Hello San Francisco!

By Maxim on October 28, 2011

Just completed my relocation from Moscow to San Francisco. Weather is great and people are friendly.

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Spark AdvancedDataGrid

By Maxim on August 9, 2011

I have used the logic from Spark Tree to build AdvancedDataGrid based on Spark DataGrid and it seem to work nice:


View Source

Since AdvancedDataGridcontains a few code and uses a lot of Spark Tree logic I’ve decided to add it to the Spark Tree project in GitHub.com instead of creating a separate library.

Note: you will not see disclosure icons unless you specify corresponding item renderer for some column: <s:GridColumn itemRenderer="com.sparkTree.DefaultTreeADGItemRenderer"/>

Download SparkTree4.5.swc for Flex SDK 4.5 and higher.

Please report bugs in comments or to the GitHub Issue Tracker.

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Sorting images by color

By Maxim on June 2, 2011

Here is a quick example how to sort images by color.

View source

Basically I just sort images by hue of the major image color. The issue is how to get that color. I get some image pixels, clusterize them and take the center of the best cluster.

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Android USB driver

By Maxim on April 18, 2011

If you plan to test the amazing new Flash Builder Android features and can’t install the USB driver for your phone – just install the PdaNet. It will smoothly put the driver in place and you will be able to debug your mobile project on your device.

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Pronto 4

By Maxim on February 25, 2011

I’m happy to present the project I’ve been working on for the last 2 years.


Continue reading “Pronto 4″

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FTheme.com launch

By Maxim on February 6, 2011

FTheme.com is my new library that hopefully will make a small revolution in Flex 4 styling and skinning. New application look can be created in Notepad, loaded at runtime and change everything from application background bitmap fill to the CheckBox-es size.

Hope that you enjoy existing looks (NightSky is my favorite). Looking for forward for your feedback and new exciting looks.

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Year summary

By Maxim on December 29, 2010

It was a good year, thank you for reading this blog – hope it is useful at least sometimes :) Starting from the 20-th August 2010 when this blog was opened:

  • More than 2900 people came and read more than 5000 pages
  • Average time on site for each visitor was more than 2 minutes.
  • 600 visitors came from USA, 585 from Russia and 222 from Ukraine.
  • Most popular posts were Spark Tree and storing icons in external ZIP.
  • 45% were using Firefox, 31% Chrome and 10% Safari.

Here is some personal statistics according to the StatSVN:

  • In this year I’ve committed 277 559 lines of code that is 1 100 lines/day.
  • 45% lines were modifications and 55% were new.

One of my next posts is going to be about the look&feel customization system that we are developing in CommuniGate for Pronto:

It’s super-powerful, lightweight and fully backward-compatible (while runtime Flex styles in SWFs are not).

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Spark Tree on GitHub

By Maxim on December 10, 2010

I’ve just uploaded Spark Tree component to the GitHub so if you’ve got some updates or bug fixes – please send pull requests :) Also the package is changed – now it’s com.sparkTree.

Download SparkTree.swc
Download source code

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AMFPHP in convinient and reliable way

By Maxim on November 14, 2010

Remoting with AMFPHP greatly simplifies the client-server application logic. Now I’m going to simplify it’s usage. No responders, no listeners or clients. Just one call(...) and one callback function:

  1. private function init():void
  2. {
  3.     new Gateway("http://localhost/amfphp/gateway.php");
  4. }
  5.  
  6. private function listButton_clickHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
  7. {
  8.     listButton.enabled = false;
  9.     call("Persons.listPersons", 10, listPersonsCallback);
  10. }
  11.  
  12. private function listPersonsCallback(object:Object, errorText:String):void
  13. {
  14.     listButton.enabled = true;
  15.     listButton.errorString = errorText;
  16.     if (errorText)
  17.         return;
  18.    
  19.     // handle persons from object
  20. }

Here is the Persons.php service:

  1. < ?php
  2. class Persons
  3. {
  4.  
  5.     var $link;
  6.  
  7.     public function __construct()
  8.     {
  9.         $link = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASS);
  10.         if (!$link)
  11.             throw new Exception("DB connection error" . (PRODUCTION_SERVER|> ? "" : ": " . mysql_error()));
  12.         if (!mysql_select_db(DB_NAME))
  13.             throw new Exception("DB selection error" . (PRODUCTION_SERVER|> ? "" : ": " . mysql_error()));
  14.     }
  15.  
  16.     function listPersons($limit)
  17.     {
  18.         $query = sprintf("SELECT * FROM persons LIMIT %d",
  19.             mysql_real_escape_string($limit));
  20.         $this->_handleResultError($result = mysql_query($query)));
  21.  
  22.         return $result;
  23.     }
  24.    
  25.     // utility function
  26.     function _handleResultError(&$result)
  27.     {
  28.         if (!$result)
  29.             throw new Exception("query error" . (PRODUCTION_SERVER|> ? "" : ": " . mysql_error()));
  30.     }
  31.  
  32. }

Download Gateway.as and call.as

Callback function can have the following signatures depending on the application logic:

  • function():void
  • function(errorText:String):void
  • function(object:Object, errorText:String):void

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Flash Builder Buritto – code templates and content assist workaround

By Maxim on October 26, 2010

Adobe has recently released a preview version of new Flash Builder – Buritto that has many great features including code templates. Here are my ActionScript code templates so far (download templates.xml to import):

  • commitProperties
  • createChildren
  • getterNoChange
  • getterSetterWithEvent
  • measure
  • model
  • noChangeEvent
  • separator
  • separatorSmall
  • setter
  • updateDisplayList

Also there is a weird issue that content assist shows empty dropdown on first Ctrl+Space and then shows separately varibales, properties, methods and etc. assist on each Ctrl+Space. This can be worked around by unchecking all items in Content Assist Cycling preferences panel:


I seemed to have “All” checkbox but now I don’t see it now. If you will see it, check it :)

Thanks, Adobe! :)

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