SDFUG

Lee Brimelow just put out a great little video introducing some of the cool new features in Flash CS4, and I must say after watching it and I can’t wait to get my hands on CS4. You can check it out at gotoandlearn.com!

Today I was looking for a way to add a nice flip transition to a component I was building and I stumbled across a nice library written by Alex Uhlmann called “Distortion Effects.” Now (as usual) I am a bit behind the times seeing as he wrote this library to showcase at Max 2006; however, luckily for me when it comes to code, age does not matter. Alex has been kind enough to provide the full source code for the libraries as well as a nice example app that lets you play with the various effects.

You can find the full source code and other information regarding these effects on Alex’s blog here:http://weblogs.macromedia.com/auhlmann/archives/effects/index.html

Again, probably a long way past due, but I’d like to send a thanks out to Alex for sharing this source, it made my day a whole lot easier!

As you have surely already read (or watched on Adobe TV), Adobe announced Adobe Flash CS4 today. At our next meeting, we will try to take a deeper look into some of the new features of Flash CS4, as well as some of the other components of the suites. If you can’t wait until the meeting, then go read Keith Peter’s blog to grab a non-Adobe POV on Flash CS4. 

We’ll be discussing new features in the creative suite and viewing some demos supplied by Adobe. 

I ran into an issue today where I was dragging items from a list and having another list updated with the drop data. So lets say for example list A contains 3 items (item1, item2, and item3 respectively), if I dragged and dropped multiple copies of item1, they would properly display in list2; however, when I moused over one of the items in list2 the list seemed to think that their was only one “item1″ object in it’s array collection. The visual result of this was that hovering over one of the item1 objects in list2 would show the over state for the last item in the list (rather than the one that I was actually hovering over). After some digging, I found a property called “mx_internal_uid” that flex uses to keep track of objects in a number of visual components (such as list and datagrid). What was happening was that when dropped the item, a copy of it was being created, and the mx_internal_uid property was being copied over to the new object. The result of this was that the list would break because it handles it’s selection and other state updates by referencing this property. If that made any sense (I’ll try to come back and make this a bit more clear later), check out the solution.

The solution:
The best solution is probably to use strongly type custom data objects in this case (that’s what I did at least), instead of using simple Objects (which is what I was originally doing). The other thing that seems to work is creating a deep copy of the object using the ObjectUtils.copy() method and then setting the “mx_internal_uid” property to blank.

I’ll try to post a more clear explanation of this issue along with a code sample when I get some more time.

Problem:
Yesterday I got SVN all setup on my Mediatemple account, and feeling very accomplished, I checked in a couple of projects that I am working on. I then went on coding, committing changes as I they were made, and generally feeling very good about my new setup. Then last night I went mobile and wanted to work off my laptop for a while, no problem I figured since I can simply check out my source files and work on them from any other machine, this was definately not the case. I checked out the flex project I was working on to my laptop, began making a bunch of changes, then tried to run my project. This is where the problems started. When you commit a flex project into svn, the bin directory (by default) is ignored, and is not checked in with the rest of your project. This may not seem like a big deal, and in fact, in many cases is exactly what you want. The problem is this: when you try to run your project, an error is thrown because the bin directory does not exist, and as such Flex cannot find the html file that is associated with the Application file that you are trying to run.

Solution:
After much googling, and a lot of trial and error, I finally found the solution to my problem and it really has nothing to do with which files get committed into source control. The problem was in how I was checking out the files FROM source control. Using Subclipse in FlexBuilder, when you check out a branch to your local machine, you are presented with a dialogue (”Check out as”) that gives you two options for how your would like to checkout the project. Option 1 is to “Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard,” and option 2 is to “Check out as a project in the workspace.” I had been using option 2 all along, which works just fine if you are running an actionscript only project; however, if you are running a flex project, then you will need to selected option 1 as it will walk you through the steps of creating your bin directory, then when you try to run an application file, flex will automatically create any missing html files in your bin. One other important thing to note is that the above scenario will only work if you do NOT include your .project file in version control. If subclipse finds a .project file in the project you are trying to checkout, it will not give an option to check out the project using the new project wizard.

Problem solved, sanity restored, back to code.

