is completely voluntary, and I’m leaving on good terms with everyone at Stanford.

qwitter badge

So as of this moment I’m unemployed. I highly recommend it. I’m not looking for new work for a while. For the next 4 months or so I’ll be traveling and doing a little Flex contracting work. I’m going to try to focus on blogging a bit more, so hopefully I can start posting more frequently. My travel plans are still taking shape, but include some combination of the following:

  1. Sailing along the coast of Central America to Panama. For a few weeks in April I’ll be sailing with my dad, who is currently sailing alone from California to England via the Panama Canal (yes, he is amazingly badass). I’m going to meet up with him somewhere along the way, maybe El Salvador, and sail for a few weeks to Panama.
  2. A few east coast trips. I’ve got friends on the east coast I haven’t visited enough, so I’ll be making a few trips. I’ll be vacationing with my girlfriend in Cape Cod, and I also might make separate trips to DC or NY.
  3. Sasquatch music festival at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state.
  4. An as-yet-undecided European-ish destination. Maybe Turkey, Greece, eastern Europe… this is pretty up in the air, we’ll see if it actually happens.
  5. Denmark for the best rock festival ever, Roskilde.

During and between traveling I’ll be playing with Flex stuff and blogging. I’ll be back home and doing contracting work for most of May. I’ll get back to real life around mid July or August, at which point I’ll be figuring out my employment situation. I am not looking for a job until then.

For now it’s time to enjoy life without worrying about paychecks and early-morning commuting. To celebrate I gave myself this sweet mohawk:

mohawk

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

List control for the one-armed man

This is a little experiment to play with a different method of selecting items in a Flex List control. It allows you to re-create some of the multiple selection options you usually get by holding down the control or shift keys while you select items. But now you don’t need to hold down the control or shift keys. Just play with it to see what I mean, it’s hard to explain.

There was a question on flexcoders that was about something like this. I’m not sure if this little experiment solved the right problem for the original poster, but trying to figure out how to get some of the functionality of using the control and shift keys without using the actual keys was kind of interesting (what can I say… item renderers and list controls turn me on). So this is what I came up with. Another thing to note is that the checkbox acts as a visual indicator only, it is not actually a clickable control.

View the source here.

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

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