You are looking at posts that were written in the month of November in the year 2007.
My friend James is in a radio competition down here in New Zealand, and he needs your help! He needs to get as many people as possible to join his facebook group in the next 5 days, and if he wins, he’ll get a huge Contiki prize.
His facebook group can be found here. Please join! It only takes a second, and he’ll really appreciate it!
Over the weekend my blog achieved the milestone of 10,000 total page views!When I started this blog back in July, I wanted a place to connect with the Flex community and share thoughts and code examples. I had no idea that just four months later over 150 people would be reading my content everyday!
You can see from the graph above (click for a bigger version), that the number visitors per month is growing linearly with 1000 more visitors each month than the month before. (The dip at the end is because the image was taken on 12 Nov 07).
A few weeks ago I wrote about a solution I had found for making flash paper assets behave correctly inside Flex applications. I have been using this solution within my current Flex project, and it works quite well in simple cases. In some more complex cases it simply didn’t work however, and I spent a lot of time tacking down the solution.
The problem can occur when you manipulate the FlashPaperLoader component at runtime (e.g. resize and/or change source). Often when things are changing, the FlashPaperLoader swf isn’t initialized and ready to receive the calls through external interface. This means it can’t relay the sizing instructions to the FlashPaper.
Here’s a weird trick:
1) Go to Google image search
2) Search for anything you like
3) Paste the following code into the address bar and hit enter
javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI= document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5 ); void(0)
I think this only works in Internet Explorer (didn’t work in Opera). It’s still really weird though, and works on any site with images on it.
In a recent project of mine, I needed a container which would lay its child components out in a horizontal manner like an HBox, but unlike an HBox, it needed to wrap the child components into a new row when they exceeded the available width. If the available height was exceeded, the container should then grow downwards if the height property has not been set to a constrained value. If the height is constrained, then scrollbars should appear.
Hot off the press! Google has announced that MySpace and Bebo have signed up to join Google’s new OpenSocial initiative. OpenSocial is a platform which will allow people to use the same applications across all of the participating sites. That’s great for us developers, and great for users too.
Considering that we only heard about OpenSocial a week ago, this is amazing news. In just a few days, the entire social networking world has been shaken up.
I’m watching all this happen with some degree of trepidation I must admit. After Microsoft valued Facebook at $15 billion my fears of a second DotCom bubble spiked a little bit…
The best thing about being a Flex developer is the community! Even though I’m half a world away from most of the other Flex developers, I love the community of like-minded people I can connect to through the net. It looks like I’m not the only person who thinks this either.
The main reason I started blogging was because I wanted to contribute to this community of like minded people. There are incalculable benefits to be gained if we all took everything we’ve learnt developing Flex, and made it available for the rest of the community.
