June 2008 Archives « BetaDesigns( Blog )BetaDesigns( Blog )

24Jun/082

Application Version Control in AS3

I thought that I would just write a quick note on how I know which version of an application I am looking at when it has been published to the web. It's all well and good saying its revision 87 from svn but how do you know? Well a simple way is to add it to the Flashplayers custom context menu. Right click to see the custom menu and to view the source

Tagged as: .properties files, Actionscript version control, application version control, ContextMenuItem, custom context menu, flash.events.ContextMenuEvent;, flash.ui.ContextMenu, flash.ui.ContextMenuItem;, Flex application version control, mx.resources.ResourceBundle;, resource bundles, ResourceBundles in Flex, version control Continue reading

24Jun/080

Custom Color Picker Source

Some time ago now I decided as a self improvement mechanism to re-write one of the Flex components from scratch so that I could get my head around the Flex Component Framework. So I set my eyes on the ColorPicker Brave or stupid you decide as this was going to be one of my first components ever, I should have probably started somewhere a bit smaller.. But hey.. It works and I learnt a hell of a lot. and now it's time to share.

Tagged as: buzzword color picker, Color Picker, Components, Flex component development, Kuler, kuler rss, open source, Sourc code Continue reading

19Jun/080

*.CSS files are Whitespaces Sensitive

Just a quick note to say that if your stylesheets don't seem to be applied correctly
Styles in a .css file are white space sensitive so if you place text-align: left it works but if you place text-align : left it breaks the css as it thinks that the tags name is text-align : ( inclusive of the final space between the last letter and the : ) !!

Tagged as: css, stylesheets, whitespaces No Comments

19Jun/085

Profiler Problems in Flex!

After reading an example chapter from Training from the Source : Profiling Flex Applications on InsideRIA I thought ooo! I like using the profiler but i didnt know you could do that! So away I went and opend up one of my apps and clicked Profile.... O no whats going on? No Profiler prompt just straight into the application

Socket closed.
Socket closed.
Socket closed.
Flex Profiler No activity 60 seconds after connection.

and then quiet

Tagged as: Flex, Flex Profiler No activity 60 seconds after connection., http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-12869, InsideRIA, mm.cfg, PreloadSWF, Profiler, ProfilerAgent.swf, Socket closed., Training from the Source : Profiling Flex Applications, workspace/.metadata/.plugins/com.adobe.flash.profiler/a Continue reading

5Jun/082

Using describeType( ) and getDefinitionByName( ) to return a Dictionary of public static const

Wow that was a big title!
Ok i know its not something you would usually have to do but I think this is useful anyway when you have a large list of public static constants declared in a class and you want to somehow loop through them without having to place them in an array or dictionary manually. For example i was writing a Translation utility class today and i needed to add this list of supported languages.

Tagged as: ActionScript, describeType( ), dynamic language translation, flash.system.Capabilities, flash.system.Capabilities.language, Flex, getDefinitionByName( ), language translations, Static CONST Continue reading

3Jun/082

Canon Buzzwords goes Live!

The application went live on Friday lunchtime at http://www.canon-europe.com/buzzwordbuster in support of Canon's attendance at "DRUPA", the "World Cup" of Print Industry events!.

(The application is also available in German at http://www.canon.de/druck_glossar).

There were some interesting challenges presented with this application such as

Bilingual
Deeplinking ( without the use of JavaScript )
PureMVC Framework
Component Driven.

The problem with the Deeplinking was the fact that Canon uses a content management system that doesn't allow you to add any JavaScript to the Page! Not even as an include. This posed a big problem with the app due to the fact that Deeplinking was requirement of the brief. As you may or may not know Deeplinking is enabled in Flex via an external folder called history and within this folder you have history.js and history.css files both of which are needed to allow Deeplinking to work.