I had an app with a Horizontal List control and for some reason, Flex insisted on adding an extra item to my list whenever I added a new item to it? Strange. This only happened after I converted the project to Flex 4 and when I went back to Flex 3, it worked as it should. I debugged and confirmed that it was getting the correct dataprovider and despite there being only two items in the dataprovider, three items were rendered.

I looked and looked in all the wrong places until I noticed that I was setting "horizontalScrollPosition" to -1? Why on earth was I doing that? Turns out that if you do this, Flex 4 will create the missing item in your list rather than throwing an "out of bounds" error. Hope this helps someone else with a similar problem!

I've read a couple books on EE, but this is the first I've seen that covers the new ExpressionEngine 2. The book is written by Ryan Irelan (of EE-insider fame) and has a foreword by Rick Ellis (the creator of EE) so it sure seems solid.

Especially the chapter explaining how to build relationship between entries is very well thought out and written. This is something I've always had a hard time with, but now I feel that I fully understand the power of it. It's the kind of feature that I've had to do a lot of testing to get right, but thanks to this chapter I now feel that I'll get this right the first time.

On thing I missed in this book was the solid discussion that you'll find in Michael Boyink's PDF-book on how to plan when building a site from scratch. How does it make sense to structure the site? What requires that you make it it's own 'channel' and how can you break down existing designs into smaller bits. The 'EE2 - A quick-start guide' is however much more complete in that it goes through and explains every core feature in a pedagogically correct way, but I would probably recommend someone planning to convert a big site to EE to read both books.

All in all - many things to like about this book. Chapter 10 that covers optimizing your EE site alone is worth the money for this book as getting the caching right can actually save you from server upgrades. It's a well written guide for the complete beginner and covers all the topics that such a book should. It could however have been more complete and covered more ground. This is however enough to get you started and from there on, you can lean on the excellent EE documentation and forums.

PS: it's been silent here lately, but I'm quite active on Twitter :)

I'm really looking forward to this event and it's all in English so feel free to join us! One of the things I can't wait to try is getting my internals rearranged using Fernando's Airboards!

Adobe AIR makes it a breeze to make utility applications like this and the result is "WP2MT", a small app that reads the XML file you can export from WordPress and saves the contents to the Movable Type Import Format that EE can import from. Click the Badge at the bottom to install the application.

How it works

Start by exporting the Wordpress content to the WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR format. Depending on what version of WordPress you use, you'll find this under the Tools or the Manage menu in your WordPress control panel.

Install and start the app. Click the "Open File" button at the bottom and browse to the XML file you just exported. The app will now show a summary of the XML file, showing the number of posts, pages, comments and discarded items (revisions of articles or attachments). You'll also see how many of these that are unpublished and you can choose if you want to include these.

Next hit the export buttons to create a text file containing either the pages or posts. That's it.

One thing not included in the MovableType format is the original URL of the entry, so I've added a custom field for EE that's called 'EXTRA FIELD-1'. By making an extra field for this, you'll be able to look up what url entries had before and you can also check against this field to see if an entry was added after the export.

Feedback is much appreciated and if you have WP files that won't import, send them to jenschr [at) gmail [dot) com and I'll see if I can fix it.

You can also download the .air file directly from here. If you don't use the Badge above, you may need to install the AIR runtime as well.

Here's source files that show the bug and the fix FLA - SWF - TwoStateButton.as

Switching the movieclip to graphic fixes the issue, but why won't this work? It's always worked well before, so this must be a bug in AVM2? Another thing is that if you hover this button for a few seconds, the Flash IDE crashes instantly...

If you're unable to repoduce the bug - feel free to check this video that shows it and please post a comment telling what Flash Player version/browser you are using. I've been able to reproduce the bug on all OSX browsers + IE8 on Win7.

Submitted this as a bug in the bugbase https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-4396

Rob is also the lead developer of Away3D and has done lots of workshops on it so he is certainly the one to learn from. Read more on the Away3D Blog.

FP10 has problems with images that have width or height larger than 8191 pixels. This is still much better than the 2880x2880 pixels we had to work with in FP9 so that alone is a great reason to insist on FP10 for this kind of applications. There is also another limitation mentioned in the official documentation that says "the total number of pixels cannot exceed 16,777,215 pixels". I've found that this isn't a problem for this implementation, so users can easily upload 8000x8000 pixel images without causing problems. The class will take the uploaded image and scale it to whatever max size you want. If the uploaded image is smaller than the max, it'll leave the image unchanged.

