24 ways is back for a 3rd holiday season with 24 new posts by some of the worlds best web developers. Starting December 1st and continuing through to Christmas day you can get your holiday fill of web geekery.
Looking for a cool and unique Christmas give that will have everyone talking about? FlipClips is a cool online service that creates Flip Books from your digital video clips! A 75 page Flip Book costs $8.99 and a 150 page Flip Book will run you about $18.99.
Thomas Baekdal has authored an insightful report on the Actual Browser Sizes that are being used by the people visiting our sites. The report has some interesting findings like users with screen resolution of 1024×768 and lower typically maximize their browser window, where users with larger screen resolutions are less likely to browse with maximized windows.
The report is broken into 5 parts:
Take the time to read this report. It will be well worth your time.
The Adobe Edge Newsletter has a goot article on Using the BitmapData class in ActionScript 3.0 to render video. The approach described in the article uses the NetStream and Video classes to handle the loading and playback of video and then takes that data and displays it in a Bitmap object. Once in the Bitmap object, you will be able to apply filters to give your video some very interesting effects.
AS3 E4X Rundown is a great introduction and reference to working with E4X in Flex. The author, Roger Braunstien is correct that 75% of E4X makes perfect sense, but it’s the remaining 25% that requires a bit of demystifying. This post covers the basics well then goes on to share some of the tips and tricks in working with E4X.
If you’ve ever had to install PHP from source on Mac OSX, two of the dependencies you’ve likely come across are libpng and libjpg. Ethan Tira-Thompson has created a universal binary installer for both of these libraries to make them easier to install. You could also grab these from Darwin Ports or Fink, but the installer is easier!
Alright - forget my terminal hack for removing the glass dock! Apple has apparently made the Dock completely skinnable! Pimp My Dock is a freeware application that will let you create your own dock style by importing graphical elements that you create in your favorite image editing application.
If you are graphically challenged, you might want to check out LeopardDocks.com where you can download and share custom Leopard Docks.
The topic around dynamically resizing Yahoo! Maps in Flex came up in the Yahoo! Flash Developer Group last week. At the same time, I had also been trying to solve this problem for a project I’m working on. At first this problem seemed quite mysterious. I could resize the map, but it was always resizing to a 3×2 aspect ratio. If I had a container was not 3×2, the map would pin itself to the top of the container and have white borders to the right and bottom. I tried all possible combinations of properties (height, width, percentHeight, percentWidth, scaleContent) with no luck.
Yahoo! provides an AS3 API for Flex 2.0 developers that includes a SWF (built in AS2.0) and a SWC. The AS3 AstraWebAPI libraries are a set of wrapper tools that facilitate access to Yahoo!’s Web APIs from Flex 2.0 and Flash. This library works quite well, but it only exposes a subset of the API calls that are allowed by the Yahoo! API’s - so as a Flex developer you only have access to the most common calls. Unfortunately the AstraWebAPI swc does not include the setMapSize method that is defined in the as2map.swf file. So how do we access this method?
A little background. as2map.swf is an ActionScript 2 swf that you load into your Flex application when you instantiate a Yahoo Map. The AstraWebAPIs.swc file then provides a set of wrapper classes that uses ExternalInterface to communicate between your Flex application and the as2map.swf. It sounds kind of ugly - and is - but until Yahoo! releases an AS3 version of their mapping tool, this method will have to do.
So how do we make API calls to methods not exposed by AstraWebAPIs.swc file? My solution is to call the ExternalInterfaceBuffer directly from within your Flex application. It’s pretty easy to do…
import com.yahoo.webapis.maps.utils.ExternalInterfaceBuffer;
private function resizeMap(someWidth:int, someHeight:int) : void {
// SWFDOMID and UNIQUEID are constants set in your existing map code
var apiCall:String = SWFDOMID + ".setMapSize" + UNIQUEID;
var EIBuffer:ExternalInterfaceBuffer = ExternalInterfaceBuffer.getInstance();
EIBuffer.addCall({method:apiCall, data:{w:someWidth, h:someHeight})
}
I have provided an example (with source available here) that you can look at.
reflexutil is an open source project that provides a Firebug like DOM inspector to your Flex apps. At any point during the execution of your Flex application, you can right mouse-click and access the ReflexUtil property inspector. With the inspector, you can look at any UI component, it’s hierarchy in your application and edit pretty much any property live! It is pretty easy to configure and use and could be a huge time saver.
Living Digitally - Christian Cantrell’s personal blog - has a fantastic Review of the Amazon Kindle from the point of view of a person who has been waiting years for a good e-book reader. Even though Christian had only used the Kindle device for a few hours, the review is full of highlights and lowlights of this new consumer device from Amazon. I can’t wait for this product to be available in Canada!
