What I Have Been Doing Since My Last Blog Post
It has been a while since I have posted to my blog. A friend asked me what I've been doing with myself, since obviously I have been too busy to post. Here's my list:
Fiddling with technical problems recording audio conversations via Skype (and failing)See gotoAndSay()Re-re-recording a podcast (more on that later)See gotoAndSay()- Forming the new and improved Adobe User Group of Atlanta (was the Atlanta Macromedia User Group)
- Recreating the AUGoA Web site
- Finding a permanent place for AUGoA to meet
- Looking for new employees for the new Roundbox Costa Rica office
- Planning a trip to Costa Rica
- Planning a Adobe User Group of Costa Rica
- Creating a AUGoCR Web site
- Learning Flex 2 Builder
- Learning Actionscript 3
- Learning how to better communicate between Flex 2 and Coldfusion
- Learning how to use Coldfusion gateways to create an instant message robot
- Learning how Yahoo Maps API works with Flash, Flex and Javascript
- Relearning how Flash Media Server works
- Learning more about Flash Lite 2
- Learning how to best implement AJAX
- Applying all a learn to a new "top-secret" project
- Redesigning a new "top-secret" project
So, yeah, I have a few things going on professionally that are keeping me from posting right now. But do not fret, as my new "top-secret" project gets moving forward, I am certain that my post will become more frequent and more interesting.
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I'm a Failure at Creating a Tool Tip for a Flash MX 2004 DataGrid
My situation is this: we have a long title inside a cell in a DataGrid. It's too long for the on-screen area we are working with (The real problem is that the client's product's names are too damn long!). So I said, obviously while smoking crack, "we should add a tool tip to the data grid!"
What the hell was I thinking?!?
I put together an example (oh-my-god-I-did-it-in-as1-on-purpose) to show here as the project code is too complicated to make any sense. This example was created to remove any rogue code elements.
The code I created works fine up to a point. The tool tip appears most of the time. But every now and then a "I" cursor, or edit cursor shows up and a new rollOver event gets fired.
For instance, roll into the area to the right of the price. Looks nice, eh? Now roll your cursor across the "M M M" of the title; you'll see a rapid-fire set of events making the tool tip flicker. Shouldn't there only be one "itemRollOver" event being fired? What the heck is firing off these events and making the cursor change? Is the lable (or whatever is created to put the text into it) firing off a rollOver event?
Does anyone have any furthur insights into this?
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October AtlMMUG Meeting: Macromedia Presents Macromedia Studio 8!
Yeah, that's right! Thursday, October 6 is the day that Macromedia is coming to Atlanta to show off all the new features of the recently released Studio 8.
Take a look at the event information here!
Only 50 seats available, so RSVP here!
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Open Source Flash Projector Replacement: Interesting First Thoughts
This week on the OS Flash list Darron Schall brought up a subject that interests me deeply: an open source Flash Projector replacement.
Mind you, no effort is underway. Darron merely made a brave suggestion to open up discussions. I don't know of any C, C++ or C# programmers ready to take this effort on.
Speaking for myself, I have had problems with commercial projector replacements in the past but nothing that makes me think that an open source project would be all that much better. With the rare exception of the Screenweaver tale of woe, the commercial products have been good values for what they deliver.
Here at Roundbox we've used Macromedia Director, Northern Codeworks' SWF Studio and Multidmedia's Zinc in project over the past two years. We select a projector replacement for various reasons; file size, features, plug ins, power. I strongly believe that Director is the best of these due to it's integration with Flash (I mean, who is going to integrate better than Macromedia?) and Director's extenability through Xtras, but there are price barriers and learning curves to consider. I feel cautious about pushing the capabilities of the other products because, frankly, some of the things that we do with Flash aren't exactly mainstream; we know that Director can handle and often assist in accomplishing some of our more bleeding edge goals. Other projector replacement products seem very passive and there is no way for me to assist myself since there is no authoring language like Lingo available for these products. And I don't see any of these products going open source any time soon (although having Screenweaver as open source would be fantastic!).
So, keeping all this in mind, I am offering my list of "must-haves" for my fantasy open source Flash projector replacement:
- Multi-platform (Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linus)(with feature parity if possible)
- File System Access (create, edit, copy and delete)
- Extended System Information (Registry access, resolution control,...)
- SQLite Support (a suggestion per the OS Flash list that I really like)
- Plug-in Architecture for custom plugins (like SQLite)
- Powerful Debugger
What would your Flash projector replacement have?
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I've been MXNA'd!
Greetings to all of you who are reading my blog for the first time. This morning I awoke to an email from the fine folks at the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA) stating that I have been added to their list of aggregated blogs!
