Arno Manders

I’m  making a tree like menu structure. It is already a hacky business but now I encountered another problem. And I have no clue where it is happening and if I do something wrong or Flex is messing it up.

I have a Tree component that uses a tree renderer to render the items. In this tree renderer I determine if it has children and style it by setting the left position and adding an icon.

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For my AMDawing I searched a lot for . And all the solutions that I found are too complex in my opinion. I saw all the examples with remote objects and AMFphp or ZendAMF.

Finally I found the solution at thinkerlog.com. I think it is the most straight forward solution. This are the basics:

First you make the URLrequest that requests the php file url. And then you use URLvariables to send all the variables to the php file. This is the code:

                        var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("upload.php");
	         	var vars:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
 
		        vars.name = this.creatorName.text;
		        vars.bindata = Base64.encodeByteArray(imageData);
		        request.method = "POST";
		        var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
		        loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, uploadPhotoHandler);
		        request.data = vars;
                        loader.load(request);

That is everything at the Flex side. Now the PHP file “upload.php”:

  if ($_REQUEST["bindata"] === NULL) {
    echo "missing parameter.";
  }else {
    $img_data = base64_decode($_REQUEST["bindata"]);
    $name = $_REQUEST["name"] === NULL ? "anonymousn" : $_REQUEST["name"];
    $name = strip_tags($name);
    $img_size = strlen($img_data);
    if ($img_size < 1000000) {
	$date = date("U");
      $img_filename = "data/$name.$date.png";
      unlink($img_filename);
      $img_file = fopen($img_filename, "w") or die("can't open file");
      fwrite($img_file, $img_data);
      fclose($img_file);
	echo "$date";
      echo "$img_size bytes uploaded.";
    }else {
      echo "image too big.";
    }
  }

If you want an extended tutorial you have to go to thinkerlog.com

A few weeks ago I was busy finding a graduate project. And during that time augmented reality looked very interesting. Most of you know what it means, for the others here a small explaining line from wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.

"it's amazing, it's the new Lego"

I’m not going deeper into this subject I only made this post to show some of the cool examples:

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Here in Holland you have free news papers that you can read when you consume any kind of  public transportation.  In my childhood when I was bored I took a newspaper and draw all sorts of objects on  photo’s of famous people,  like: glasses, moustaches, beards and acme. I think this is also cool in flash

My original idea was to do it different than the newspaper and use 3D for it. Put a famous head as texture on a 3D model and draw on it. I’m not that far yet because it is hard to find an 3D model of a head. I now have an 3D plane with a texture on it. It is already possible to do the same things as in the newspaper and something more… You can save it to a server! So I encourage you to upload your creation to a server.

For now I have a photo from Berlusconi (Italian prime minister). Why? Because I love his quote on the recent earthquake victims that lost there home

“They have everything they need, they have medical care, hot food . . . Of course, their current lodgings are a bit temporary, but they should see it like a weekend of camping.”

Please upload those drawings and I will show them on my blog!!!!

start drawing

I hope I don’t get problems with the mafia

Known problems: Slow and you see some grey dots if you move the mouse (don’t know the solution)

I try to create my own extension with a saved AIR file. The point in doing this is that the user knows what files are created by what program and a file without an extension is just plain ugly.

When you save a file in other programs you can choose to overwrite a file (that is created before or has a known extension) or create a new file. I tried to find a way in AIR to do this same thing. I found one article on an Adobe blog that uses a FileFilter in combination with a file.browseForSave but he is using it in a way that it has no effect and is pretty useless. He is creating a FileFilter but he is never using it:

save:function(){
var fileFilter = new air.FileFilter("To Do Lists", "*.todo");
ToDo.currentDirectory.addEventListener(air.Event.SELECT, ToDo.fileSaved.bind(ToDo) );
ToDo.currentDirectory.browseForSave("Save To-do List");
}

I hear you think “who cares about the FileFilter” because it sounds like a minor problem and maybe it is. But for me it seems easy to build because browse(), browseForOpen() and browseForOpenMultiple() are using it.

I wonder if there is a way to work around this problem. It is maybe a little detail but it are the little details that make things great.

After the Flash Google maps API release I spend some time to see what is possible. I started with the documentation from Google. In there documentation they are using the latitude and longitude coordinates to set the center of your map. This is not really a human readable way to do it and personally I never used the latitude and longitude coordinates to find a city or street in Google Maps. That is why I started searching for a way to center the map with an address.

I build a small application with source-code available in Flex that is using this technique. In the left upper corner you can search your own address. I use ClientGeocoder to search for the address but the problem i’m running in to is that you can’t run it local because he returns this error.

Warning: Domain maps.googleapis.com does not explicitly specify a
meta-policy, but Content-Type of policy file
http://maps.googleapis.com/mapsapi/crossdomain.xml is
'text/x-cross-domain-policy'.  Applying meta-policy 'by-content-type'.

You can’t use ClientGeocoder crossdomain. You should call it from a domain that has a registered Google Maps API key in my case “http://blog.arnomanders.nl”.

Is it me or is file.url a lot easier to use than file.nativePath in Adobe AIR. Maybe I’m missing something because every tutorial or code snippet I can find uses file.nativePath.

I’m busy building an AIR application that can be used on Windows and Mac OS. I have to take care of the file structure of both systems. After I test my application on a Mac I couldn’t load anything from it. The reason of this problem is that Mac needs “file://” in front of the file URL to load the file correct.

When I had this problem I searched the internet for a solution. I found very complex solutions at EverythingFlex and Snipplr. But then I start to examine the File object and found just the right file url (on the Mac it adds “file://” in front of the url) just accessible with File.url. Then I tested it on Windows and it worked perfect.

I see no reason why I shouldn’t use this simple version of all the long code solutions that are available on the web. But like I said maybe I’m missing something?

I stumbled into an incorrect working function of the TileList in Flex. It looks like they swopped a few variables around.

If you set the direction of the TileList to horizontal it looks like Flex doesn’t care about the option and just scolls vertical. After that I checked an Adobe quickstart guide to know sure that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But I couldn’t find anything that I missed.

Because I hate it if things don’t work I try everything to get it working. So I tried to set the direction to vertical just to see if something was happening and now the TileList scolled horizontal… very strange.

here is a example with source code (right click)

Maybe I’m doing something wrong? Do other people have the same problem?

I extended the Flex 3D example of my previous post some more. Now you can drag (left mousebutton) the objects and bounce them into each other.

I think the smart visiters will see that it look a little like TileUI from Doug McCune or TileUI copy of Bill White. I tried to make something like that but I used Away3D and the WOW physics engine.

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Watch the Away3D and WOW demo. Sometimes they stand like a tower and sometimes it almost look like they explode. Click on the onderground to reset the cubes to a random position

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