This Blog Dying Soon

I’ve just about had it with WordPress and I’m moving my blog to blogger. WordPress’s UI is terrible, their feature set under-developed (I have to pay $10 a year for my own CSS?!) and their restrictions on importing SWF’s from external sites simply ridiculous.

The new blog will be found at http://www.RJRIA.blogspot.com. Go check it out – there might be something great up there even now.

The new blog is going to be more general. While I guess I never stuck to Flex specifically in the <10 posts I have here, the new blog is going to be titled to make it easier for me to talk about RIA development in general, design philosophy, and experience design as well as Flex.

If you have any good ideas about the title, I’d love to hear them!

FormItem’s have a bad layout.

In Flex, there’s unfortunately no easy way to make this layout work:

<form item’s label>

<form item control>

So if you, like me, have a layout that requires a prompt (something like “your email”) to sit directly above a form item (say a text input), you’re going to have some trouble.

You might say, well, why not just give the form item no label, or an empty label, and put a “Label” control on top of it, like this:

<vbox>

<Label text=”your email”>

<FormItem label=”">

<TextInput>

</FormItem>

</VBox>

Great idea! Unfortunately, this won’t give the layout you desire because Flex still allocates some space to the form item’s empty label.  Your “Label” control will be somewhere around 3 pixels to the left of your TextInput.  Awesome.

Does anyone have a good elegant solution for this that doesn’t involve any of the following?:

a.) re-writing FormItem

b.) using an absolute layout

c.) shifting the Label control to the right

I’ll update this post if I find one, but in my frustrated fury I wanted to get the question out there.  It seems like this sort of thing happens to me a lot with Flex….if you’re not working very soundly within the Adobe prescribed box for how their components should be used, you’re going to be jumping through hoops.  It’s stuff like this that consistently make me worried about estimating how long it’s going to take to complete any part of a project – if things work in the way they seem they should, it shouldn’t take long, but who knows what weird restrictions Adobe has on the object I want to use?

picnik is amazing

If you haven’t checked it out yet, zip on over to Picnik and enjoy one of the best Flex RIA’s I’ve seen. Here’s why:

1. It solves a real problem. People need and will use a good picture editing application. You shouldn’t have to use a sledge hammer like Photoshop to remove red-eye or increase the contrast in a picture, and the millions of small photo editing programs that ship with cameras just don’t cut it.
2. It has a great interface. The people at Picnik payed a lot of attention to usability, and it shows. The interface is clean and simple enough that I can find everything I need but not so simple that something I need isn’t there. It’s focused on letting you perform basic editing to pictures, and it does it very very well.
3. It’s better in Flex. One criticism I hear frequently of Flex/Flash is that there isn’t a need for it. Picnik is a good example of an application that would’ve been at least 20 times harder to develop in Ajax and wouldn’t work as well as it does. There’s a good reason to use Flex for an application like this (Flex has excellent built in bitmap editing features) and they use it wisely. The transition animations are simple and enhance the user experience rather than taking up too much processor and distracting from it.
4. It’s better as an internet application. I can use Picnik from anywhere and it works fine. I don’t need an application this light-weight installed on my computer, clogging my registry, taking up disk space, probably running in the system tray.
5. It uses social networking intelligently. Rather than trying to re-invent facebook or flickr or myspace, picnik ties into these services more or less seamlessly and increases both their value and its own.

Overall I give this application two thumbs up – this is a real 10. Nice work, Picnikers.

“Internal Build Error” or “Classes Must Not Be Nested” error

Lately I’ve been seeing these errors in Flex Builder and not been able to find any good reason why they’re happening. It seems like the errors alternate – sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s several of the other – and there’s no easy way to figure out why they’re happening. Usually they’ll go away if you clean the project enough, but that’s a huge waste of time, so I’ve spent a few hours scouring my code and removing anything that might be causing the errors.

I’ve found that these errors can be caused by several different conditions. FlexBuilder doesn’t handle them well (indeed it seems to have exceptions in either it’s own environment or the compiler), so you get this generic error message instead of something useful.

Here’s a list of problems that I’ve found that can cause these errors. Hit up the comments if you have any others:

1. Forgetting the semi-colon at the end of your member variables.

Michael Imhoff documented this one first. For some reason, flex builder doesn’t flag this as an error while coding, and it doesn’t throw exceptions in the build if you manage to make it compile.