Using the class is straightforward. Just make an instance and pass in what you want returned as the maximum width/height:

var bigImageHandler:BigImagehandler;
bigImageHandler = new BigImagehandler( 1500 );


and then add listeners to respond to what the user does:

bigImageHandler.addEventListener(Event.CANCEL, userFail);
bigImageHandler.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, userSuccess);
bigImageHandler.addEventListener(Event.CLOSE, userCancel);


Click here for example (Source code)

The project I did this for is also quite cool and I'll give a small presentation of it on the next FUGN meetup. It's a small app that'll allow you to make yourself old. Just upload an image (or use a WebCam), position facial features and you can turn on/off wrinkles, hair and more. Feel free to give it a spin! Click the image my old self to get started making your own. (Note: the app is in Norwegian, but I'm sure you'll figure it out by just clicking around)

If you make a multiline textfield with a border and autoSize set, you'll see the problem easily. Every time the .htmlText property is set, an extra line is appended. It is not a newline character (\n), but rather a return (\r). This is done by the Flash Player itself and I can't find a good reason? You can see the bug here (source). I've reported the bug in the Flash Player bugbase and initially I had no solution to the bug.

Then, my friend Fabrice found a solution. Adding this line after seting htmlText solves the issue:

tf.htmlText = tf.htmlText.substring(0,tf.htmlText.length-1);

1. Remember to set the target-player parameter in your Compiler Arguments for both the Debug and Run configuration (-target-player=10.0.0.0)


2. When using the Embed-tag in FDT, you can't use the "Pure" config. You have to use the ordinary one

		[Embed(source="/image.jpg")]
		private var img1:Class;

BTW: I've been really busy lately. Lot's to catch up on after summer holidays, FOTB, all the MAX announcements (as the iPhone one) and client work. I'll also go to Sydney to visit my brother next week so it's been a while since last post. Will probably be so a while ahead as well. So much to do and so much fun ahead!

Common for both of these sites is that they scale the content to the width of the browser. If you view any of these sites on a big screen such as the Apple 30", this looks extremely bad and all you need to fix it is one simple line of code:

video.smoothing = true;

That's it and your video will look much better on big screens. Doing this adds a little to the CPU usage, but this won't matter much on the average machine.

I've also uploaded an example FLA that you can have a look at to test this. Just run the file to load play video. Scale the SWF and click the video to toggle smoothing on/off.

PS: sorry about the lack of updates recently. I've been on holidays and been quite busy with client work lately. Finally having a little free time now to experiment and play! :)

For many years, I've used Blinksale for my billing purposes. It's a very basic service, but it does have one neat feature and that's tagging. By selecting invoices by tags, I can easily see what I spent my time on and Flash 3D is a BIG part of it. This chart shows what kind of projects I've billed the last 12 months:

This is just my commercial work and in addition I've also done many personal projects. Most of these include Away3D in some way so if anyone ever wondered if it's possible to make money from Open Source Flash - here's another little bit of proof. Thanks to the entire Away3D team for filling my days (and nights) with fun!

PS: The 6% training is also Away3D! :-D

PDF of presentation

I've done lots of presentations before, but this was the first time I presented at an international conference in English. I was super-nervous but the session went really well and I got some good feedback. It kind of surprised me how little feedback you get initially. Just a few mentions on Twitter that said my session was "nice" - not all that encouraging. Later I got the feedback from the Feedback forms as well as blog articles such as this one that said "Fantastischer Vortrag und super Redner". Really strange to not just give feedback like I usually do on Flashmagazine, but also receive it! :D

Photo by Marc Thiele/FFK

The day before the conference, I also did a full-day Away3D workshop. Renowned community expert Peter Elst was there and I'm glad he enjoyed it! I also did two reports from the event for Flashmagazine.

I have to congratulate Marc and Sascha - they really know how to pull off such an event! The mood was excellent. 500 attendees, 28 sessions, 10 workshops and not a glitch. Pretty neat and all served at a fraction of the cost of other conferences? Pretty impressive if you ask me! I had a great time!

There's two main ways you control the appearance of the main application window. One is by setting properties on the mx:WindowedApplication tag and the other is to set properties in the application.xml file that defines each AIR app.

Resizing

<!-- Whether the user can resize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<resizable>false</resizable>

<!-- The type of system chrome to use (either "standard" or "none"). Optional. Default standard. -->
<systemChrome>standard</systemChrome>
<!-- Whether the window is transparent. Only applicable when systemChrome is none. Optional. Default false. -->
<transparent>false</transparent>
<!-- Whether the window is initially visible. Optional. Default false. -->
<!-- <visible></visible> -->
<!-- Whether the user can minimize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<!-- <minimizable>false</minimizable> -->
<!-- Whether the user can maximize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<maximizable>false</maximizable>
<!-- Whether the user can resize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<resizable>false</resizable>

The other option is to not use the operating system's windowing style, but rather the standard one that AIR provides.

<!-- The type of system chrome to use (either "standard" or "none"). Optional. Default standard. -->

<systemChrome>none</systemChrome>

<!-- Whether the window is transparent. Only applicable when systemChrome is none. Optional. Default false. -->

<transparent>true<transparent>