CANDYMANDESIGN

See you in Amsterdam! FLUGR meeting

2011-11-13T10:10:00.001-08:00

I am speaker at Flugr - Dutch Flex user group event in Amsterdam on November 18, 2011. I am going to speak about image editing using Flex SDK. I spent some time today playing around with hand writing effect and I made a really bad looking thing bellow :) Too long and too much mess at the end I think...

Anyway, I am very happy I will visit Amsterdam. Guess what was the first thing that came on my mind when I heard I will visit that town!

Force garbage collection In Flex

2011-10-21T04:32:00.000-07:00

Nothing really new here.
However, I had to modify one of the classes I used before in order to be able to use it in Flex 4.* SDK so I decided to put it here - maybe someone will find it useful as well.
What this class does is that it forces garbage collection in some time interval (by default it runs every 15 seconds).
To be able to use it, download it from here: http://candymandesign.com/share/blog/files/GarbageCollectionRunner.zip

After that you simply call a static method:

import com.candymandesign.utils.GarbageCollectionRunner;

GarbageCollectionRunner.run();

As optional parameter you can provide a time interval to tell to garbage man when to return back. Those who have a habit to read the code after download will find in comments that it should be only used in development - never in production.

ActionScript 3 Multithreading - CMVC framework

2011-05-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

In my previous post i mentioned CMVC framework. This framework is really helpful for me and I am using it for development of complex Flex and Flash components/projects. It's lightweight, fast and easy to setup and use. In short:

CMVC (CMVC stands for CandyMVC) is ActionScript 3 lightweight framework based upon Model, View, Controller. It enables implementation of MVC with no special setup required. Instead of overriding bunch of methods to setup the project, it lets you start working on application logic as soon as project is created. One of the main features is multi threading - it can handle notification in near real time by all subscribed mediators.

Why I build it beside of all MVC frameworks out there?

I like to know exactly what is happening in the background.
I needed an easy way to setup a project to use MVC
It was fun to do it

And why in the name of the lord am I sharing it with out proper documentation or examples?

Because there is a huge possibility that I won't manage to complete it at all. Hey, but there is one component that is using it - not so clean code, but still you can see how its running :).

So I do not see any reason to keep it only for myself. If someone finds it useful, I will be happy to know that I am not the only one.

You can download it from google code: http://code.google.com/p/candymvc/

Image Editor component in Flex 4.5

2011-04-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

Its been almost 3 years since I wrote this post and i am still getting requests about source code. Off course, i don't have it anymore :) So i thought that this could be a good project to rebuild with CMVC.

CMVC is a framework that makes my life easier when developing complex components. I became too lazy to setup PureMVC and override bunch of methods just to start rolling. So instead of using multicore PureMVC and setting it up each time, this framework lets you start working on application logic as soon as you create a project. The best of all is that it lets you keep PureMVC structure (method names are similar etc) and keep working in old fashion way. One of the coolest features is that all subscribed mediators can handle notification in near real time. Multi threading? Well kind of... But its still very cool.

So here it is... Image Editor for Flex 4.5 (it can work in earlier version too if you make a small modifications though)

Full working image editor preview

with full source code available here

Spark DataGrid VS MX DataGrid

2011-04-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

I was so excited about Spark DataGrid coming in Flex 4.5.
I was expecting to have a better performance and to be less memory consuming. I know that Spark DataGrid is in early stage of development etc, but I will still use MX DataGrid until I really see those improvements.
I did a test with data set of 100.000 objects.
It turns out that MX DataGrid has a much better performance (especially when sorting dataProvider, where Spark DataGrid completely freezes). All i did in this test is scrolling, editing and sorting the same amount of data in same intervals in both DataGrids.

Spark DataGrid:

MX DataGrid:

It seams that (good ?) old MX DataGrid will be around for some more time...

