Forest and the Trees

Flash on Tap

Doug — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:27:47 +0000

I’ll be speaking at Flash on Tap this October 7-9 in Boston. This should be a great conference: Flash + Beer = Nothing to Fear? Or something. