Watch a video tutorial for setting up a Flex app to send Tweets via AMFPHP. [ Other AMFPHP video tutorials ]

I signed my RunPee.com site for a Twitter account: RunPee. I wanted the app to be able to send tweets whenever someone added or cloned a PeeTime. The application already uses AMFPHP for all it’s database communications so I was already half way there.

But for the purposes of this tutorial I’ll start a project from scratch.

If you’re testing locally you’ll of course need WAMP server running with AMFPHP and CURL enabled. CURL isn’t enabled in WAMP by default but it’s very easy to do so. On a Windows machine just follow these instructions:

1. Shut down WAMP: Stop all services
2. Open the folder: WAMP\bin\php\( your version of php )
3. Open the file: php.ini
4. Do a text search for: “extension=php_curl.dll” and remove the comment so that it’s enabled
5. Open the folder: WAMP\bin\Apache\(your version of apache)\bin\
6. Open the file: php.ini
7. Do a text search for: “extension=php_curl.dll” and remove the comment so that this to is enabled
8. Save/close both .ini files
9. Restart All Services in WAMP

Now we need some php script that will hook us up with the Twitter API. I canabalized the code from this tutorial here at Woork. I then combined Woork’s code with the Twitter documentation to enable the functionality I needed. Actually, all I needed to do was send a tweet but as your can see the example below does much more. And that’s still not everything. But you should be able to extend what I’ve done here to take advantage off all the Twitter API that you need to.

Also, I signed up for a Twitter account for testing purposes that you can use. You don’t want to use your own because you’ll be spamming people as you test - like I accidentally did. :-)

Testing Twitter account: FlexAMFPHPtest / password ( yes, the password is password. )

In all my examples here I’m returning the data as XML but you can switch to JSON or RSS in many cases. I chose XML because you would be able to extract data from it using E4X - which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

I’m a huge fan of stuff like that. If I were independenly wealthy I’d probably spend most of my days exploring mathematical topics such as that.

Years ago I created a one-dimensional version of the Game of Life using AS2 - oh, so slow by today’s standards.

And along those lines is a Flex app that creates a Sierpinski triangle by choosing random numbers.

Suppose I have a variable declared as such:

[Bindable] private var myText:String;

And I have a TextArea like this:

<TextArea id="myTextArea" text="{ myText }" />

Pretty simple. Anytime I change the value of myText it will be updated in the TextArea. Ahh, the beauty of data binding.

The error I made was that under certain cases I directly changed the text value of myTextArea as such:

myTextArea.text = "";

Now in these cases the property myText hasn’t changed - which was the mistake I made.

The problem occurs when the user browses back to the same movie that they were at originally. In that case myText is “changed” but to the same value it had before. In that case data binding never fires and the text displayed in myTextArea doesn’t update. It stays as an empty string and not the value of myText.

This is really just a problem of poor programming. I should never had directly changed the value of myTextArea.text. Instead I should have said:

myText = "";

That would have “zeroed” out the text in myTextArea just as I wanted to and then when the user browsed back to the same movie the value would change again thus updating myTextArea is needed.

But as we all know code grows organically over the span of a project and sometimes what we wrote last week doesn’t jive with what we wrote today. That’s how this bug was introduced.

The easiest way to avoid this bug is to not give the TextArea an id. That way you can’t change it’s text value directly and must always rely on data binding. That works in instances where you never need to talk to the component for any other reasons. If you have to, say, move the TextArea around then you’ll have to give it an id. In that case just be careful.

RunPee.com is pretty much ready for prime time. Best of all there are PeeTimes up for the movie Eagle Eye. Oh, in case you didn’t know: RunPee.com is a wiki for people to share the best times during a movie to run and pee. Really, it’s not a joke. It may be pretty funny, but it’s not a joke. :-)

Right now the content is being generated by family and friends but as the number of registered users - that means you! - picks up I hope that it will support itself.

So, go see Eagle Eye and grab the BIG soda and popcorn before the movie. And you won’t have to worry about missing anything when you run off to pee because you’ll know when to go and what you’ll be missing while your away.

By the way, I thought Eagle Eye was pretty good. There’s a link near the bottom-right of the site that links to my review - no spoilers.

Watch a short video overview of pixDIF. Note: the audio sounds weird because Camtasia can't see chromeless AIR apps. So I had to use Jing to record a screen-cast. Then play that back and use Camtasia to record the recording. The things we go through...

1. You install it to your desktop ( Adobe AIR application, see install badge at the top of this post. )
2. Launch it
3. Drag-and-drop your design comp images into the app
4. Select one and it will launch in it's own chromeless window
5. You can now move that window over your functional app and look for the differences

• alpha fading of the image
• turn the image visibility off
• create horizontal or vertical guides
• drag the guides around
• use the guides to measure pixel distances very precisely
• use the arrow keys to move the guides - if it's selected/red
• or use the arrow keys to move the image/window around on your desktop
• hold down the shift key to move 10 pixels at a time

• When dragging a vertical guide to the far left: if the mouse moves beyond the application border the guide pops into view at the far right. I traced some mouseX values and sure enough, it's reporting the far right pixel value of the screen. It might be an AIR bug. I could probably code around it. But then maybe you could just not try and drag a guide off the window to the left. ;-)

• Full screen mode
• Ability to annotate screen (draw circles or things over areas i need to fix)
• Ability to print what is on the screen (annotations, etc)
• Save annotated screen as PNG/JPG

• Bidding ends on Wednesday, September 17th, at 6PM EST.
• Buy it now price is $375.
• I will notify the winner on the evening of Sept. 17 - I'll be on vacation so be patient.
• Winner and I will work out a method of payment - Paypal would work best for me.
• Once I have the $$$ I'll email the activation codes so that you can use them right away. I'll then mail the actual gift cards via USPS.
• When the winner gets the activations codes and signs up on Lynda.com I'd appreciate it if you would come back and comment that the transaction is complete. Just for public record.
• I think that does it.