Cropping white space from images using Flex Bitmap classes
March 2nd, 2010
This blog entry covers a quick introduction to the Flex bitmap classes, BitmapData and Bitmap. Read more…
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Working with ESRI SHP Files in ActionScript
September 4th, 2009
There are lots of heavy weight solutions to drawing maps in Flex and Flash but for a recent project I needed something lightweight to display on a web portal. By lightweight, I mean something that will load quickly over a modem connection or, in our client’s situation, an air card. We already had sales alignment maps created in the ESRI SHP format so the goal was to utilize them in the Flash environment to make displaying maps more interactive. This post will cover the basics of loading SHP files and rendering them with basic ActionScript code. No Flex components were used to keep the footprint small.
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Displaying the AIR application version
April 4th, 2009
There are numerous reasons why you’d want to get access to the AIR application version. You may want to display it in an “about” dialog or perhaps you want to automatically check your website for updates. Read more…
Horizontal Scaled Canvas
March 31st, 2009
Let’s say you have a Canvas containing several UI components. Depending on the screen size, some may be too large to display inside the canvas causing scroll bars to appear. Instead of having the user see scroll bars or a cropped version of your UI components, you can scale them so they fit perfectly. Here’s how I solved this problem. Read more…
Drawing curved lines and arrows in Flex
February 18th, 2009
While working on one of my mapping projects, I needed to draw some arrows between different points on the map. After searching the web I found something close to what I was looking for, but I wanted curved arrows for a slick look. Read more…
Taking control of right-click in Adobe Flex
February 2nd, 2009
Adobe was kind enough to give developers the ability to add options to the right-click menu in a Flex application with the use of ContextMenu objects. However, if you want to customize the way the right-click menu displays, or perhaps do something entirely different when the user clicks the right mouse button, read on to find out how! Read more…
Submit any form on key return in any browser
August 5th, 2008
You may have noticed that in Internet Explorer, pressing return while focused on a form input box only submits the form when there is a single input box. Once you have multiple inputs, say a username and password, it stops working. Read on for a tip on how to gain back this behavior on all browsers AND validate the input before submitting the form!
Using SSL Authentication on a non-SSL website
April 5th, 2008
The task is to provide a secure login on a website which doesn’t necessarily have any other secure content. If you have an SSL certificate for your webserver you can use SSL just for the login to reduce the traffic going over SSL. Read more…
Ant for web developers
April 2nd, 2008
I just spent the last day configuring an apache ant script to automate some tasks in our development environment and I figured I would share some of what I learned. Read more…
Ice Racing!
March 5th, 2008
What do you do with 12+ inches of lake ice in the middle of winter? YOU DRIVE ON IT!!!! Read more…