Entries Tagged 'RIA' ↓

Have you ever generated graphics with Flex? Flex comes with a lot of powerful graphics tools, but it can get pretty hard to do interesting stuff with it. But you need not worry anymore!

Degrafa is a project dedicated to the development of a Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex.

Their intro paragraph says:

The focus behind the Declarative Graphics Framework (Degrafa) is to bring the graphics classes up a level to provide a common ground between developer and designer within Flex, and enable the graphics classes to become first class citizens within the Flex framework.

In simple language, Degrafa allows you to achieve complex graphics using simple tag based syntax. It’s easy to learn and is very fast. I was amazed to see the samples!

Degrafa Samples

The next time we need some low level graphics work, I am going with Degrafa!

We have been struggling with zooming TextArea in Flex for 2 months now. Tried lots of combination but nothing worked. Can someone help?

Essentially, we scaleX and scaleY the TextArea as the zoom level changes. The component zooms in fine, but the text in it keeps wrapping as we keep zooming. We expect the text to stay as it is and just zoom. Not re-wrap.

Here is the text at 100%. Notice the last words on the lines.

TextArea zoom at 100%

Here is the TextArea at 150% zoom. Notice how the wrapping disrupts.

TextArea zoom at 150%

I have a live example if you want to try this out.

We have tried using zoom effect, adding line breaks at the end of each line before zooming and removing them, trying different fonts, embedding them - everything we could think of! But this looks like a bug! TextArea keeps wrapping the text as we zoom.

What could be a solution?

Vaishali told me about the FWA Theater. It has a clean interface and a collection of good videos. Some of them amazed me, some of them made me laugh. Go to the Best of FWA and watch the Kitkat Ad or the Nissan Stunt! I think you will like it!

Nice use of RIA!

Adobe is teaming up with Google and Yahoo! to improve indexing of dynamic content in rich internet applications made with Flash. This means Google and Yahoo! will be able to crawl your site if you have a Flash/Flex/OpenLaszlo based application that pulls content from database.

Here are some excerpts from the press release.

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine.

Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search.

This surely is a great development!

Update:

OpenLaszlo blog has a great post on why this is not so big a news!

Working on a project that allows user to change the color of an image using Hue, Saturation and Brightness adjustments from Flex. The same image should then be printed in high resolution from the backend.

The trouble is, when we apply the same HSB variations that Flex used to Photoshop / Gimp / ImageMagick they generate a totally different color output. We want a WYSIWYG color change/printing, so this is not going to work.

The following table shows the output we received!

Not sure what the solution to this is. ImageMagick has come the closest to Flex’s HSB variations, so I am currently trying to figure out something with it.

Any hints?