October 11th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Libraries
Tags: actionscript, Animated Tile List, AnimateTileList, flex
The Animated Tile List attempts to fill the Visual Component gap left by Adobe in their current TileListRenderer structure. While not as sophisticated (it doesn’t support drag & drop, mouse commands, or data change transitions for instance), it nevertheless provides an invalidating, caching tile list with smooth selection transitions.
Notable differences: The AnimatedTileList does not poll its children for desired row height or widths, but calculates those directly off of the numRows and numColumns properties, setting them explicitly.
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October 3rd, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: News
For the next four weeks, I will be conducting a series of four Adobe Connect sessions through Columbus Digital, Columbus’ Official Adobe User Group. These sessions will focus not on ActionScript or Flex Development itself, but rather on ancillary skills and tools important to Application Architects and Developers who want to get into serious Flex application development.
The topics will be as follows:
- October 5th- Flex and Subversion
- October 12th- MVC Frameworks and Cairngorm
- October 19th- Unit Testing with FlexUnit
- October 26th- Automating Application Compilation and Deployment with Ant
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August 23rd, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles, Inspiration
Tags: accessibility, actionscript, firefox, flash, flex, internet explorer, wai-aria, windows
My colleague (aka running buddy, aka friend, aka fashionista) Andrea Hill and I had a pow-wow a few months back in anticipation of her Accessibility presentation at Spring </br> . Personally, I thought the conversation was a perfect example of how genius occurs at the intersections of knowledge domains, as we were able to take her expertise on Accessibility standards and my expertise in Flash and Actionscript and come up a back-of-the-napkin approach to Flash Accessibility that might just fix all the headaches caused by interfacing with Assistive Technology. Note that this solution does NOT absolve you from designing for visual impairments, hearing deficiencies and so forth- this is a way of interfacing with screen readers.
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August 15th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Tutorials
Tags: actionscript, air, ByteArray, File, flex
One of the holy grails of the "Build Once, Deploy Anywhere" promise of the Adobe AIR isn’t simply that your application will cross all major operating systems, but also that the same codebase can be deployed via the web as an RIA. Admittedly, there remain some differences in functionality; For instance, a desktop application has to worry about windows or contextual menus. Another challenge altogether is transferring data between a desktop and a web application, which can be a daunting task if you’re trying to share multiple files, yet is perhaps not as difficult as you might think.
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June 30th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: flash, flex, javascript, ria, rna
I had an excellent discussion with my coworker Susan today about refining certain internal processes, and one of the tangents of the conversation went off on what the actual definition of a Rich Internet Application actually was. As we know, anything from a banner ad to a product configurator can be considered an RIA, and the only common element seemed to be that an RIA retains its functionality within the context of what the user is interacting with. In other words, if you click on button in an RIA, the resulting action does not significantly change the page or window the user is interacting with; Clicking to go to a new page loses context, using an animated accordion to display different content does not.
The similarities, though, end there. Implementation varies, technology varies, scope and location and functionality varies, and all in all it ends up being a pretty difficult convoluted mess to describe. At best you can group them via complexity, and after a brief exercise of that nature we realized that a new breed of networked application was emerging. Well, alright, perhaps not emerging, but instead gaining momentum and acceptance in the mainstream. Here’s the scale, see if you agree with our reasoning.
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