Recent Articles
Don’t skimp on the curly braces wrapping if statements or other one-liner code blocks in Javascript because minifying/packing that Javascript can lead to avoidable and hard to track down errors, especially in IE which surprisingly cares a lot.
I’m super tired of seeing this bad practice and having it waste my time. You’re just lazy and [...]
If you are loading images dynamically using a Flex 3 Image control and attempting to manipulate the actual bitmap data, say for instance to draw a reflection or auto-center an image, you might have encountered the following runtime exception: “SecurityError: Error #2123: Security sandbox violation: Loader.content: … No policy files granted access.”
This has to do [...]
Adding Facebook / Twitter / MySpace / Digg / Reddit / Bitly share functionality to your ActionScript 3/Flex application
December 18, 2009No Comments
I’m not sure that I need to write anything about the importance of including social sharing tools in any project destined for more than a few people to use, but in case you think I do, here goes:
If you make something that peoples reputations could benefit from being associated with and that thing [...]
Problem
You want a selected item in a Flex 4 List control to keep its highlighting even when a mouse rollout event occurs. By default Flex 4 Lists will execute the rollout behavior even on a selected item which can have unexpected consequences such as deselecting an item.
Solution
There’s no built-in option at the time of this [...]
Making your ActionScript 3/Flex project work correctly in both development and production
December 2, 2009No Comments
Very often there will be multiple environments that your application will be running under whether just for testing purposes or even multiple deployment domains. When running in a dev or test environment it can be useful or necessary to mock input/output or even just modify any urls your app is using if relative addresses aren’t [...]
How to tell if your user is on a Mac in ActionScript 3
November 29, 2009No Comments
Ok, so the real problem here is that the Adobe Flash Player plug-in for the Mac has horrible performance issues (read: sucks) compared to its PC counterpart for reasons easily justified yet still incredibly painful for Flash/Flex developers. In this case, especially if you are doing anything with the Microphone, Camera or Video classes you [...]
Disabling keyboard shortcuts in Flex 4 Lists
November 29, 2009No Comments
Problem
Flex 4 Lists pack a lot of awesome, especially compared to Flex 3 Lists. One of the new (AFAIK) built-in features are keyboard shortcuts for navigating through items in the list including enabling the ability to easily live search through items in the list’s dataProvider. For the Event Planner of vokle.com I needed to show [...]
Displaying the remaining characters available for a Flex 4 TextInput or TextArea
November 27, 2009No Comments
Problem
There are many instances where I need to allow a user to enter free-form text but the amount of text they can enter is limited to a certain number of characters, obviously it is good user experience design to provide feedback to the user on how many characters they have left available to enter so [...]
ActionScript 3 Custom Event Base Class
November 2, 2009No Comments
I still see a steady stream of questions on Flex and ActionScript discussion boards related to effectively using custom events. I can tell you from many hours of experience that custom events are the fundamental basis for transmitting information in any mildly complex Flex/AS3 project and whether they’re Notifications in PureMVC or the wiring for [...]
I am a software developer and project manager located in the Los Angeles area. My current efforts are focused on the real-time web, especially as that relates to collaboration technology as CTO of Vokle Inc. In the past I have dabbled in multi-touch interfaces, mobile applications and software cost estimation tools. Other passions include Chinese language and culture, lifestyle design and absurd cheffery.