Posts filed under “Flex/AS3”
JavaScript Development vs. Flex Development (and why today, web development sucks…)
Blog post titles with »vs« in it are often quite controversial. Most of the time, eliminating bias in those posts is neither desired nor possible anyway. Same here. However, having worked on real-world projects both using Ruby on Rails/HTML/JavaScript and Flex/AS3, I think that I’m able to kind of compare these different ways of developing […]
Asynchronous Callback Functions in FlexUnit
FlexUnit provides support for asynchronous testing with the Async class. While this class works well for event driven tests, it doesn’t support callback functions like you might want it to. A typical event driven asynchronous test looks like this:
Faster parallel MXMLC compilation using Ant
Whenever you have a Flex project consisting of several modules, you can take advantage of compiling those modules in parallel – provided that they don’t depend on each other – using Ant and the Ant-Contrib tasks. In a project with five modules, I’ve seen a speed increase of about 30% compared to normal sequential compilation. […]
Demo Video of AS3 Marking Menus
In my last article “Extremly Efficient Menu Selection: Marking Menus for the Flash Platform” I wrote about a powerful (but surprisingly rarely used) interaction technique called marking menus. A short demo video showing marking menus in a Flex application can now be found on www.markingmenus.org. Release of Flash/Flex components and source hopefully in 2010…
Extremely Efficient Menu Selection: Marking Menus for the Flash Platform
This is a topic I wanted to write about since a while now: Marking menus and their implementation in ActionScript 3.0 for the Flash Platform. I had the chance of extensively studying this menu technique over the summer and developed a fully working solution for the Flash Platform, i.e. for use in Flash, Flex and […]
Design by Contract framework for Flex development?
On InfoQ, there’s an interesting presentation by Greg Young on how Design by Contract (DBC) and Test Driven Development (TDD) can be combined and complement each other. Using a Microsoft framework for API contracts, he talks about how DBC can be used to eliminate a large number unit tests by setting up constraints in your […]
Paper of the Month: Faster Cascading Menu Selections Using AAMUs and EMUs
Actually, this post deals with two papers that I want to briefly present here (since they are closely related to each other). Download links and a short introduction below: The papers Tanvir, E., Cullen, J., Irani, P., Cockburn, A. (2008) AAMU: Adaptive Activation Area Menus for Improving Selection in Cascading Pull-Down Menus. Proceedings of ACM […]
“Flash Engineering” – A book about software engineering with the Flash Platform
Recently, the book “Flash Engineering” by Sven Busse (2009) has been published. While it is currently only available in German, English speakers might still want to read on, since it is quite unique compared to other books relating to that technology. I don’t know if an English version is being planned (if not, it would […]
Paper of the Month: Rethinking the Progress Bar
This is the second post in my series about worthwhile, freely available academic papers with practical relevance for application design. Here you go: The paper Harrison, C., Amento, B., Kuznetsov, S., Bell, R. (2007) Rethinking the Progress Bar. Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology. Newport, Rhode Island, USA, […]
Efficient Gesture Recognition and Corner Finding in AS3
Gesture recognition and corner finding are two techniques that can be useful for all sorts of things. For example, gesture recognition can be used to recognise shapes in graphics applications, to control the user interface on a mobile device or to build creative games. In this context, I’m referring to shapes drawn with an input […]
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