December 23rd 2010 - Entry Posted to: AMFPHP,FlashPress,General,Zend AMF

I’m just finishing off the next version of FlashPress.

Apart from some bug fixes, the main change is the addition of a postComment, userLogin and userLogout methods.

Changes:

• New postComment method
• New getPostTems method (this depreciates getCategories)
• New userLogin method
• New userLogout method
• Addition of customTax property on PostVO object, to handle custom taxonomies on post objects
• Slight changes to TermVO object properties. One additional property added
• Bug fixes for getPost method
• Bug fixes for getUser methods and WpUserVO object
• Adjustments to the search method so it searches custom post types as well as built in

Some thoughts about the postComments method.
This is currently working fine in dev. I’m curious as to how you would like this method exposed. It does write to the DB, so I’m in half a mind to wrap it within the current writeable variables. However, in doing so, you make available the rest of the writeable methods, which might not be that desirable to all users. I’m hesitant to go down this path.

So, what about a new global constant that either allows/ restricts comments? Or I can simply hook into the wordpress options and check what is set within the ‘Discussion’ panel and on a per post basis and allow / restrict comments based off that?

At the moment the method does not validate against users. Any new comments are placed into the moderation queue. A subsequent comment from a commenter that has an approved comment is automatically approved. Which is left up to the wordpress commenting mechanism.

Commenting really requires basic user management. Do you want to see this in FlashPress. Something like a login / logout method? Which I’ve added.

Commenting now hooks into the WordPress options settings, honoring either the blog wide and or individual post commenting settings.

Any other methods that you think should be in? If not, I’ll freeze the API and just clean up the classes documentation, fix bugs and roll out a version 1 release along with some examples. Happy times.

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July 12th 2010 - Entry Posted to: ActionScript 3,General

If you are like me, you like to be able to trace out commands etc from Flash into your browser container. I generally use FlashTracer on Firefox or a more full featured debugger.

However, sometimes I simply want to trace elements into the console of either Safari or Firefox. This is as simple as using ExternalInterface and a small javascript method that takes a single parameter and writes it to the browsers console, via console.log(). Which can then be inspected via Safari’s debug panel or within Firebug on Firefox. And yes, I realise I could use Flashbug or something similar, but to be honest, I hardly ever use Firefox, hence the desire for something that works in Safari.

Simple example file is attached.

Source files
Simple Flash logging (2131)

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June 23rd 2010 - Entry Posted to: General,jQuery

I seem to be spending more and more time using jQuery than I do Flash, but I think that is just the nature of my current job. I’m actually really enjoying jQuery, it’s a breeze to use and in most instances you can do what you can do in Flash with javascript, only quicker.

To cut a long story short, I had a project come up that needed a javascript full browser background image class, and being the nerd I am, I thought I’d roll my own rather than use any existing jQuery plugins.

I approached it from a Flash standpoint, and tried to replicate the way I use my Flash full browser classes. So rather than operating on a container of image urls as most jQuery full browser plugins do I set this one up to respond to a method call, and load and display each image as requested. The reason for this approach was that I wanted the plugin to only load what images were requested, by me when I wanted them. I’m thinking however of adding in the ‘operate on a container of image urls’ approach to a future iteration.

As this is my first attempt at writing a jQuery plugin I’ve probably made a ton of noob mistakes. Let me know how it works and any bugs you encounter.

Plugin Features

• Set Fade in time
• Center image within browser window on x axis
• Callback methods

An example of loading a single image;.
http://www.noponies.com/dev/jquery-npfullbrowser/static.htm

An example of setting up a slideshow;
http://www.noponies.com/dev/jquery-npfullbrowser/slideshow.htm

Source Files
Here is the relevant source file; jquery Full Browser Background Images (1891)

By downloading, you agree to the terms of use, outlined here: http://www.blog.noponies.com/terms-and-conditions

Dependencies
Zero

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March 23rd 2010 - Entry Posted to: ActionScript 3,class

A recent project needed a watermark added to any images that could be downloaded off the site. Originally we used a PHP solution, which worked fine. But I wanted to do it inside of Flash and use the save methods in FP10.

