Finding a good Caliper or measuring tool that is both cross-platform and FREE seems to be quite difficult. PixelPerfect is a good starting point but not really as useful as a real caliper. So I decided to create myself a CALIPER application for Adobe® AIR™ Project Page or directly from the Adobe MarketPlace

Just a quick post mostly as a reminder to myself on how to easily create Icons for your Adobe AIR applications.
Once the application has finished Initializing i add a button to the main view. that calls a method called takeSnapShot( e : MouseEvent ); that writes the application out to the desktop as a PNG file.

 
private function takeSnapShot( e : MouseEvent ) : void
{
  var bm : BitmapData = new BitmapData( Capabilities.screenResolutionX,
Capabilities.screenResolutionY, true, 0x00FFFFFF );
 
       bm.draw( view );
 
	var ba : ByteArray;
	var pnge : PNGEncoder = new PNGEncoder( );
	     ba = pnge.encode( bm );
 
  var file : File = File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath( "SnapShot.png" );
  var filestream : FileStream = new FileStream( );
     filestream.open( file, FileMode.WRITE );
     filestream.writeBytes(ba);
     filestream.close();
}
 

Forgot to post about this but redbullracing went live last month and i was in charge of creating the flash homepage. It was a simple but interesting project, most notably the distortion effects that are applied to it. Apparently they have caused a lot of people to think their monitors were broken! I blogged about some of these effects here I also made a little countdown timer that lets you know how much time is left until the next race. Which was kind of neat as it had to be localized to the users current location.

They have just posted a security alert over at Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team Website regarding false links on social networking sites that tell you to download un-official versions of the flash player that have malware installed on them..

So be careful

I needed to build a simple Password Strength indicator much like the ones you find on google registration pages. Using some simple RegExp ( Regualar Expressions ) it wasn't that hard.
Below is a simple example that uses the class to display the security level as well as updating a HBox to show a visual indication of the quality of your password.
The crieteria for the regular expressions are to check Capital letters, standard letters, numbers and none word characters to build up the quality level Right click to view source

 
package co.uk.BetaDesigns.utils.string
{
  public class PasswordStrength
 {
    private static var _strength : Number = 0;
    private static var _regSmall : RegExp = new RegExp( /([a-z]+)/ );
    private static var _regBig : RegExp = new RegExp( /([A-Z]+)/ );
    private static var _regNum	: RegExp = new RegExp( /([0-9]+)/ );
    private static var _regSpecial : RegExp = new RegExp( /(\W+)/ );
 
   public static function checkStrength( password : String ) : Number
   {
			_strength = 0;
 
     		if( password.search( _regSmall ) != -1 )
     		{
     			_strength ++;
     		}
     		if( password.search( _regBig ) != -1 )
     		{
     			_strength ++;
     		}
     		if( password.search( _regNum ) != -1 )
     		{
     			_strength ++;
     		}
     		if( password.search( _regSpecial ) != -1 )
     		{
     			_strength ++;
     		}
     		return _strength;
    }
    public function PasswordStrength( se : SingletonEnforcer )
    {
	//Force it so the user can't get here;
    }
  }
}
class SingletonEnforcer{}
 

The guys over at adobe have put together some good free video's on getting started in Flex, Currently 3 whole days worth of stuff!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

Ok so I was given the challenge of creating a TV style distortion effect for a project im working on. The obvious solution for this was to use a sound wave and create a distortion effect based on the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum( ); method in combination with a DisplacementMapFilter to build a distortion effect for any Sprite in an Application or indeed the application itself. As you can see in the example below you can change the size of the pixel distortions by increasing the intensity value. Furthermore if you mouse over objects they are registered with the distorter class to allow for the distortion to stop, you can turn registering on / off by selecting the relavent checkbox's. You can also play pause and stop the effect using the buttons.

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

This comprises of making just two files one of which is a singleton class that can be used for every project you want to add version control to and the second is a VersionControl.properties file which you update before you publish a new version of your application lets take a look at that file first

#Each item takes the same params as the ContextMenuItem class
#and is seperated by and & ampersand
#caption:String = caption Value : String,
#separatorBefore:Boolean = false,
#enabled:Boolean = true,
#visible:Boolean = true
#In addition each item supports a url variable just add
#&YOUR URL GOES HERE;
Version=Version 0.1&false&false&true;
url=Developer:A McCormick&false&true&true&www.goeshere.com
viewSource=ViewSource&false&true&true&www.goeshere.com

The Second class controls what these properties do i know its a long class but its fully commented. ( right click the grey square above and choose view source to see the VersionController class ).
Basically it loops through the VersionControl.properties file and builds context menu items based on the values, adding the ability to include links as well.
And finally all you have to do is call getInstance( this ); in your main application file.

<!--[CDATA[
 
			import VersionControl.VersionController;
 
		]]-->

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. I haven't looked at the code for this in a long long time so be gentle.. In addition there are many improvements that could be made, and I fully intended on implementing them, unfortunately time has got the better of me and I have no real reason to implement such things as multiple rss feeds ( kuler is really slow and not 100% reliable ). A choice to use squares / balls .. anything else you like as the renderer for the colors.

However it does have lots of other cool features like::

Color grouping

Nice shiny 3D balls for the color swatches.

Kuler Lookup facility ( optional just set Kuler = true/false );

Can be used exactly the same as the Flex Color picker so you can just swap it into existing projects.

OK Just right click to view the source

This is mostly based on the Flex Color Picker so feel free to use it in your own projects improve it and just give me a shout as I would love to see it implemented in real life projects personal or otherwise.

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 : ) !!