Be careful with View in Flex 4.5 - Memory leak

2011-02-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

Flex 4.5 SDK... I think Adobe did a great job on this. I really do!
However, after i spent 1 week working on Android app based on TabbedViewNavigatorApplication, i noticed that i have a memory leak doing nothing more but just changing selected index of navigator.

In the app i was building, i had 3 views. Two views had some simple lists and one view had a papervision - nothing special, just some basic Cube rendering and animation. The problem here is that each time pushView() method is called, new instance of provided class is created. So if you keep changing the view, you are creating tone of instances. Since in the whole app, i am not calling pushView() by myself, the application does not respond to Keyboard.BACK button. So i could afford to kill the active view by myself after it is removed from display list.

Here is how it looks when you let navigator to manage the memory on its own:

And here is how it looks when you kill the instances by yourself:

As you can see above, it looks better... I am not sure if it is a bug, but TabbedViewNavigatorApplication has a memory leak for sure.
Here is how i did it:

tabbedNavigator.addEventListener(IndexChangeEvent.CHANGING,onChanging);

private function onChanging(e:IndexChangeEvent):void
{
var ob:Object = application.tabbedNavigator.selectedNavigator.activeView;
ob.destroy();
ob= null;
}

Of course, destroy function should be defined inside the View you created and this is where you remove all elements, set null where it should be null, etc.

Anyway, its Friday 7:30 PM and i am still sitting at work... Log offff

URAL 750 powered by Adobe Flex

2010-06-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

And i finally did it... I saw it, bought it and i love it!

Wanna perfect Android phone? Take HTC Desire!

2010-04-27T04:38:00.000-07:00

As probably all of you know how Apple changed their terms and conditions and how that affect on Flash developers, i wont spend words on that. Also, i am not gonna talk about HTC Desire specifications since you can find that information on multiple sources. I am just too excited about this phone to keep it for myself.

I was one step away from buying IPhone 3GS and now i am glad i didn't! I have this phone about 4 days now and i think i spent more time with it then talking with my wife (you can imagine reactions...). Having Adobe AIR for Android and having this phone beside me is a combination i just can not resist. So if you are looking for a great Android phone, dont loose your time thinking about it. Do it.

XMLValidator - simple way to check if String is formated as valid XML

2010-04-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

There are probably more solutions out there for this, but i want to share with you how i check if the String is formatted as valid XML. I made a simple class with one static method to achieve this. You can download it from here and you can use it easily by calling isValid method:

import com.candymandesign.flash.validators.XMLValidator;
XMLValidator.isValid(yourStringGoesHere);

Example above will return true or false as result.

Consuming Google Text to speech API in Flash

2010-03-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

I played around with Google text to speech service. It was real fun trying to make Google say the word in your native language :). After 30 minutes of playing with it i made this demo below. Feel free to download the source :).

You can also download TextToSpeech class that lets you easily call this service.
Example:

import com.candymandesign.flash.speech.TextToSpeech;
TextToSpeech.say("hello there");

Text Layout Framework BreakOpportunity error

2010-01-22T04:40:00.000-08:00

Recently i was developing application that uses Text Layout Framework and runs in the browser using Flash Player 10. When trying to use the same piece of the code in new created AIR application, the following error shows up: "ReferenceError: Error #1065: Variable flash.text.engine::BreakOpportunity is not defined.".

The solution is to edit .actionScriptProperties file inside the root of your project. Find htmlPlayerVersion tag and change it to something like this: htmlPlayerVersion="10.0.0". This will do a trick. It should save about 2 hours of your life :)

Flipping the paper - Flex 3D effect

2008-11-07T15:03:00.000-08:00

Here is something i did while i was testing TweenMax's bezier tweening with DistortImage class. Check the demo here and download swc file with documentation here. Pretty cool effect, huh?
(yeah, just wanted to let you know i am still alive!)

