Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMar 3rd, 2008 | 4 Comments
The Flex SDK is finally fully open-source. So I thought I’d have a little fun and implement my own Binding classes to be used when using the [Bindable] metadata tag in an ActionScript 3 project.
The first thing I did of course was to checkout the Flex SDK from subversion. They’ve got instructions on doing all that in their wiki. The wiki also has some great instructions for downloading and installing ANT and the other things you’ll need to build the SDK. Look further down on the previously linked to page in the section “Building and testing.”
Once I had the project...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlexFeb 7th, 2008 | 8 Comments
The first question you probably have after seeing the title of this post is “why would you make an alternative to Flex?” Or perhaps, “how could you even think of competing with Flex?” Honestly, we aren’t trying to compete. This will be open source. And alternatives are always nice to have. We could talk about how difficult it can be to extend the Flex components, how limited the styling is, or how Flex makes complicated things easy and easy things complicated, but the fact of the matter is we just thought building an alternative would be fun.
Now, that being said,...
Posted by Jacob Wright in FlexJan 26th, 2008 | 3 Comments
I’ve been thinking deeply about how applications are architected. Tyler and I put together a MVC framework which we’ve been reluctant to release because he’s not sure if it’s quite right or if it’s different enough from other frameworks, and because I don’t have time to put it up and document it. So we’ve been brainstorming on how it might be better.
I’ve decided that there are two main focuses when designing a Flex application, and it results in two different kinds of frameworks. There is Flex-focused applications and server-focused applications....
Posted by Jacob Wright in CSS, FlexJan 17th, 2008 | 8 Comments
I was reading a post about the Top 10 Flex Misconceptions and read in the 2nd section that "Flex also uses CSS for styling of components / applications."
I know since day one Adobe has listed CSS styling as a feature of Flex. But anyone who has used CSS to style a web page knows that Flex does not support CSS. It supports, well, SS.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Flex is missing the "Cascading" part of it. CSS is all about using a style sheet to describe the "presentation of the document" (World Wide Web Consortium CSS1). Because of the limited amount of the CSS standard that Flex supports,...
Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Flex, GeneralJan 12th, 2008 | 29 Comments
I wrote a project timer awhile ago. After I had done that (in Flash 8) I needed a task list that could be split up by client and project, so I combined the old time and a new task list into what I called creatively the Project Tracker. I've been using it since Apollo preview release. I just added a new feature for myself that rounds the times to the nearest half-hour or hour if desired (since that's how my company bills clients), and I thought that I'd share it. It allows you to keep track of time spent on tasks, project, and clients as well as let's you check off any of them when complete. You...
Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, GeneralJan 10th, 2008 | No Comments
I'm working on a library to give rich text or WYSIWYG functionality to an AIR HTMLLoader. It's coming along nicely thus far. I have all the keyboard shortcuts happening and the HTML is being replaced by the appropriate stuff (e.g. bold fixes webkit's <span class="Apple-blah blah" style="font-weight: bold"> to just <b>). I've got undo/redo in place even with typing and deleting etc.
So I was thinking, it would be cool to write a DocBook editor in AIR. It might be the first DocBook authoring tool that looked nice. :) DocBook is an XML format for books or documentation. I won't go into...