So let's review who I am for any of you newbies: My name is Leif Wells. I am Director of Multimedia Services for Roundbox Media, a company in it's fifth year of providing interactive product and services. At Roundbox, I get to manage Jesse "JesterXL" Warden. I have been involved with interactive media since the early '90's and have strong skills using most of the Macromedia Product line. I live and work in Atlanta, Georgia. I am the Manager of the Atlanta Macromedia User Group (AtlMMUG).
I wrote a blog manifesto back in August but I seem to have fallen short on some of my commitments therein.
So, welcome to any and all. I will be writing about thing to do with Flash, Actionscript, Director, Flex,... well, you get the idea. Take a look at the "Archives by Subject" sidebar for an idea of what's been going on.
Super Special Thanks to Ray Camden for providing the code for this blog. I just saw that he has updated BlogCFC to version 3.7. Thanks Ray! That's one more thing for me to change on this site in my "spare time". ;-)
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FAME: Why I Switched (Part Three: ASDT)
The Actionscript Development Tool
Just because I can type some ECMA script into a document inside Eclipse and save it with the .as file extension doesn't mean I am doing anything exceptional. Sure, it's an Actionscript file that the Flash IDE will compile, but let's face it -- I could do that in Notepad. So I turned my eye to the world of Eclipse plugins.
Editor's Note: Speaking of plugins, reader "Trond Ulseth" mentioned that we can find over 800 Eclipse plugins at www.eclipse-plugins.info. Thanks, Trond. And thanks for reading.
A quick Google search turns up this link. The Actionscript Development Tool (ASDT) is the Actionscript plugin being developed by Peter Schreiber and other developers. ASDT is currently at version 0.0.7 so I didn't have a lot of hope for it being perfect. Not to mention that the last build of the product was in late February. I do not personally know the developers that contribute to the project, but I do know that more than two months without an update is not a good sign. I have joined the discussion list to see if there is anything going on, but Sourceforge mail server keeps delaying my message to join the list (what's up with that?).
ASDT gives you colorized coding. This is nice. Being able to see key words and commented code as different colors is very helpful especially for old eyes like mine. ASDT also gives you code hinting: if I enter "var zozo:" a pop-up code hint box will appear with a list of items that could appear behind the colon. Better than the Flash IDE, this list includes all the imported classes for that class, and the class that you are working in as well. Nice.
Although coding Actionscript files in Eclipse with the ASDT installed is better than coding without it, it has a lot to be desired. I am not trying to be negative here, just realistic. I'd love seeing the line error hints that the Java files have as well as the little icon by the file name in the file's name tab and in the Package Explorer window.
But before you get disappointed and cry out "why have you taken me here then?" let me add one thing: in the Actionscript 2 preferences there is an item labeled "MTASC". This is where things get very interesting.
Tomorrow: MTASC
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FAME: Why I've Switched (Part Two - Eclipse)
(Part One)What is Eclipse?
The web site supporting Eclipse says that the Eclipse IDE is "is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular." Well, that doesn't explain a lot.
To me, Eclipse is an environment that I can edit a lot of different code-oriented documents at the same time, no matter what kind of files they are; .java, .xml, .html, .jsp,& you get the idea.
Also, for Java files there is window that outputs the results of compiling the file. For the Flash-only coders out there, it's kind of like hitting the check mark in the Actionscript pane only 100 times better. It tells you where all the problems are and marks them in the document window while you type. A much nicer experience than that of the kind of mystery-meat error messages we tend to get in the Output window -- and that method of feedback has 0% interactivity. Well, you do get to scroll a lot when you have more than one error.
You could think of Eclipse as something like Dreamweaver for documents that compile (Well, you could use it for the things that Dreamweaver does really well, too, but that'd be your choice. I'll stick with Dreamweaver.). But I wasn't looking at Eclipse to create HTML, CSS or XML. I was looking for a good IDE to compile Java. And that it is.
Downloading and installing Eclipse is a breeze. Just go to eclipse.org and download the Eclipse SDK. A reminder to all of you Flash-only coders: there is no installer. What the Java coders normally do is create a folder for the application and then put the application inside there. For instance, my drive has a folder named "C:\ eclipse\eclipse-SDK-3.0.2-win32". Inside that folder is yet another eclipse folder where you can find the eclipse.exe file. Double-click that and away you go. It's really that simple.
While you are in that folder, please take a look around. There's a lot to see. One of the most important folders, of course, is the plugins folder. Plugins are one of the things that make Eclipse so powerful. Programmers create plugins to handle all kinds of needs: Javascript, Perl, Coldfusion. There are over three hundred listed here for all kinds of occasions.