Exporting PDF from Flex

2008-06-27T09:39:00.001-07:00

You know you can generate PDF documents from AS3 by using Life Cycle ES but what happens when the project you are working on requires another server technology? In my case - PHP. Well, you can just tell your client that PDF is not good option at all! Hey, that could solve the problem! OK. Since i am working on the project that requires pdf generation, i made simple class to achiefe that. You can download APDF class from Google code:

http://code.google.com/p/apdf/ .

In the package, you will find php code too (it requires PHP 5).
There are two versions of APDF you can download. The only diference is that one of them use as3corelib for image encoding - see my previous post (please be aveare that as3corelib is NOT included in the download) and the other one not. If you are on Flex 3, choose the one with out as3corelib.
The APDF class enables to create and export PDF documents from Flex. It uses open source PHP library FPDF to generate the pdf document. You can add the images or text by calling APDF methods. This is still in beta but i would really appreciate you let me know if you find any errors.
I was thinking about to make a demo application that enables you to dynamicly create pages, add images, text, links and so on but it is sooo predictible... So i made application that enables you to capture the video, add coments to captions and then finally to export all the captions to PDF. Think it's pretty cool but i will leave it to you. Check it out
HERE.

Image Editor in Flex

2008-06-19T03:10:00.000-07:00

[EDIT : Take a look at this one instead :) ]

I had a fun last night building the application which allows user to edit images directly on the server. There are couple of options like color, hue, saturation... Why? Because the current project i am working on is Flex CMS with integrated web analytics and image editor - all in one. Man, it turns me on! Anyway...

If you wonder how to export valid jpg or png files form Flex, this is how you do that. First, you need to download as3corelib form Google Code........ And that's about it! :) Really, it's easy as that! In the as3corelib package, there are two classes used for image encoding: JPGEncoder and PNGEncoder.
If you are using Flex 3, you have built in classes mx.graphics.codec.JPEGEncoder and mx.graphics.codec.PNGEncoder. What these classes do is to convert BitmapData object to valid JPG or PNG as a ByteArray. Since i am using PHP all the time, i will explain how this works with PHP (the PHP is used only for decoding and for displaying the image).

I made a simple class to achieve that - you can download it from here and check the methods here(as3corelib is not included in the download).
What happens when you convert BitmapData to JPG? Well, you can't do anything with it if you do not know how to actually display ByteArray.
First, you will need to encode ByteArray with mx.utils.Base64Encoder and to decode that data on the server. This is where PHP comes with base64_decode function. And that's it. :) When you check the class i provided, you won't have to think about it and PHP code is included in the class too - just call tracePHP function.

Make shore you check the application i made for testing. There are a couple of images of my naked wife you can edit and save to your computer.

Yeah... dream on!

Running ASDoc

2008-06-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

Ah...Finally! I had a problem with ASDoc tool (which comes together with Flex) for a long time... I guess, running this tool from command line is much easier for developers with java background... :)
Anyway, i did some research and i finally did it - run this tool from Flex. After you take a look at these screen shots, i guess you will get the picture! :)

http://muzakdeezign.com/flex2/external_tools/external_tools_config.jpg
http://muzakdeezign.com/flex2/external_tools/external_tools_location.jpg
http://muzakdeezign.com/flex2/external_tools/external_tools_directory.jpg

And you can read the full comment here.

One thing that is missing in ASDoc tool is @includeExample command. It would come handy for code examples but for now, it's for internal use only - not included in the version of ASDoc we all have... :/
Hope we'll see it in Flex 4...

*******edit
Perfect little tool for generating ASDoc commands: http://code.google.com/p/dita/
Thanks Shang! :)

Piwik ActionScript3 API

2008-06-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak…
Really powerful web analytics software even if it's still in beta.

A couple months ago, i have heard with Matthieu Aubry - the project leader of Piwik Analytics team and the idea was to build AIR version of Piwik. I really wanted to do something like this (like forever) and i started to work immediately on ActionScript API. But... there is always but... I didn't had a time to finish it until now.
So i decided to put Piwik ActionScript3 API on Google code and let it find someone who will play with it. I still need to generate docs and to clean up the trash from the code and i hope i will publish it before 7.June.
Also, i made a simple AIR version of Piwik for testing purposes (this will be cool since i used papervision and Yahoo maps API for interactive map - just to give it some life :)...

going back to work....

