HackIX

18 January, 201218 January, 2012

Hackix #JS #sopastrike #SOPAblackout #sopa

HackIX joins #sopastrike #SOPAblackout #sopa and blacks out site on the 18th.

6 January, 2012

Zend Server 5.6 is out

Kevin Schroeder writes; Zend Server 5.6 is out. I’m actually pretty stoked about this release. Here’s a few reasons why.

Zend Server CE now contains the full Zend Server stack. Why do I find this exciting? Because the upgrade path from CE to the full version is stupid easy. That means you can try out all of the features in Zend Server and if you don’t want them, just let the license expire. I call it a gateway drug. Seriously. Get Studio or PDT and try the deployment feature. If you’re not using it you’ll ask yourself “why am I not doing this?”
All of you Mac users can finally stop bitching and complaining about the lack of Mac support. We don’t (and probably won’t) support Mac for production (does anyone besides Apple actually use their server products in production?) but for dev work you now get the full stack on your Mac. This is not GA yet but will be later on. If you want a preview release you can go to http://forums.zend.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26873 .
Fault tolerance in the Job Queue through MySQL clustering. In clustered environments job queue information has moved from local storage to remote MySQL storage. So you can have a single MySQL server sitting there, a clustered setup or RDS or some other cloud-based DB, it doesn’t matter. If it can be accessed using the MySQL drivers then it can be used by the new Job Queue.

via ESchrade – Pure PHP Goodness.

15 December, 2011

How To Take Screenshot on the iPad2

If you are seeing something interesting on the iPad screen that you would want to capture. Screenshot is quite useful, especially if you have an error on your device and you want to capture an image so that later you could show it to a support tech and they could assist you in fixing the issue.

Heres how:

1. While you are looking at the screen press Sleep/Wake + Home button and quickly let go of the buttons.

You will see the screen quickly flashes indicating that it has taken the screenshoot. Your capture should now be placed in the Camera Roll album. To view the image go into the album and open it up.

Once you have the image you could email it.

18 November, 201118 November, 2011

How to create custom MouseEvent.CLICK event in AS3 (pass parameters to function)?

Matt W answers;
Take advantage of the dynamic function construction in AS3.


private function myCallbackFunction(e:Event, parameter:String):void
{
     //voila, here's your parameter
}

private function addArguments(method:Function, additionalArguments:Array):Function 
{
     return function(event:Event):void {method.apply(null, [event].concat(additionalArguments));}
}

    var parameter:String = "A sentence I want to pass along";
    movieClip.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, addArguments(myCallbackFunction, [parameter] ) );

31 October, 2011

Creating a Windows AIR Native Extension with Eclipse

Nick Kwiatkowski created a few very interesting posts with video tutorials, he writes; The second I heard about Adobe giving us the ability to create our own extensions to the Flash Platform in AIR 3.0, I was smitten. It was finally a way that we could add our own features and do the things that were high priorities on our lists, but not on Adobe’s. I knew I was looking for features that were one-offs (how many people today really need access to the COM ports), but they were forcing me to do all sorts of weird workarounds like launching proxy applications to do seemingly simple tasks.

AIR 3.0 got released a few weeks ago and I’ve jumped in head first into creating some ANEs (AIR Native Extensions). For those of you who don’t know, ANEs are packaged extensions that contain operating-system specific code (DLLs for Windows, Libraries for MacOS, Java classes for Android and Objective-C for iOS), that allow you to do things that the Flash Player wasn’t able to do.

Unfortunately, Adobe assumed that if you were developing DLLs for Windows, you were going to be using Visual Studio and nothing more. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense in my mind as they’ve been leveraging Eclipse for all of their tooling, and Eclipse does offer some great C/C++ addins. Now, that being said, Visual Studio is by far the more feature-full and hands-down the best editor for enabling these kinds of workflows on Windows. It is, however, very costly and even though Microsoft offers a free versions, it takes over your computer by installing debug versions of most of Microsoft’s shared libraries making your computer slower and more crash prone.

