Emak Mafu Labs Blog

As a developer you will often find yourself scouring for information, whether it be a solution to your latest nightmare, source code for the latest framework or simply something cool and so you most of you will inevitably find yourself firing-up the web browser and hitting the big G.
So let me just stop you right there, you may want to consider some other sources before trawl through x million pages of results. The most important part of your search will be where you search, and searching everything is not a good idea if your looking for something specific.
First up on the list is del.icio.us, or “the web filtered” as I like to call it. The idea behind delicious is simple, people tag links that they like so they can remember them, and find related links, however the fantastic side-effect of this is that only valid content is tagged, nobody is going to go around tagging messageboards, preachy fanboys or catchment sites because they have nothing on them. Thus a search on del.icio.us will usually give you a result that somebody thought was worth saving.
The website ffffound takes this concept one step further, you can only tag something if you are invited by a friend, and friends only have three invites each. Although strictly for images (designers) its a great concept and fantastic source of inspiration.
Of course you can still use google, who wouldn’t, but you would be better off searching Google Groups for code related stuff. Google has been increasingly gaining momentum with Google Code and the integration with groups means that a lot of developers are taking to the messageboards there.
If you like to keep on top of the all the latest information then you will want to search the “blog-o-sphere” at technorati, for all the post of all the blogs registered, or the increasingly geeky digg.com, which was here before del.icio.us, but has become slightly bloated by the number of backtracking urls and and abundance of people “digging” everything.
Finally you may want to consider some plug-ins for your browser, if your a mac user try inquisitor, find as you type functionality, and firefox has trailfire, but I’ll leave you to explore the concept behind that…..

Firstly a big thankyou to everyone involved, especially Adobe for helping with the venue and the free beer! The event went down really well, we got just under 200 people coming along, a lot of them from other platforms. The best question of the night in the Q&A was “How do I convince my clients to use Flex and not Ajax?”. Looks like it is all going in the right direction. The next big event like this will be in April, but there will be 2 smaller events between now and then.

Sorry about the delay, but we are back now. Loads of really good excuses, like moving office, moving server etc. but I won’t bore you with all that.

The biggest news is that after 3 years on Old Street, we have now moved to Shoreditch Park, photos are coming soon!

Hey, this is a post for all you apple fans. I found this big poster with all the Apple creations the company was born. Geek out!

The poster here

We have review the Image Cropping Application and now we have it working in a better way. These are the new stuff that we have added to the component:

- Smoothy Scaling: All the scaling works smooth now, it has a little delay that makes the scaling “attractive”.

- The Scaling it’s now from the centre point of the image, it does it more intuitive?

- When you load the component, the image that you are dragging and dropping doesn’t got out of the container.

- We have added a checkbox ‘Activate Limits’, that allows you to drag, scale and move the image whatever you want.

- Internal Source Code improved.

Here you can see the old version. The newest one HERE Judge by yourself. Enjoy!

If someone doesn’t know it, every nights the Adobe Developer teams release the last version of Flex SDK. Sometimes this SDKs has some bugs and some unstable issues but almost all of them are working fine.

If you’re interested on it, you can download it from:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/sdk/flex3sdk.html
Install them it’s also really easy, and in fact, it’s really easy as well to come back to your previous version of your sdk.

1. Unzip the file with the SDK to a folder in your computer.

The steps that you need follow to install your last Nightly builds:

2. Under Flex builder, click on the top menu bar  Window->preferences.

3. On the tree menu of the right side, click on Flex->Installed Flex SDK.

4. Click on Add.. and browse the folder where you’ve unzipped the SDK. After, give to your sdk a Intuitive Name (like “Last night build”) and click OK

5. With the checkbox select your new Last Night Build. Click ok.

6. Rebuild your project, and you will have it running with your new SDK!

Here you can see some photos from the Flex User Group last meeting. Enjoy!

Hello everybody!

Mike Potter in action.

Design watches application running!

Platform Games Doof!

And after all, our Flex in The Pub! Thanks!

I have just done a victory dance for a problem that has plagued me for somtime now, its a random error that decides when it will and won’t show giving the lovely descriptive error:

The name of this class, XXX, conflicts with the name of another class that was loaded …

This is completely down to time stamps on the computer where the files have been saved and the computer when the files are compiled. In my case, the server where all my classes are stored was 2 minutes ahead of my computer - so when the compiler saw the file - it cant really understand why there’s a file from the future and throws its toys out the pram resulting in a compile error.

you may even be experiencing this if your sending your files to a time zone behind your one - same problem as described above.

I solved this problem by making sure the servers time is synced to “Apple Europe (time.euro.apple.com)” and so it my computer, this way, they are running to the same second - after i did that - i made sure all the effected files had been re-saved with the new timestamp - and wola!

Someone kindly videoed a portion of the Abobe MAX conference in Chicago - where they were exhibiting a sneak peak of what is in the next generation player to come out. Some really cool features seem to be in there, and ones that makes sense to be too. They seem to be working on their own answer to PaperVision by adding a z axis, although - no where a near where PaperVsion is now - but definitely delivering for the high demand of 3D environments.

Another cool feature that they have created is the ability to float text over many text box’s, just as if you were in InDesign, a solution that will bring a new layout to flash text through out the world.

They talk about some other stuff too - check out the video:

Involved in my work of Mafunet (a generic cms done in Flex), I found a big problem: when a user uploads an image to a website and this image has to have standard size, he needs to crop the image before uploading it with Photoshop or Gimp, or we have to automate the scaling of the image, losing some details and functionality. I have developed this component, that allows the user to load an image on the server, crop it on the client side, and save it again on the server with the name that I choose.

For the masking, I have changed the blend mode of the different layers. But I’m still having problems when you drag the image, it takes a little bit of time to understand the layout.

The steps…

1. I crop the image with the function of BitMapData copyPixels(bitmap data, rectangle, point).
2. Then, I encode the crop image with JPEGEncoder.
3. Once I have encoded the image, I create a post call, with the file and the name of the file that I want.
4. Once done, I download the file to see how it looks.

The example, here.

And that’s all, if someone needs source code, e-mail us.