2. Having the same namespace listed twice with different extensions in your mxml

so this:

<Component
xmlns=”com.site.stuff.core.*”
xmlns:fanui=”com.site.stuff.core.*”
xmlns:mx=“http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml”
creationComplete=”onCreationComplete()”>

should be this:
<stuff:Component
xmlns:stuff=”com.site.stuff.core.*”
xmlns:mx=“http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml”
creationComplete=”onCreationComplete()”>

or with the default namespace declared, obviously – as long as there’s only one namespace linked to com.site.stuff.core.*.

3. Having the same import declared twice in an AS file or embedded AS in an mxml file

4. Commenting out certain lines of code and rendering trace statements unreachable.

I’ve never seen this, but it was documented as one way to get the error on Flex Coders.

According to Matt Chotin in response to the FlexCoders listing, this is a documented issue.  Hopefully it will be fixed in Flex 3.

Until then, good luck!

Why I Love Joost

I received an invite to Joost last week and was finally able to check it out. In a nutshell, it’s one of the best applications I’ve seen in a long time. The content is nice – it’s fun to watch TV on my computer – but what I love even more about Joost is the usability.

Here’s a list of the top 5 thing you can learn about rich applications from Joost:

1.) It’s focused. Joost is an application that brings TV to your desktop in a way that works. It has some other features, like show recommendation and chat, but they’re relegated strictly to the background. The focus is on TV, and you know that from the second you start up the app. Too many apps springing up these days are trying to leverage some neat trend first and promotetheir product/service second (“social networking” is driving me crazy.)

2.) It just works. The developers have obviously taken some pains to make sure that Joost just works for me, and I love that. I don’t have to worry about configuring a bunch of settings or setting my bandwidth or selecting my player or authorizing my plug-ins. The controls are simple and make sense, and if you close Joost in the middle of a show, it opens back up later to the place you left off. In a world full of applications that only really work after an hour, or even ten minutes, of re-configuring your computer, applications that work so smoothly are a breath of fresh air. It seems so simple, but it makes me so much more excited about this application.

3.) It’s extremely usable. The controls are simple and easy to find. The layout is focused on maximizing the screen area and provides a few basic controls to do everything else.

3.) It has a great website. Joost’s website is short, sweet, and to the point. The header features small flash movies that promote the application in entertaining ways and the content itself is concise. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, it’s one thing: a website that tells you about Joost.

The bottom line with applications like Joost is that they emphasize elegant usability. It looks great, but it’s not cluttered or confusing, and at the end of the day, that’s the single most important thing separating good ideas from popular software.

Joost doesn’t tell me how many invitations I have left, but as of right now I can still send invites. If you’re looking for one, add a comment with your email address and I’ll get it sent to you ASAP.

Intro to Flex Builder 2 presentation

I gave a presentation earlier this week online for Adobe on using Flex Builder 2. If you’re new to Flex or wondering whether Flex Builder is worth using, it might be helpful.

This was the first time I’d given this presentation, so it went a little long. We also had over 100 attendees, so the question and answer time was absolutely crazy. The text area where I as the presenter was reading the questions from was scrolling so fast I could barely read it!

You can find Adobe’s recording of the presentation here.

Artemis goes live

While I was gone last week, Artemis, a framework for connecting Java programs to Flex interfaces, went live. Check it out here:

http://artemis.effectiveui.com/

Using Flash in Flex

Grant Skinner has a great post up about a technique he’s calling “shake ‘n’ bake swfs”:

“Normally Flex will strip all ActionScript from an embedded Flash symbol. We’ve developed a technique called Shake’n'Bake SWFs (yes, I did watch Talladega Nights before coming up with the name), which allows you to utilize Flash symbols in Flex projects with all AS intact. I mentioned this technique at 360Flex, but didn’t go into much detail because there are better options available when using Flash CS3. A couple of people mentioned that they would like to learn about the technique, so I thought I’d blog about it. “

Read it all here. I can’t wait to hear what the “better options” in Flash CS3 are….

Hmm.  That sounds sarcastic, but it’s not meant to be – I really can’t wait.

flex conference next month

Adobe and effectiveUI are co-sponsoring a free flex conference next month, on May 3rd. Speakers will be from ebay, effectiveUI, Adobe, Forrester, and ZDNet. Click here for more details.

Adobe releases Apollo camp presentations, quick start guide

Adobe is posting all of the presentations from Apollo camp online in video form here. Be sure to check out Sean Christmann’s awesome wiimote demonstration, which you can also see on Anthony Franco’s blog.

Disclaimer: I work with Anthony and Sean, but I think you’ll agree that this is pretty hot stuff.

Also, here for free is the pdf version of Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide.