Blogs

ActionScript 3 Photobucket API Basics

Posted Fri, 2008-10-10 07:11 by richard.bezemer

So by popular demand, and just because it's fresh on my mind, I've revisited the Photobucket photoflow example. This version of the app goes a step further and uses the full blown ActionScript 3 Photobucket API. This API is actually relatively new and I was actually working on a similar interface to their API when they released theirs.

Stylesheets and mx_internal

Posted Thu, 2008-10-09 21:45 by richard.bezemer
To make a long answer short... they don't work well together. basically if you want to set a style property on a CSSStyleDeclaration and you have mx_internal declared in your class (i.e. you are overriding a flex sdk component such as a button or list) then you will get weird ambiguous reference warnings like the following: Id 1000: Ambiguous reference to setStyle The solution is simple, instead of declaring use namespace mx_internal you just have to scope each of the variables or functions you want access to. i.e. mx_internal::adobe_hidden_variable.

Creating a php proxy for flash

Posted Thu, 2008-10-09 10:16 by richard.bezemer
So I'm planning on updating my photobucket samples, but I wanted a live flash file on my site instead of the crappy static image I had before. Unfortunaly since the coverflow component requires access to the BitmapData to create the reflection, loading any external images will throw an error.

Flex - Adding icons to a ToggleButtonBar

Posted Thu, 2008-10-09 01:28 by richard.bezemer
This was one annoying problem, I wanted a single icon on each button on my toggle button bar but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what was going on. I had set the icon property in my buttonStyle in my applications stylesheet, but my icon was nowhere to be found.

Finally after pullling my hair out for a while, a trip to flexexample found me what I was looking for. The ToggleButtonBar (and any navigation component) uses the data provider supplied to it to pull out the icon resources for each button, so the dataprovider was overriding my stylesheet with null.

Strength of Canada's economy

Posted Wed, 2008-10-08 16:45 by richard.bezemer
Ok, I know it's a coding blog for the most part, but I thought this article was a excellent read on why Canada's economy isn't going down the drain like everyone elses. To me this is exactly how regulation of the banking industry should take place.

9-slice scaling

Posted Mon, 2008-09-22 20:29 by richard.bezemer
Here is a pretty good write up on using 9-slice scaling in Flex to make sure your resources scale properly when you are skinning controls, it's pretty easy concept, just hard to find in the flex documentation.

Flex skinning example

Transparent List in Flex

Posted Mon, 2008-09-22 09:28 by richard.bezemer

So I wanted a list that had no layout information, or a List where you could only see the items in the list, no selection colours, no borders, no background, etc... I spent a lot of time racking my brain trying to figure out the best way to do this. Finally out of desperation I looked at the api and a few related blog posts and the answer was simple. Flex provides support for this in the base list class, so just extend the List class and tell it to not draw anything. How simple is that!

Here is the code to do it:

Monitoring Memory usage in C++

Posted Wed, 2008-09-17 08:34 by richard.bezemer
Wow it's been a long time since I posted last. Anyway I found this very indepth article on creating tools to assist in debugging memory usage problems in c++. I've always been interested in the behind the scene's working of memory analysers and this is a great read. Monitoring Memory Usage - Gamasutra Now if my other projects ever slow down I might just get a chance to play with some of these things.

Telus is Evil

Posted Sat, 2008-06-07 21:24 by richard.bezemer
Does this article scare anyone else as much as it scares me? I've seen this mentioned for a while, but it really hit home when it's companies you are used to dealing with in Canada. This subscription based internet site business model goes against the very foundation of what the internet was based on.

Why do people still dislike C++

Posted Sat, 2008-06-07 08:32 by richard.bezemer
Recently this article from Mark Roulo from way back in 2001 made the rounds on reddit. He talks about how difficult c++ is as a language and why it should never be used for a large project. He goes into great detail about his interview questions designed to frustrate the most seasoned of C++ developers and spends a lot of time berating the use of pointers in C++. I have a real problem with kind of article. They focus way to much on the c side of c++ and not the ++ part.