This is my first foray into using Flex 4, and it takes off from where I was at with my Converter application (as mentioned here, here and here) back in September of 2006 (shizzer time flies!).
I’ve changed the currency conversion to use Google’s Finance site, which means far more accurate conversions are occurring now.
I’d like to make it so you can select multiple currencies and convert to them all at one time. Also with the ability to remember the settings that you’ve used.
If anyone else has got any ideas about features they’d like to see just leave me a comment.
You can view the web version of the converter here www.wrench.com.au/converter
Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.
Or you can install the Air app by clicking on the install badge if you’d prefer to have it on your desktop.
I’m using Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 to create this app. I’ve had to setup 2 projects to export both the web and Air version of the converter. If anyone’s got any tips on doing this from a single project then that would be appreciated. I suppose if it was a more complex piece of code, then there’d be some benefit in splitting the codebase, as it is this just adds a hurdle in the way of a smooth development process.
I’ve also given up on trying to fix the security issues I was having with accessing an external link on a 3rd party server for the currency conversions (as detailed back in the first three posts I made on the converter). I’ve got a php proxy page on my server instead which calls the google site and then returns the results to the swf. This only occurs for the web version though, the Air one connects directly to Google so is about 250ms quicker on each currency conversion.
http://www.wrench.com.au/
Initially built using AS2 but never launched in 2006 (due to time constraints i.e. doing real work), the domain that was supposed to showcase my wares remained as a coming soon page for nigh on 4 years. Finally the bullet was bitten in the latter part of 2009 and the decision to port the entire site to AS3 and utilise the Gaia framework was made. Within 4 weeks, a fully functional, SEO compliant, user accessible site was finished and launched. Kudos to Steven for the framework, rock on Gaia!
Feel free to leave any comments you’ve got about the site; be they good, bad or otherwise…
I’ve been interested to see the response to President Obama’s approval rating dipping below 50% and it made me wonder, what if the rest of the citizens of the world got a say in this rating…? So now I’m giving you that chance! If you’re not a citizen of the US, how do you think the President is handling things?
One things for sure, he’s doing a damn site better job than that last clown that was voted in twice!
The Polls below, just select Yes or No and then the Vote button.
Have at it!
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Long time no read. Been busy with a large Flex project, plus I’ve been trying to see a bit more of Europe - but thought it was about time to get back onto some blogging. That and I’ve come up against something that I can’t seem to figure out (and it doesn’t look like anyone else has either from the amount of Googling I’ve done looking for a solution).
Basically what I’m doing is loading an swf with an image in it, which loads over the top of another swf which has some navigation elements in it. What is occurring is the swf on top is preventing any mouseover events from reaching the buttons below the image. I’ve zipped up a test archive to try and illustrate what’s going on. If you run test2.swf, and then mouseover the part of the orange square that intersects the green square, the green squares mouseover event should fire. I’ve set mouseEnabled = false on the orange square, but the fact that it’s in a completely different swf seems to mean that this doesn’t have any effect. The part of green square underneath the orange square is simply not receiving any events.
I’m actually using the Gaia framework, so it’s doing all of the loading of the swf’s. And I thought possibly setting the ApplicationDomain of the swf’s to be the same would mean things would work - but it didn’t. So if anyone’s experienced overlapping assets in two different swf’s interfering with mouse events then please let me know in the comments below.
Ok, this is a bit off topic but I attended Oxegen festival in Ireland recently. The music was good, the weather was crap, the punters in my campsite were worse. Some little bastard thought it would be funny to go into my tent and spread my belongings all over the campsite. Not cool. I found some of the things, but others were lost to the mud.
Anyways, the purpose of this post is to give a shout out to the service and support department at Black Wolf (Kate in particular ;-) . One of the parts of my backpack went missing, and they’re going to send a new one all the way from Australia to London free of charge! So if you’re in Oz and thinking about doing some travelling, make sure you check out the Black Wolf gear. Not only is there service awesome (this is the second time they’ve helped me out since I’ve been overseas) the quality of their gear is very good as well.