Eclipse can take care of all of my document types, even my Actionscript files. But, as usual, I want more! I want code-hinting and code coloring like the Flash IDE gives me and like the Java documents have inside Eclipse. I immediately began to look for an Actionscipt plugin.
Tomorrow: Actionscript Development Tool
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For Those of You Who Remember Fontographer:
This press release tells of how FontLab is now the exclusive distributor of Fontographer!
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FAME: Why I've Switched (Part One: Introduction)
A fellow employee and Java developer decided to leave Roundbox Media recently. Although quite a few things went through my head because of this departure, I do not believe that one of them was that my daily workflow stinks
Let's face it. Most of the time we don't see where our workflow slows us down. We're too buys working. Frankly, I was beginning to depend on Flash MX 2004 taking a long time to compile my projects. I could walk my dog, call a friend or deal with problems that my team may be having. You don't realize how much of you time gets wasted because "that's the way I do things" or "I've always done it that way" excuses. That is, until you change your workflow. Then you realize that it makes no sense to repeatedly go through ten steps to do something when you could do it all at once. Or that the tools you are using to do certain things were redundant.
The change in my workflow in the past two weeks was the inheriting of the Java code from the departing developer. The project was just getting to the point where we would be adding the Flash <=> OpenAMF <=> Java communication when the original developer turned in his resignation. It was decided at that time for the developer to complete all the tasks possible before leaving, and I would take over where he left off.
Let me make this very clear: I would not call myself a Java developer. Although I can alter code and eliminate problems, I am a beginner at best. So I needed to figure out the best way to complete this task. Since I was doing a new job, I needed to find the right tools for it.
Why Look For Alternatives?
Honestly, I wasn't looking for alternatives to coding inside the Flash IDE. Really. Jesse Warden and I have had several conversations about how he and I were the last two serious Flash developers that still used the Flash IDE to input code. Everyone else, it seemed, was using external editors. Kenny Bunch even admitted to using emacs to code his Actionscript. But I have always been a Graphical User Interface (GUI) type of guy. And an ardent Macromedia supporter.
It was just that using the tools I knew all at the same time the workflow was impossible. I ended up with a screen full of windows. I had Flash MX 2004 open to edit my .fla and .as files. My Netdebugger.swf file was running. To peek into the MySQL database, I had my old copy of MySQL Control Center open. To deal with Java and XML files, I had Dreamweaver MX 2004 open. I had a few Cygwin windows open: one to start and stop my Tomcat server, one to review my Tomcat server's output file, one to run Ant to compile my Java files, one to load or reload my data into MySQL. Then I had a few Windows XP windows open. Don't forget to throw in my email client, my instant message client and window and a browser window (thank God for tabbed browsing)
Add it all up and you end up with an Alt-Tab key combination nightmare.
Looking over the shoulder of one of the Java developers at the office I noted that he, too, had made a change to his workflow. He had begun to use the Eclipse IDE. It was already installed on my computer, so I thought I might give it another try.
More tomorrow.
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Flash Player and the Yahoo! Toolbar: Beating the dead horse.
Finally, the news has broken about the Yahoo! Toolbar being bundled with the Flash Player. (You know it's bad when the folks at /. get to chew on it.)
Yes, that's right. Someone (and I won't call them and idiot) decided that it would be a great idea to leverage the Flash Player market to distribute the Yahoo! Toolbar.
I don't wish to add to the fear, uncertainty and doom (FUD), but let me try to see if I can make a few points that can help Macromedia see why this is a bad idea:
- One of the biggest selling points for using the Flash Player in corporate projects was that the player download was small and simple. Adding the step to the process where you have to opt-out of getting the Yahoo! Toolbar complicates matters. Yes, I understand that the Yahoo! Toolbar download is only presented to Internet Explorer users who have never installed the Flash Player. But just who the heck do you think that will effect? Only every new corporate customer out there.
- Suppose one system administrator at one of my client's offices ignorantly decides to ban Flash because "someone on SlashDot said it installs spyware". My company could begin losing millions of dollars in future business. I am not exaggerating. Apparently, that is something that no one at Macromedia thought about.
- Suppose more than 1000 corporations decide similarly. What has Macromedia done? Perhaps kill all the potential projects that use Flash. No more rich Internet applications. No more claims of "the most downloaded video player on the Internet". More than five years of effort and good will a waste.
- I realize this is a lot of "what if" speculation. But consider this: why would you even want to risk everything you have worked very hard to create?
I'd also like to point out to Macromedia, as I am certain others have, what the nutty idea of bundling did to the Shockwave Player. History *does* repeat itself if you don't actually learn from it.
Macromedia, please remove all bundling from all the player downloads not just the Flash Player. They aren't good for developers, they aren't good for developer's customers, they aren't good for rich internet applications, they aren't good for business.
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