Introducing Makebook: a web app that lets you create books and manage a library of stories, recipes, poems, whatever … I’ve been developing the Flex front end for about 7-8 months now, and it’s been an interesting ride. It’s requires Flash 10 — it’s on the bleeding edge in some respects. I have the sleep deprivation to prove it :)

Here’s a screenshot of the editor:

Sign up and have a go. Let me know what you think.

I would love to talk about the set of features that we’re working on next, but that would spoil the surprise now wouldn’t it :)

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See an example here – view source is enabled. It’s in Flex, but there’s nothing Flex-specific about the class, so you should be able to use it in Flash. I have used the Vector class (a bit like Pringles – once you’ve pop()’d, you can’t stop) but that’s not really necessary, you could just swap in an array if you are still coding for Flash 9 (boo).

Thanks to Overset.com for the ideas – their AS2 spinner – I didn’t use the code but it gave me a jumping-off point.

PS In the code, “petals” is the same as “leaves” … no idea why I mixed metaphors … should clean that up, but hey.

[ Edit: fixed the typo in the title of this post. ]

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I will probably go with Ruben Swiergina’s one, simply because it has API docs, and it took me less time to figure out how to use it. But they both look like good solutions in the own right. Well done guys.

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Can Coldfusion, for instance – I’m referring to that because it’s Adobe’s pet server technology, not because I have any affection for it, or much knowledge of it – work with Text Layout Framework Markup? Or is there a way to export to XHTML, or any other commonly used format?

From the minimal docs available at this point, it seems that the formats available to export are Text Layout Framework Markup, plain text and FXG. To someone building a rich-text web-based editor in Flex that can print, are any of these technologies relevant?

It might be possible to do some kind of conversion from Text Layout Framework Markup to XHTML to PDF (up to this point, the HTML-to-PDF conversion part of it was what we were thinking of using, given that the only option available for editing was poor old TextField), but that would be like recording a beautiful grand piano using an 8-bit soundcard and then playing the recording through Yamaha monitors. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

If anyone reading this has any clues I’d be very grateful – this question is critical to whether or not the new technology will be useful in my current project. I’ve tried to post about this in the forums; unfortunately there seems to be a bug preventing me from posting (if anyone from Adobe is reading this, it asks me for a nickname then says it’s already taken – whatever I choose).

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Now we have text flow, columnar layouts, proper inline graphic elements … and fine-grained control of pretty much everything about the fonts. Absolutely bloody amazing … Awesome.

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(There is a partial workaround for this: uncheck “Remove unused imports when organizing” in Preferences > Flex > Editors > ActionScript Code. But that doesn’t help with creating the imports in the first place, so I’m still manually adding imports – which breaks the principle of convenience, you know, the reason we use IDEs in the first place.)

So on the bug report, it says that the problem has been fixed in Flex Builder plugin 3.0.210014 and higher. And where, pray, does one download said plugin? Not on the Adobe site. Nowhere in fact. Apparently it’s an update via Adobe Updater. So I run it. Nothing.

So either:

Adobe Updater is broken; or

The standalone version of Flex Builder (which I am using) is not being kept up to date with the plugin version.

… whichever it is, it’s crap. Fix it!

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A little background: the Flash stuff I get from my designer does not conform to what Flex expects from its components. Things stick out the sides, animate all over the place, there’s massive masked objects all over the shop that totally screw up the placement in Flex, especially in a fluid layout where I am relying on horizontalCenter and verticalCenter to keep things positioned correctly. Scrollbars suddenly appear on my application, elements start shaking and shuddering as they animate when they would ideally stay perfectly still.

I was sure there would be a way to fool Flex into thinking my UIMovieClip-extending objects are not changing their height and width. I tried overriding the getter for width and height – no dice.

Then I thought I’d try overriding the getter for “bounds” – the rectangle that defines the size of the display object. It works! Of course then you aren’t getting the magical auto-alignment that the Flex framework offers .. but in the cases where your content doesn’t need that treatment but does need to be positioned using, say, horizontalCenter, it’s perfect.

It’s as simple as:

override protected function get bounds():Rectangle {
var b:Rectangle = super.bounds;
b.width = 200;
return b;
}

.. of course, “200″ is just an arbitrary number.

To see how this works in practise, have a look at an example (wordpress is refusing to embed my Flash inline for some reason). View source is enabled; ignore the package names, I just hacked the example together in the midst of building a client’s website, and I can’t be bothered to make a separate project for the example).

P.S. I have no idea if this is already common practise; I tried googling for solutions but found nothing. Comments welcome.

P.P.S. The name “flesh hack” is quite apt, I think, to describe a programming trick to get Flash and Flex to work well together – the struggle is often quite brutal …

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A commenter on his blog suggests that he eliminate all dependency on Flex classes. Well, duh. If that was possible, that would be easy. But I am using value objects that are used in communication with the server via remoting. It’s not reasonable to have to ask the backend developers not to use ArrayCollection just for the sake of some damn problem Flash has. For God’s sake, UIMovieClip is in mx.flash … I wonder if it’s possible to compile certain other mx classes into my UIMovieClip. If I find a solution I will post it here.

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For reasons that aren’t worth going into, I want to add Operation objects programmatically to a RemoteObject. The “operations” attribute (defined in AbstractService) has the following helpful information:

The Operations array is usually only set by the MXML compiler if you create a service using an MXML tag.

Fantastic. So what if you aren’t? Is it a regular numeric array of Operation objects? Or an associative array (suggested by the fact that the attribute type is Object, rather than Array), using the remote service method names?

Adobe: WTFM (properly!)

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The problem is, as with all writing (apart from blogging, which is more or less stream-of-conciousness), it’s very hard to say exactly when to stop revising. I keep thinking of things I could improve … but the chapter was already hideously late. I need to call it a day!

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