mx.managers.PopUpManager stories

I ran into an interesting issue with the mx.managers.PopUpManager the other day, so I thought it would be a good reason to post it here.

I was creating a video player, that displays a video of a screen recording and a video of a webcam recording on the stage, so I thought I’d use the PopUpManager to “show” the component displaying the webcam video … Everything seemed to work fine, except that the video of the webcam recording was “flipped”/mirrored …
Using the normal addChild/addElement methods in my app, fixed the issue straight away.

So if you’re on the Flex SDK team, you might have a look at this

Parsing your flashVars

It’s been a long long time since I haven’t posted anything on my tumblr, and you’ll probably also notice that most of the links to the demos or source code I posted previously don’t work. I’ll try to fix that as soon as I can. I’ve been quite busy with my new job, which is really interesting and I’ve also been without internet at home for quite a while, but hopefully that should be solved soon.

Anyway, before I slip off topic, I wanted to post this, because this is something I often forget.

When using flashVars in your Flash/Flex applications, you’ll probably end up using different data types : string, number, boolean and so on… just remember that all of these are actually plain “strings”.
Take the following example:

param name="flashVars" value="myString=foo&myNumber=404&myBoolean=true"

var parameters:Object = (FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication as Application).parameters;
// In a pure ActionScript 3 application this would be
//
// var parameters:Object = root.loaderInfo.parameters;

// Parsing strings is really easy and works all the time
if(parameters.hasOwnProperty("myString")) 
    var myString:String = parameters.myString;

// Parsing numbers is just the same 
// and even though, the value comes as a string, it will
// be cast to a number without any effort
if(parameters.hasOwnProperty("myNumber")) 
    var myNumber:Number = parameters.myNumber;

// But when it comes to booleans, 
// you'll need to check the value if it was a string

var myBoolean:Boolean;
if(parameters.hasOwnProperty("myBoolean")) {
    if(parameters.myBoolean == "false") {
        myBoolean = false;
    } else if(parameters.myBoolean == "true")  {
        myBoolean = true;
    } 
}

Animated text scrolling in gumbo

Based on this flex example that shows how to set the VerticalScrollPosition of a RichEditableText, I made some tiny changes and I came up with an “animated version” I wanted to share.

The demo is visible here and the source code can be found there

Cheers

AFCS Shared Ball

If you want to develop multi user applications, there are a number of technologies available out there, I’m not going to list them all, but recently, I worked with The Union Platform, Red5, and I also had a look at Stratus and AFCS.

AFCS is quite interesting because it provides loads of features “out of the box”, and if I had to develop a “professional” / commercial application, this is probably the solution I would choose.

Anyway, I made a simple “shared ball” application (just like the one that comes with the Red5 samples) and I wanted to share it with you …

Shared ball demo | Shared ball source code

enabling the flashplayer plugin on chromium-browser

chromium-browser is the open source project behind Google Chrome (not the OS, but the browser), it’s quite nice but the annoying things about it are :

• It’s not stable yet, (but it’s getting there)
• By default, when you launch it all plugins are disabled

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/chromiun-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

chromium-browser --enable-plugins

twup - a simple desktop “app” for twitpic

bit.ly for as3

Like everyone who uses the web, I’ve been using the bit.ly “url shortener” a few times.

I wanted to use this in an ActionScript/Flash project I’m currently working on so here it is

Cheers

want your gravatar in flash?

I just wanted to use gravatar in a flash project I’m currently working on.

Turns out, it was much easier than I thought.

Just enter the email address your gravatar is associated to (must be valid) and press “Get it”; you can also use the slider to change the size. Click here for the source.

Cheers

using gedit and need mxml support?

If you’re using gedit and you need syntax highlighting in MXML files, here’s what I came up with. Enjoy…

Oh yes, I might change the name to gedit_flash what do you think?