So, I wrote this simple little class to adding a water mark to a display object, and the returning that display object as bitmapdata for say, passing to Adobe’s jpg encoder.

Maybe someone will have some use for it?

Source Files
Here is the relevant source file; Watermark class (1612)

By downloading, you agree to the terms of use, outlined here: http://www.blog.noponies.com/terms-and-conditions

Dependencies
Zero

Comments Off

July 29th 2009 - Entry Posted to: ActionScript 3

I made this as a simple test for RSS parsing for a job a little while back, and it never was used for anything, so I’ll post it here as it may be of use to someone.

Its a simple RSS parser that uses the RSS and Atom libraries http://code.google.com/p/as3syndicationlib/ to handle parsing its RSS feeds. Although parsing RSS is trivial, I wanted to use a provided Adobe library for the hell of it.

The file is not overly documented and uses my scrolling panel and scrollbar classes to handle scrolling the RSS items.

An example is below.

Source Files
Here is the relevant source file; Rss Reader Demo (1862)

By downloading, you agree to the terms of use, outlined here: http://www.blog.noponies.com/terms-and-conditions

Dependencies
Zero

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July 27th 2009 - Entry Posted to: ActionScript 3,tutorial

At work I’m without my install of Flex, and its various niceities like ant builds for creating ASDoc documentation for my various classes and work projects.

In the past I’ve messed around with the commandline controls for creating ASDoc documentation, but without a great deal of success.

However, at work today, I decided to get it working and create some documentation. There are a range of options for creating asdoc documents on the mac, I’ll list them below.

1 / Command line. Downloading the Flex SDK and kicking it command line style.

2 / Getting a copy of Flex, and using Ant to build your docs.

3 / Using either the SDK, or Flex but a front end tool like Dita to generate the shell scripts for you, that you then run in terminal to create your docs.

I’ve used Dita and Flex with an Ant build on my home mac. At work, I use the command line approach.

Heres how I got it to work, using the new Flex 4 SDK beta and the OSX terminal.

a / Make sure you have downloaded the latest Flex SDK. Unzip it and place it somewhere on your hard drive. Mine lives in the “Developer” folder of my OSX boot disk.
b / Open up a text editor. I always find it easier to work out my terminal commands in a text editor, and simply paste in what I want into termainl when I’m ready.
c / Find the path to your bin folder within your Flex SDK folder. The simplest way, is to simply drag n drop the bin folder into an empty terminal window, which will then give you the path to the folder. Or simply, type it out manually. You now need to tell terminal to work from this ‘bin’ directory, via the ‘cd’ command. The syntax for that is below;

cd path-to-you-flex-sdk-bin-folder

d / Now you can simply run the various asDoc commands to generate your documentation. The various commands I’ve used to create the documentation for my NpFSObjectresize class are listed below. Make sure the asdoc commands are all on one long line. For some reason, I had to have the footer and window title before the -doc-sources parameter.

cd /Developer/SDKs/flex_sdk_4.0.0.7219/bin/
./asdoc -main-title="NpFSOBjectResize Class" -window-title="Noponies NpFSOBjectResize Class" -footer="Copyright <a href='http://www.blog.noponies.com' title='Visit Class Author'>Noponies</a> 2009" -doc-sources=/Users/dsattler/Desktop/sample/noponies -output=/Users/dsattler/Desktop/sample/docs

As you can see from the example above, I have a folder called ‘sample’ on my desktop with my actionscript residing in a folder called ‘noponies’. I’m simply outputting my docs to a folder called ‘docs’ which resides within that ‘sample’ folder.

When you are ready, simply paste in your ASDoc commands into terminal, and you should see the asdoc tool run through its various steps. One thing I’ve noticed is that the Flex 4 ASDoc tool is much more strict about correctly closing html tags etc within your documentation. A missing closing /p caught me out.

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