about creating online experiences
Tools/frameworks that minimize boilerplate code while not abstracting away the underlying technology are wonderful. Thanks to SASS and Compass it is actually fun to work with CSS3 and all browser specific prefixes. The combination is a great timesaver and helped me a lot to make the about page of cocomoshi just a little more playful. Here’s a little variation.
Here’s a useful little interactive cheatsheet I made to better remember all the functions inside the Flex lifecycle. I’ve never found the time to validate all the descriptive stuff so please use with care. Most of the information provided should be pretty accurate and should still be applicable to Flex 4.6. But again, be sure to double check.
This little tool visualizes the lifecycle of the Flex 4 Spark component model and hopefully helps to understand what happens behind the scenes.
Basically it is an expanded stack trace with comments showing the most important method calls during the lifecycle’s birth, life and death phase including invalidation and validation.
Flex is great to prototype.
Here’s a little thing I’ve thrown together a while ago. Pick and create football-formations.
It features a couple of custom components like a JerseyEditor, a simple Color-Picker a formation list and some custom item renders.
You can adjust the formations on the fly entering any system you like. Try 4-4-2 if you’re more in for a classical style, try 2-3-4-1 for an attacking lot or use drag and drop to adjust your own custom formation.
Clicking on a player opens up the editor so you can add your own players. And no, the colours of the jersey editor do not get passed over right now.
It’s been a while since Adobe managed to nuke its developer base with a single press release. In the past few months I’ve been repeatedly asked if I would still bet on Flex, so I might as well write it down. My short conclusion: Flex has a future but within a limited scope.
Quick note on how to copy all maven dependencies to a target folder.
If you can’t get Maven to work with a particular IDE or plug-in it might be helpful to at least copy all dependencies (jars) to a destination-folder. The Maven Dependency Plug-In will kindly assist you to copy maven dependencies to a target folder.
I had a look at Google App engine and some of the new features in Spring 3 (MVC).
I decided to create a platform for city ratings and –rankings. I polished the whole thing a bit in the hope to attract some visitors. I wonder if I can get some peaks in traffic to see how this service will perform in GAE under load outside of a stress test.
To see what I’m talking aoput, a first version is up and running at CityClash. To read about my experience with Google App Engine read on after the screenshot.
Here’s a first version of a simple Ruler component that takes some of the techniques discussed in the couple of previous post into account.
The ruler can be scaled down or up by holding CTRL/SHIFT while clicking and can be moved by holding the ALT-Key and keeping the mouse button pressed. When scaling an animation is applied for smoother transitions. For the labels an array of Strings can be set, each one defining a division on the ruler. The number of subdivisions can be set as well
Simple ruler component. View source is enabled.