I needed a very simple Twitter cache for a project I’m working on. And I was very happy to trade off some realtime accuracy for reliability. In addition to caching the tweets, I also needed to pre-process them into css-able html with clickable links, usernames, and hashtags. The web had a few [...]

Alas, LCDS 3 doesn’t support the notion of transaction (in the sense of a Database Transaction). I assume that somewhere deep within the system transactions are used to ensure correctness of data in the db, but none of this is exposed to the user. Fortunately, it is possible to bundle up a bunch of updates [...]

I just wrote about how to handle special characters in Flex 4 when written as HTML entities in MXML. Now I’ve moved my data with the special characters out of MXML and down into a MySQL database. Data access is provided by a vanilla LCDS 3 backend. I now have a very different problem [...]

I tend to spend a large portion of my development time worrying about the various interfaces across the application. I like to worry about UX (aka the interface between the user and my app). I like to worry about the ORM (aka the interface between the database and my code). And I [...]

Adobe took a big step forward using swfobject.js to handle swf embedding in Flex 4’s index.template.html, but in my opinion they didn’t go quite far enough.
Here are my changes:

Short and sweet, so I can understand what the hell is going on.
Use Google AJAX Libraries API to include swfobject.js.
No IE6 crap.
No Browser History crap.

Here’s my current [...]

Recently, I was caught by a special characters vs. html entities issue in Flex 4. For reference, you can read more about special characters in the text property of a text component in the official docs. And also here on Flex Examples. Unfortunately, neither of these was exactly what I was looking [...]

Once upon a time, in what now seems to be a prior life, I became a published author when my thesis hit the university press. That time has come again. After much effort, the second longest thing I have ever written has been published by InsideRIA. I wrote a two-part article titled [...]

Recently, I needed to do some programmatic animation in Flex for a client project. I was looking to achieve a kind of “mouse following” effect where an object would move towards the mouse even as the mouse itself was moved. And since Grant Skinner just updated his tiny GTween tweening engine, I thought [...]

Continuing my Quest for Cool, one of my favorite aspects of data visualization is user interaction. Interactive visualizations are not only cool, but they can be extremely useful getting information to the user.
Here is a screenshot from Google Analytics showing the main line chart of visitors:

When you rollover one of the points, you get [...]

Axiis is an advanced data visualization framework built on top of Degrafa. And when I say advanced, I mean really advanced. I found my way to Axiis because I wanted the maximum amount of visual control that I could get. Axiis is designed to support any kind of visualization you could possibly imagine, [...]

Another one of my favorite improvements that found its way into Flex 4 is the separation of layouts from containers. The fact that layouts can customized and simply plugged into any container is pretty sweet. It’s a real developer benefit because it makes me faster. I can quickly develop a custom component [...]

Flex 4 introduced an awesome new skinning architecture. Among other things, the new architecture provides significantly better separation between a component and its skin. Flex 4 also promotes the use of states to the point where they are virtually mandatory in any non-trivial app. And that brings us to the question of the day:
How [...]

The Flex 4 gods were kind to us developers when they made the great decision to leave the custom drag-and-drop support unchanged. We just do what we’ve always done: detect the user is trying to drag something via mouseDown or mouseMove and then add both dragEnter and dragDrop event handlers to the drop target. [...]

In Part 1, I covered the basic setup of LiveCycle Data Services 3 Beta sitting on a MySQL database. Now, I’ll get into the Flash Builder side of things, and talk about the Modeler plugin and model driven development.
Setup Modeler Plugin

Get Flash Builder 4 Beta (download)
Get the LCDS Modeler plugin (download)
Install the Modeler plugin:

Unzip [...]

With the beta release of LiveCycle Data Services 3, Adobe has changed the game by bringing model driven development to the forefront. The geniuses from the entity formerly known as Macromedia have put together a compelling product if you are in the business of enterprise RIAs like us. Here are a few choice [...]

The dream of SVG was probably born sometime in the late 90’s. Version 1.0 arrived in 2001, followed by the current version, SVG 1.1, in 2003. For anyone keeping score at home, that’s over 6 years ago, which is like 120 years ago in internet dog years. Also for those at home, [...]

