Posts
-
My New Computer
It’s not a Mac! It’s a Sony!
A Sony Vaio E-Series to be exact.
Yes, I’ve gone back to the dark side. But it doesn’t feel that way anymore. I’ll make a long story short, since I’ve started out to write a long explanation of why I’m going back to Windows, and I think the less said, the better. I started out on Commodore machines and eventually made it to PCs. I used PCs since the early 90’s with Windows 3.0. Was always happy with them. Did the Mac thing for 3 years, and it was great, but I’m a bit disillusioned with Apple right now.
Read more... -
A few MinimalComp updates
Addressed all reported bugs and added a few graphical goodies.
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=“static” fversion=“10.0.0″ movie=“https://www.bit-101.com/2003/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Updates.swf” width=“420″ height=“320″ targetclass=“flashmovie”]
[/kml_flashembed]
First is grids. The Panel now has a few new properties. Panel.showGrid turns on or off a grid drawn in the background. Panel.gridColor and Panel.gridSize let you control the color of the grid lines and how far apart they are. Grids also apply to the chart classes and work the same way.
Read more... -
MinimalComps: New SWC, zipped source, updated site
Backlogged on this, but I got the new SWC and zipped source uploaded, including the new RangeSlider component (HRangeSlider and VRangeSlider, actually). Has a bunch of other bug fixes in there as well.
Also updated the site, as it had a nasty bug in the WheelMenu that caused a run time error, as several as you reported. This was fixed a while back, just needed to update the site. And the site now shows the RangeSlider as well.
Read more... -
MinimalComps: RangeSlider
I know I’m supposed to stop making new components and clean things up for 1.0, but this got in my head and I had to bang it out. It’s basically a slider with two handles. You get a lowValue and a highValue. Good for specifying a range with a low and high boundary. I thought it was pretty important to have labels for the two values, but wasn’t sure the best way to do it. Finally came up with these sliding labels that match the position of each handle. They can be always on, always off, or just show up when you move the handles. You can also specify the position of the label.
Read more... -
Minimal NumericStepper
I wasn’t planning on doing this before 1.0, but I needed one and put a couple of buttons and an input text together for the project I’m doing. Then I needed another one elsewhere in the project. So I extracted what I made, cleaned it up and here you go. 🙂
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=“static” fversion=“10.0.0″ movie=“https://www.bit-101.com/2003/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/NumericStepper.swf” width=“100″ height=“36″ targetclass=“flashmovie”]
[/kml_flashembed]
The buttons are a bit different than other Numeric Steppers, but I kind of like them. You have max, min, value, step, labelPrecision, and of course a CHANGE event.
Read more... -
Encoding PNGs in AS3, asynchronously
Occasionally I make apps that create bitmaps and save them. To do so you need to use an encoder to turn the bitmapdata bits into a byte array that can be saved in some image format. AS3 has a PNGEncoder class, but the main problem with it is that it’s pretty slow. I’m saving a 4000×4000 bitmap and it takes sometimes well over 30 seconds, during which time, the app completely freezes up.
Read more... -
Custom List Items for MinimalComps List and ComboBox
I checked in some changes to List and ComboBox that allow you to create custom list items. Here’s an example:
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=“static” fversion=“10.0.0″ movie=“https://www.bit-101.com/2003/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/CustomList.swf” width=“250″ height=“200″ targetclass=“flashmovie”]
[/kml_flashembed]
This is enabled through the listItemClass property on List and ComboBox. In it, you pass in a class that must extend the ListItem class. Here’s the code for this example:
[as3]package
{
import com.bit101.components.*;import flash.display.Sprite;
Read more...
import flash.events.Event; -
MinimalComps Fixes
As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks addressing any bugs or enhancements to the components. In the last few days, here are some of the things I’ve added and fixed:
– exposed numVisibleItems on ComboBox
Read more...
– fix for stage click to close ComboBox
– exposed items array for List and ComboBox
– more accurate leap year calculation in Calendar
– Sliders now dispatch a change event when you set their values programmatically
– HBox and VBox now calculate their own width and height based on their contents, so you can now nest these
– Knob has 3 modes of reacting to the mouse: vertical, horizontal, and rotate
– fixed some visual jumpiness that occurred when resizing components
– made internal event listeners use weak references
– on text components, if text is set to null, it will be changed to an empty string rather than throwing an error -
And finally, Minimal ComboBox
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=“static” fversion=“10.0.0″ movie=“https://www.bit-101.com/2003/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ComboBox.swf” width=“120″ height=“200″ targetclass=“flashmovie”]
[/kml_flashembed]
Has most of the same properties / methods as List. And adds:
openPosition – “top”, “bottom”, or ComboBox.TOP, ComboBox.BOTTOM. Defaults to bottom.
defaultLabel – what shows if nothing is selected. Default to an empty string.As mentioned yesterday, this is the last component I am going to add for a while. I’m going to concentrate on cleaning things up, fixing any bugs that come up, considering any needed enhancements to existing components, and then calling it 1.0.
Read more... -
Font issue in MinimalComps
It was brought to my attention today that there was a possible issue in the MinimalComps regarding font embedding. If you were to compile the component source with the Flex 4 SDK, no labels on any components would show up. If you use the precompiled SWC, you’d be fine, as this was compiled with the 3.4 SDK. But if you were using the zipped source checked out the source with SVN and compiled under SDK 4.x, you’d hit this problem.
Read more...