Ok, this may be somewhat obvious to some of you, but it took me a second to figure out, and after a quick google search I’m apparently not alone so I figured I’d post it in the hopes that it will help somone else. in Windows if you want to Run your application in debug mode from flex builder, you can simply hit the F11 key and voila, the project runs in debug mode. Now move over to the Mac, you see that you have the key sequence “Up array, Apple command, and finally F11″, this doesn’t pose too much of an issue other than having to perform origami with your fingers. The issue is that on many Mac keyboards, the F11 key is already mapped to a system shortcut (in my case the volume down option). So every time I tried to run this key combo. to get the project to run, all that would happen was my volume being decreased.

The solution:
Hold down the function (fn) key, then hit apple and F11. The function key overrides the mapped volume down option, and the apple and F11 key tell it to run the project.

For those of you using MediaTemple’s GridServer, you may or may not know that you have the ability to create your own SVN repository. This is a really nice feature to have, as it allows you to have source control over your personal projects (if you’re not doing this, you should really consider it). You can find instructions on how to setup your SVN repository on MediaTempl here: http://kb.mediatemple.net/article.php?id=143.

Once you have your repository all setup, the next step is getting your projects into source control. If you’re using FlexBuilder to build your applications (either Actionscript or Flex/AIR based), you will want to install a plugin called subclipse. Subclipse is a plugin for Eclipse that provides support for Subversion within the Eclipse IDE (basically allowing you to do things such as commit, update, and checkout projects from your repository from a nice gui within FlexBuilder). You can find instructions on installing Subclipse on their website: http://subclipse.tigris.org/install.html

With Subclipse installed, you only have a few more tweaks that you need to allow you to connect to your repository on MediaTemple (the tweaks are required since MediaTemple does not support standard http url’s and instead requires that you connect to your repository over ssh). Luckily for us, Keith Peters over at Bit-101 has written a very nice tutorial on how to get this all working. http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=1060

That’s it! Now you have no reason not to be using source control, unless of course you aren’t using MediaTempl …

This post is in addition to my original post about exporting AS3 stub-code from StarUML. You can find the original post here!

OK. I got everything installed, and it is working so well that I had to write a second post to say quite simply that this thing is BAD ASS! If you’re new to creating UML, it takes a bit of time to get familiar with the terminology used in the StarUML application and to figure out how to make it do exactly what you’d like; however, once you get past the initial learning curve and get your class structures laid out, it will produce beautifully formatted AS3 stub-code for you!

And in case you missed it in my first post, you can find an extremely descriptive and helpful tutorial written by Senocular detailing exactly how to get everything setup and configured here: http://www.senocular.com/flash/tutorials/starumltoas3/

Today I started the process of creating the UML models for a prototype application that I am building and decided that it was time to move on from Grant Skinner’s GModeler and start looking for something with some more features. After about an hour of searching I felt I was at a dead end. I came across a number of blog posts talking about various UML Modeling apps and how they work well for Java and C; however, they don’t have support for Actionscript stub code (which is something that I really want). I kept finding post after post about this elusive project called Saffron that was supposed to be the Holy Grail of Actionscript UML Modelers (and also written on AIR which is just cool). The problem with Saffron is that it apparently doesn’t exist (yet). There have been people talking about it with aniticipation for over a year and there still doesn’t seem to be any actual product (also the site of the developer who started the project is currently down, which doesn’t help to instill any hope in me). I figured at this point I was at a loss, so I headed over to gModeler, started creating a few objects, and decided that it just wasn’t going to wrok. There HAS to be something better out there. So I gave google one more shot, and that’s when I came across a post on Senocular.com discussing how he had just written a plugin for a FREE UML Modeling app called “StarUML” and that it would output AS3 stub code! SUCCESS! I haven’t actually tried it yet (I will as soon as I post this), but so far it’s looking good. He just posted the update a few days ago, and has even included a nice tutorial on how to install the plugins and get it all working (http://www.senocular.com/flash/tutorials/starumltoas3/). Now it’s time to take this baby for a test drive!

Here is the information for the 360|Flex videos that were talked about at last night’s meeting.

1. Install AMP
2. Click “My Favorites” menu at the top.
3. Click “Add RSS Feed” at the bottom.
4. Paste: http://sessions.onflex.org/1733261879.xml