I wanted to use Eclipse’s CDT addin with the standard GCC tooling that is available on pretty much every operating system. By using GCC, I was able to make very portable code that with minimal effort was able to compile on all three of the major OSs (Windows, Mac, Linux). Adobe’s documentation was little help in getting this going (even if you were coding in Visual Studio, there is very little guidance on how to get things setup). I do have to note that with my setup there is one distinct disadvantage — the lack of ability to debug the DLL when it is launched from AIR. You will have to write your own C/C++ harness to do testing on your code in order to test it. If you use the Visual Studio tooling, you CAN debug any DLL while it is running (this is why Microsoft replaces the shared libraries on your system to allow that debugging).

I’ve created a four part video series documenting how to get going creating ANEs. Part 1 covers setting up your environment, including installing CDT, the compiler, and getting Eclipse setup to do your programming. Part 2 covers actually coding the C/C++ code for your Windows DLL. Part 3 covers creating your ANE, and packing up all the stuff needed to make it work. And Part 4 covers how to use your new ANE in an AIR project.

Watch the Video >> Part 1 « QueTwos Blog.

6 October, 2011

Drag-and-Drop in Flex 4

UPDATE: I have another Drag-and-Drop Revisited post that covers even more drag-and-drop functionality available in Flex 4.

The Flex 4 gods were kind to us developers when they made the great decision to leave the custom drag-and-drop support unchanged. We just do what we’ve always done: detect the user is trying to drag something via mouseDown or mouseMove and then add both dragEnter and dragDrop event handlers to the drop target. So there is nothing in this post that’s not basically identical to Flex 3, except the coolness of FXG (which you can easily mimic with Degrafa in Flex 3).

Simple Drag-and-Drop

via Drag-and-Drop in Flex 4 « Saturnboy.

28 September, 2011

Splash screen with FXG in Mobile applications with Flash Builder for PHP

ahillman3 on Stack Overflow wrote this (and won my hero of the day award); OK, the primary focus for your solution is the preloader attribute on a mobile application. See the preloader=”CustomSplashScreen” below:
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
The CustomSplashScreen extends and overrides the spark.preloaders.SplashScreen class, and the getImageClass function.
package {


    import mx.core.DPIClassification;

    import mx.core.mx_internal;
    import spark.preloaders.SplashScreen;
    use namespace mx_internal;

    public class CustomSplashScreen extends SplashScreen 
    {

        public function CustomSplashScreen()

        {

            super();

        }

override mx_internal function getImageClass(dpi:Number, aspectRatio:String):Class { return Class(splash); } } }
The splash in the return Class(splash), is a simple fxg file, like so:
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
That’s all there is to it. Have fun!

— Allen

via .

19 September, 2011

Flex wrappers for MadComponents

Daniel Freeman writes; I’ve had feedback from a few developers wanting a way to combine MadComponents with Flash Builder 4.5 for mobile. I intended MadComponents as a lighweight alternative to using the Flex framework. So while I don’t really like the idea of mixing them – it’s certainly possible to incorporate MadComponents within an MXML layout. All it takes is a few custom component wrappers.

Note: I’ve now put the code for these wrappers into the SVN code repository.

via MobileAppDev.

16 September, 2011

MadComponents AMF Service Test Drive for Mobile

Daniel Freeman writes; In this final MadComponents tutorial we’re going to look at the third and final Flash Builder 4.5 tutorial (from here), and do it the MadComponents way. Adobe’s Flex Test Drive for Mobile: Build a mobile application in an hour, takes you through building an AMF web service, and then building a mobile client application that connects to that service. We’re going to build the same application using MadComponents.

AMF is a binary format used to serialise ActionScript objects. A binary AMF packet is usually significantly smaller than REST XML or SOAP packet. Hence AMF services are typically much faster.

This tutorial assumes that you have some expertise in building web services, using PHP, Coldfusion, or Java. But if you’d rather do a tutorial where the web service already exists, then have a go at building a twitter client.

We recommend that you first take a look at the first six parts of this tutorial series, which will bring you up-to-speed with using MadComponents.

Read the entire tutorial at MadComponents AMF Service Test Drive for Mobile « MobileAppDev.