Going from SVG data to a Degrafa Path couldn’t be easier: just copy & paste. You can watch this video tutorial or you can check out this demo.
But there is one trick for Inkscape: even though the coordinate origin on the Inkscape document is the normal cartesian origin in the bottom left and the [...]

The plan is simple, take the nice Degrafa-skinned components from Part 1 and assemble them into a video player powered by the OvpNetStream class from the Open Video Player project.
Design
I knew right away that the design was not going to have any right angles, but I also didn’t want to go with rounded rectangles everywhere. [...]

I’m going to combine my earlier Degrafa skinning efforts with my more recent video work to create a Degrafa-skinned video player. In this post, I’ll build out all the components required for a video player control bar. And in Part 2, I’ll weld the control bar to an Open Video Player OvpNetStream backend.
Button
To [...]

The ability to split up a large application in smaller, more manageable chunks is one of the pillars of enterprise development. The flash platform is littered with examples: AS3 is OO language, MXML components, SWCs, RSLs, SWFLoader, ExternalInterface, etc. In this post, I’m going to focus on using nested SWFs via SWFLoader. [...]

Recently, I’ve been doing quite a bit of video work in Flex and AIR. My main gripe (that I’ll try to rectify below) is that there sure is a lot of info around the web about streaming, FMS, and friends, but almost none about playing local video. Even the Adobe Media Player, which [...]

Before I dig too deep trying to create a Degrafa Skin Explorer (the idea) as an evolution of the Degrafa Button Explorer, I thought it would be a good idea to spend some more time with some basic Degrafa skinning. I managed to create a few button skins previously, but this time around I [...]

Recently, I’ve been playing around with Degrafa in preparation for actually using it on an upcoming project at work. For those that aren’t in the know, Degrafa is a badass graphics framework for Flex. One of my favorite parts so far is the amazing leverage it brings to building custom-styled components. It’s [...]

We’re pretty big on testing at Gorilla Logic, and in the world of Flex that usually means using FlexMonkey to test the UI and using FlexUnit to test the code. Alas, it is a huge pain in the ass to correctly test the many async objects and services inherent in any Flex app with [...]

A while back I started digging into the WindowShade component in Flexlib. I really needed a set of cool collapsable buckets for a project at work, and WindowShade was perfect for the task. Alas, I couldn’t find too much info on styling a WindowShade other than Doug McCune’s awesome example of WindowShade and Degrafa. [...]

Flex is awesome. In many ways, it’s the right tool for the job of bringing beautiful design to the web. I use flex every day at work, and also at home on my own fun projects. Today’s challenge is to take a very simple blog design and re-implement it in flex.
In The [...]

Once everything is done (meaning I have a layout, I have a design, and I have it sliced and assembled), I like to make another pass to optimize both the size of the image files, and the number of files. My two favorite techniques are using Sprites to reduce the total number of images, [...]

The design from the last post is finished, and it follows a very simple blog layout. In this post, I’ll slice the design and turn it into a pretty html page with the magic of Blueprint CSS.
Slice It
Before we get slice happy, we need to think. First, Blueprint is grid-based, so that means [...]

I’ve been in the game for a few weeks now at Gorilla Logic and I’m really enjoying myself. My first task on my first client project was to write my bio. What fun!
So, of course, I started with my usual process of thinking (and thinking some more) before actually doing anything. What [...]

I don’t know how a real designer does it, but when I attempt a design, particularly a blog design, I always start with a simple theme. If the ideas begin to flow, I’ll know I chose well. If not, and I still think it’s a good theme, I’ll visit the usual suspects for [...]

I’m a bad designer. No amount of ego, or sugary coating can change that fact. Whenever I hang out with my coding buddies to talk design, they actually think I might border on decent. It’s either midget aliens piloting their husks or their brains have been pickled from over-exposure to Hibernate mapping [...]

This blog is running Wordpress on Nginx on a 256 slice from Slicehost.  I’ve diligently followed all of the awesome articles by Slicehost’s tutorial master, Pickled Onion.  And I even googled some other great stuff.  But when it came down to PHP, spawn-fcgi, and particularly the Ubuntu way of daemon initialization, I had to blaze [...]

Welcome to the humble beginnings of my blog.  When I start something new, I always try to start with a goal.  And I also believe strongly in having one, and only one, primary goal.  Sure you can have secondary goals, and yes, things certainly change over time.  So…
The primary goal for this blog is my [...]