:cubicleman.com

Ok, so I’m no CSS Zen master, far from it actually. The thought of creating good CSS that is cross-browser supported and all just makes me shiver. I had to look at something today concerning links with fancy image backgrounds and rollovers that tweaked this image. After some quick googling, I am a card carrying member of the Google Brain Club, I found this neat article on A List Apart on something they call CSS Sprites. Wow, what a cool deal. Basically you use a single image for all of your links and just reposition this image as a background. What does this gain? Well, for starters only one image needs to be loaded or preloaded. Sure, this one image may be bigger than a single one of the single link backgrounds, but the composite is likely to be smaller and take only one request. It might very well fall into the same number of packets as a single one too depending on image compression and such.

So, how to pull it off? I’ll go over a quick single link example. First, fire up Fireworks (can you tell I’m not a real graphics guy? :} ) and create your two link, or button, states. Here is a sample:

Now, use some simple CSS magic:
#outerCont {top:0px; left:0px; background: url( images/button_states.gif ) 0 0 no-repeat;}
#outerCont a:hover { background: url( images/button_states.gif ) -200px 0 no-repeat;}

Here is a sample page showing it in action:
button_states.html

Back to our regularly scheduled Flex/Air fun!

peas
DK

Check itout, next week is another Adobe Developer Week. What is it? A week of online presos via Adobe. Topics range from CF8 to Flex to BlazeDS. Enjoy!

Adobe Developer Week

peas

DK

Mr. Ben Forta is heading to Atlanta for the tour. Please come and join us at the January 22nd Atlanta Flex and Flash User Group. Check out the link after the break for the full details and please be kind and RSVP.

http://www.affug.org

peas

ok, hoping to step out and coin a new term: BRIA
BRIA is Business Rich Internet Applications. Idea is a RIA and BRIA are a little different to me. Consider Finetune, Pandora, or Scrapblog in contrast to say BusinessObjects, Fidelity Mortgage Search, or Viziant. BRIA are a subset of RIA focused on pure business applications such as the Enterprise sector.

Go ahead, use it, steal it, let me sue you for it. hehe…jk

DK

Using Eclispe and Trac? Would you like to see your Trac issues in Eclipse? Maybe even create and update Trac issues in Eclipse? You are in luck! A co-worker just discovered this and I promptly set it up. The project is called Mylyn. Its a plugin for Eclipse that is designed to be a ‘Task-Focused UI for Eclipse’. It can interface with Trac, Jira, and Bugzilla. Besides working with issues directly inside Eclipse, it also monitors the issue base and notifies you of new issues. Really sweet. Read about it below. You can install easily via Eclipse update tool too.

http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/

DK

Heading out this afternoon for Cheecago. Hope to see some of you folks there! With so many attendees, we may be fighting each other over the free food and beer, hehe. Be sure to drop by the Universal Mind booth too and we can chat about building awesome Flex apps.

Peas

DK

I was needing a way to perform a deep copy on a array this morning. The Flex SDK contains a way to do this:mx.utils.ObjectUtilM.copy(). Wow, so easy, no coding needed, eh? Ooops! Seems you have to add a little more code in to get things happy. To perform this copy you will need to use registerAlias() to register your classes in use in the Array to be copied. You can read all about it here in Darron Schall’s blog entry: On [Transient], ObjectUtil.copy(), and Casting. His entry talks to this issue before introducing a meta keyword Transient.

Cheers!

DK

Awesome!! Universalmind has made the list of fastest growing private companies this year coming in at 290. Though my tenure has been short so far with Universalmind, it has been awesome working with the best and brightest in the industry. I am excited to be part of such a tremendous team and anticipate the times ahead as we grow. You can read about the exciting news here at Inc 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America.

Don’t know who Universalmind is? We are a team of developers whose collective mind tackles your problems and solves them. As a team, we have developed, and continue to enrich, a core knowledge base of best practices for building, troubleshooting, and optimizing complex, high-performance web applications. Check us out here: http://www.universalmind.com. Come talk to us at Adobe MAX Chicago at the Universalmind booth too!

DK

Update: Thanks to Mike at Inc.com for correcting a obvious blunder.

We had a great conversation at CF_Lunch today. CF_Lunch? Well, if you are in the Atlanta area, the local CFUG promotes lunches for CF folks to get together. Check out http://www.acfug.org.

So, what’s with the title of this post? During our conversation a member posed the statement: I don’t get it. He was referring to AIR and its usefulness. Well, it got us all thinking. As developers, AIR is another kewl bread slicer, but what is AIR to say the VP of IT at ? Sure, it allows IT to leverage the skills of Flex/Flash developers to build desktop applications, but what else? What else in relation to Enterprise IT, ie inTRAnets? I could pose a few things perhaps, like cross-platform abilities, thought that is not a selling point for inTRAnets, eh? But what about you, what do you think?

The table discussed the recent AIR event. A few of us felt adding some content to address this to the event could really help the product.

DK

Ok, so yesterdays AIR Tour in Atlanta was awesome. I finally got the time to actually write something too. During the presentations we saw the HTML browser in AIR example, yet again. I think this example is really nice as it shows how AIR encapsulates a large complex problem into a simple tag solution. However I think the example gets lost quick as most people don’t see a real use in that. I can hear the IT Manager: ‘Ugh, why do I need this AIR, we have IE?’. Although the example does show that you can quickly and easily wrap your web app with AIR and completely remove any issue with that back button as well as add some branding of sorts maybe. You can also ‘mash’ a existing web app with a new Flex based app inside AIR with this. I think it would be good to add a few of these, or other, ideas into this example.

That said, it is wonderful example to get started with AIR, of course AFTER you write your Hello World app! Thus I created a HTML browser in AIR yesterday, with a few additions. Namely, I’ve created a tabbed browser. Its not feature rich or anything, hey we all have IE and that’s all we need, right? Ok, Ok. Those Apple folks have Jungle, err Outback? Oh, Safari! hehe.

Here is the zip to the source. It is Flex based of course. Enjoy!
TabbedBrowserInAIR

updated: as Rostislav Siryk pointed out, be a good idea to post the AIR file, eh? So here it is:
TabbedBrowserInAIR AIR File