I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes mucking around with a cool AIR app called TiltShift. It basically lets you create images using a technique called Tilt Shift Photography. The app does a rather nifty job I must say, here’s what I knocked up in around 15 minutes from the back catalogue of images on my computer.
I reckon image 4 is the best one, though I’ll continue to plough through the image banks at this end looking for suitable candidates to miniaturise. Anything where the subject matter is below the camera seems to work well. Obviously the Tower of London doesn’t fit into this category, so I’ll have to take a happy snap from the Eye and have another crack at that ;-)
For those wanting to do it the old school way, check out this Photoshop tutorial that shows how.
I’ve been watching the large number of blog links regarding the news from Adobe labs that Flash Catalyst is now in public Beta; naturally I had to download and have a go myself.
My first impressions are not good.
It seems like they’ve decided to invent their own usability best practices for the tool shortcuts. Where the hell is the pan tool? Why doesn’t holding the space bar and then using the mouse to scroll perform a pan? Keyboard shortcuts for delete don’t seem to work in the layers panel. Where is the align panel? Do I really have to right click an asset and select an align option from a dropdown? It’s a real mouseathon in the program at the moment. These aren’t really things I see as Beta related, they should just be in the app - which they are in any other CS4 product, so I’m mystified how these issues got through QA to this stage.
Probably the biggest issue is the speed (or lack thereof) of the program. Trying to edit a button’s state is painfully slow. I’m not sure whether this is to do with my system (dual core 2.4Ghz with 4Gb RAM on Vista) but I’d like to know if I’m the only one who thinks the program runs painfully slowly.
Aside from the usability and productivity issues I’m still at a loss as to why the CS4 core wasn’t used for this (or was it?) and even why we need a further dilution of the Flash product base. Surely Flash CS could be re badged as Flash Designer and the Catalyst toolset integrated (I realise I made that sound easier than it would be, but as it stands the introduction of this third tool looks like more of a money grab than anything else). This would go nicely alongside the newly re badged Flash Builder (which incidentally looks very good, so kudos to the Flex team).
I haven’t upgraded to CS4 as yet, and it’s for some of the reasons above that I haven’t. I just don’t know where the Flash products are headed, and quite frankly if this is where they’re going I may jump ship completely onto HMS Flex and let the “designers” out there handle getting the assets I’m after into a state in which I can use them. Though the right side of my brain may have something to say about that statement…
Ok, so it’s actually the international year of astronomy - but I’d like to decree in a fairly dictatorial manner that it should be the year of alternative energy (and that’s not to say that I’ve got anything against astronomy ;-)
In fact, I put it to you that not only should this year be the year of alternative energy, but the year after that, and for the next decade to come. Let me come to my point, which is we don’t have an alternative place in the universe to live, so why are we still referring to alternative energies in all their forms as such?
Alternative energy is an oxymoron; there is no alternative. Unless you enjoy 55 degree days, raging weather and a very wet day at the beach (which is now about 3 km’s further inland than where it used to be).
Perhaps a massive rebranding of the term is required. It seems that people are happy to continue to use the current form of “main stream” energy (or whatever you’d like to term energy that isn’t “alternative”) as it’s too hard to change their ways. Again, I put it to you - what is the alternative to living on this planet?
This post doesn’t offer any solutions. But I do hope it will help raise the awareness of those reading it that things really do need to change, and fast.
Well on this website it does anyway
;-)
Had to take a bit of a break from the project I’m currently working on… think I’m being driven slowly insane by Flex.
Either I’m going slightly mad or casting using the “as” keyword works differently to the old way of casting.
Here’s some code to illustrate:
showFormItem = (((e.target as CheckBox).selected as String) == _local.displayTriggerValue[i]) ? true : false
Now this gives a different result to:
showFormItem = (String((e.target as CheckBox).selected) == _local.displayTriggerValue[i]) ? true : false
WTF?!
I’m pretty sure I’ve got my brackets in the correct spot.
Yhelp!
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