Monday, July 21st, 2008
Today I needed to install Adobe Acrobat, which I’ve so far avoided to install because of its bloated size, slowness and general suckiness. Unfortunately, I really needed it. After searching my drawers for the CS3 install DVD, I pushed it into my computer and though that I’d managed the hard part. Now it should just be a matter of selecting Acrobat and hitting install. Yeah right.
Friday, July 4th, 2008
When Adobe SwitchBoard was announced the other week I was intrigued. It sounded like something I had been wishing for for a while: a better way to create user interfaces that leveraged the capabilities of the Creative Suite applications, something that the current scripting environment doesn’t do very well. I installed it and read the documentation and my entusiasm quickly faded. It’s the same lame impossible-to-use BridgeTalk technology as before with the same contradictory and strangely inter-application-incompatible API:s, but packaged differently. It’s true that you can create great user interfaces, but the scripting still sucks — and it turns out that it’s a resource hog.
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
If you are tired of application frameworks that tie your code together and makes it an unwieldy mess, take a look at Mate.
Mate is quite unintrusive, lets you configure your application declaratively in MXML and does most of the boring things for you. Judging from the documentation and examples it looks like good competitor in the less-than-crowded marked of Flex application frameworks.
The core of Mate is something called the event map which describes what should happen when your application dispatched events of different types. For each event one or more handlers can be invoked. A handler can be everything from calling a method on an object, running a command or invoking a remote object call and there is room for writing your own specialised handlers. Handlers can also run in sequence and get hold of the previous handler’s result, which makes it possible to create quite complex logic. All this is done in MXML, which means that your configuration is also the actual wiring of your application — and it’s readable and quite easy to understand.
My only objection is how Mate handles updating of views. If I understand it correctly, there are two ways, either you have an injector which looks up the view and pushes values into it, or you have an instance of a dispatcher in your view where you listen for result events and update accordingly. Both remove the benefits of bindings, and while they are certainly better than the global variable lookup of other Flex frameworks, I’m not sure I like them. On the other hand I think you can skip that part and inject the model into the views directly. On the third hand, injectors can potentially make your code more decoupled.
Update: see comments below for a clarification on this issue by the framework’s author.
Friday, April 18th, 2008
Some jokers who call themselves flexinmotion have released a ridiculously overpriced Flex component which “will automatically track all user navigation clicks, button click, check boxes, radio buttons and a number of other controls within your app automatically” using Google Analytics. Let me show you how to save those 149 bucks.
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
From time to time I re-read the introductory articles on Cairngorm just to remind me of why I don’t use it and never will. This installment of the Architectural Atrocities series is a critique of the Cairngorm framework, and the Model Locator pattern in particular.
Friday, February 15th, 2008
For two days I’ve had lots of problems with the Flex application I’m working on. Mysterious behaviour that doesn’t register any errors anywhere. I couldn’t understand what was going on until today when I accidentally right-clicked on the application. Seconds later my hand collided with my forehead and a long sigh could be heard.
It turns out that the 10.5.2 update for Mac OS X silently installed a new version of Flash Player, overwriting the debug version I had installed. Combined with the Font Explorer X problems and weird glitches and two complete system hangs that also came with the update I can tell you that I’ve lost too many hours of work because of that fucking update.
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
This is really great: Flex Doc Team: Java-based Compiler API. It’s the Flex compiler exposed as a Java API, which means that finally someone (perhaps I) can write a set of proper Ant tasks for Flex.
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
Stumbled upon a link in a mail from 2001: Gravité, a control panel for old Mac OS which made it look as if you were really dragging icons. Oh, the happy times.
Someone should revive this for drag & drop in Flex.
Monday, October 15th, 2007
It’s been a while since I wrote about TextMate and Flex, but still my last post is one of the first five when I google for “textmate flex“, “textmate flex bundle” or “textmate flex tips“. This surprises me as I thought that by now there should have been more written about Flex and TextMate by now, after all it’s been almost ten months. It turns out that there actually has been things going on, but in the quiet.
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
Joost seems soon to be out of beta, and it’s gotten much better since the first Mac version was released and I tested it for the first time (see my review of it from back then).