Object handles user interaction improved.

ObjectHandles, the easy way to add user resizing & movement of objects to your flex application, has been updated.

All of the user interactions when constraints were hit have been completely reworked. Before, you would get some weird resizing/positioning behavior under certain circumstances like when using anchors in combination with minimum sizes.

Play with the demo, now it all makes sense and there shouldn't be many surprises to the user.

http://www.rogue-development.com/objectHandles.xml


(Please excuse the repetitive first line, this blog's feed is picked up by several aggregators, and "ObjectHandles" means nothing to them.)

ObjectHandle component updated

ObjectHandles, the easy way to add user resizing & movement of objects to your flex application, has been updated.

I've completed the SelectionManager class, this allows you to be able to tell which object is currently selected and assures that only one object is selected at a time. In the near future, we'll be adding multiple-object selection.

I've also moved from a mouse-over to a mouse-click scheme for showing/hiding the handles around an object. Turns out that it's a lot more intuitive this way. Several bugs have been fixed as well.

See examples, download source & binaries, etc:
http://www.rogue-development.com/objectHandles.xml

Garden Time

Not all my projects are computer-related. My wife just posted some pictures from the construction of our new raised-bed garden I recently finished. Enjoy.




http://picasaweb.google.com/hughes.jessica/Garden

ObjectHandle updated, and binary now available

I've spent a bit more time on my move/resize flex component and there's now an expanded demo available online.

I've also set up a dump of the latest binary .swc that I've been working on to the website. With any luck this will be of some use to someone.

http://www.rogue-development.com/objectHandles.xml

New in this version:

- Horizontal & Vertical Anchors
- A selection manager

TSP (Boston Area) - Hiring a software engineer

The company I work for is hiring a software engineer in the Boston area. Taking a phrase from Joel we're looking for someone who's smart and can get things done.

The first project you'd be working on will be written in Actionscript 3 and run in Apollo. But we've had no luck finding Actionscript developers so we're looking for a really good software engineer interested in learning a new technology. Right now, Flex, Actionscript and Apollo are some of the really hot technologies in the marketplace.

Before you run away at the mention of Actionscript, Actionscript 3 rocks. It is completely object orientated with a killer API. Almost everything you like about Java, C#, and C++ is in there plus a whole lot more.

Why you should apply:

1) Learn a new hot technology.
2) We make products that aren't evil. (Our software teaches kids!)
3) We're low-stress.
4) Our development environment is the kind you want to work in. We actually have a spec! Engineer's ideas are actually listened to. We try to do things the "right way".

Go here to read the official job posting. I know... the application process on the website sucks, I'm sorry. (Update - Link fixed, the posting was modified and the URL changed)

ObjectHandle source now available

Source is now posted on google code for the ObjectHandle project I've started.

Code:
http://code.google.com/p/flex-object-handles/source

Project Page:
http://www.rogue-development.com/objectHandles.xml

First look at a Flex Component to resize on screen objects.

I've been spending some time working on a flex component to add "handles" to an on screen object to allow an end-user to resize and move it. It's exactly the same type of functionality when you're using design mode of Flex Builder.

Below is the first look at the current progress I've had.



As you might have noticed it has a few bugs and is far from done feature-wise. It you'd like to keep up on it, take a look at the project page.

If anyone knows of a project doing this same type of functionality, please let me know. I hate to duplicate efforts.

Programatically add constraints through Actionscript

Flex Builder has that great "Constraints" UI that allows you to anchor components to their parent that I'm sure everyone has used.


But what happens if you create an object in actionscript and then you want add constraints to it? There is no "top" property you can set to anchor the component to the top. It turns out the constraint system is entirely based on Flex's style system and can be used as follows:

var someComponent:SomeComponent = new SomeComponent();
var style:CSSStyleDeclaration = new CSSStyleDeclaration();
style.setStyle("top", 0);
style.setStyle("horizontalCenter", 0);
someComponent.styleDeclaration = style;

And BAMN, someComponent will be anchored to the top, center of it's parent (assuming it's parent is a container that supports anchors.) Available style selectors are:

1. top
2. left
3. right
4. bottom
5. horizontalCenter
6. verticalCenter

You could also specify the styles in a css sheet, or by adding them to an already existing style.

Edit...

As a commenter has posted you can also use the setStyle method in addition to the various other methods I mentioned. So the following would also work:

someComponent.setStyle("top",0);

Blog Strip / Power of Flex

So I wanted to add a list of recent blog posts to the home page of my website. I searched for about an hour for some javascript snippet to do a nice ajax style grab of my feed and display it. An entire hour I searched before I realized I'm a flex developer. I spent the next 15 minutes throwing together a quick prototype, and another 45 minutes tweaking it. In less time than I spent searching for a premade solution, I wrote my own.

Source, example, etc can be found here:
http://www.rogue-development.com/blogStrip.xml

I am constantly amazed at how easy Flex makes some things.

Google adsense

So I use blogger for this blog, it's always trying to get me to put google adsense ads on the page. After it promising me billions of dollars, I added one. And this is the ad I got


While it doesn't bother me much, that's not part of the first impression I'd like people to get about the blog when they come here.

Notice there's no longer a google ad on the page now...

Maybe I'll try again later.

Automated website testing

There's some really expensive packages out there for automated website testing. These things cost thousands of dollars, usually only run on windows, and are huge bloated software packages. There great for your average QA person to quickly "record" a web session and play it back later.

But developers have different needs than QA folk, and we'd like to do automated tests as well. My requirements are as follows:

1) Cross platform (windows, osx, linux, more is nice)
2) Allows me to simulate all types of requests to a web server / service.
3) Can be integrated into ant for completely hands-off testing.
4) Can verify any element of a page.

The package I've been using for this is called Hatatap.

It allows you to construct o-xml programs that easily fulfill all of my requirements. o-xml is an object orientated programing language that's written entirely in XML. If you have a good XML editor that understands XML schemas, than you get all the nice context sensitive completion you expect from a modern development environment.

Website updates

Last night I spent some time updating my long-neglected personal websites.

Rogue Development - The "dumping ground" for any interesting projects I work on.
http://www.rogue-development.com/

This site is kind of neat. It consists solely of XML and XSLT documents. The XML is transformed by the XSLT on the client side (so it only works in semi-modern browsers) and is formatted by a css stylesheet. If I had cared about supporting more browsers, I could have done the XSLT conversion on the server side, but I don't. You can view-source on any page to see the XML, and you can check out these links for the XSLT and css pages:

CSS
XSLT

You're free to use them, modify them, etc on your site if you wish, just drop me a note letting me know. I like to see what other people do.

Someday, I might write a Flex interface for reading the XML content. Or even better, I wonder if it's relatively easy to create a flex app to author the XSLT documents.

Marc-Hughes.com - My personal "fun" website.
http://www.marc-hughes.com/

The front page is flash, but the rest of the site is the same XSLT as rogue-development with a different css sheet to format it.