Flash 10 API documentation

2008-05-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

A couple hours ago, Flash Player 10 documentation was released :D.
Download and play!!! :)
Flash 10 documentation

Public Beta Flash Player 10

2008-05-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

mmmm.... something i was waiting for :)
Must be honest! When Flash CS3 was released the question i had was "What they could add into next release i already can not do it!?". I was soooo wrong! You already know that you can build 3D in flash using open source APIs like Papervision, Sandy or Away3D (or something much more simpler :) but in most cases, this is reserved for advanced developers - in the flash 10 even my grandmother could build 3D navigation!!! Believe me, it's true! Hey, what about generating sound in the runtime? Piece of cake! There are so much new possibilities in Flash 10!
There is no documentation yet but you can download compiler from adobe opensource and build content for flash 10 in flex builder 3 (or from command line if you prefer...).
I am already enjoying! :)

Here are some videos about this great release:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/videos/3d.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/videos/pixelbender.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/videos/text.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/videos/drawingapi.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/videos/visualperformance.html

Sound Spectrum

2008-05-09T19:07:00.000-07:00

Check out new NIN - you can download for free new record :)... and you can download source code for this here :)

RichTextEditor >> valid HTML output

2008-04-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

Somehow i just know you had the problem with valid HTML coming from the Flex RichTextEditor component. I mean, as output you are getting all of those tags you don't need and you just want to have some basic functionality like bold or italic text...

Heh... No i didn't build new RichTextEditor... I just changed a few lines of code in mxml file to hide the buttons i do not need and then i am posting htmlText from the component to php file to handle the rest!
The PHP code looks something like this:

And now you will have pretty clean HTML with tags you need and you can push it in your database or what ever you want to do with it...
Yeah i know... it's not a big deal... but it works!!!

TweenLite eats Tweener

2008-03-25T17:33:00.001-07:00

The part of the project i was working on was to animate a lot number of MovieClip objects at the same time (including filtering too). I used Tweener to do this but the result wasn't too good! Thanking to Andrea Sotgiu from BlueStepStudio, i changed my mind about using tweening engine.
He told me about TweenLite and after i saw speed tests, i just couldn't believe it! There are two classes - TweenLite and TweenFilterLite. Take a look at both of them! If you used Tweener before, this will be very familiar to you. The only problem i had with this was when i was changing more then one property of the object (eg, blur and x position) it would just stop tweening the first tween i gave it! Again, Andrea gave me a solution! Just add overwrite:0 in your Tweening line of the code. :)

Thanks Andrea! :)

After Effects and Flash

2008-03-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

Just a simple use of After Effects and flash!
Rollover to see effect.

BTW,
I really like new NIN! :)

Flex and Tweener

2008-02-11T18:51:00.000-08:00

This is really simple example showing how to use Tweener with Flex. Flash Player 9 is required.

You can download source code here.

Plane Class Example

2008-02-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

Here is example of using Plane class form CandyDimension package. Using manual method, all you need to do is to set alpha value of MovieClip to define z-value (alpha will be ignored). To navigate, use arrows, space and shift. Check it out.

It is saved as Flash 8 and you can download source code here.

Out of topic:
I am starting a blog on Serbian language focusing on Flash and Flex. Why? Because there are only a few bloggers talking about Adobe technology on Serbian and think it's something that is missing here. (Thank you Marija :) ).

Browsing Images in 3D Space

2008-02-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

WOW!
This is all i have to say about this add for Firefox! Very flashy!
I do not know which technology is used on this project but i suspect on Flash and PaperVision.

No more words, just take a look at this and you will be browsing images faster than ever!

http://www.piclens.com/site/firefox/win/

Great work!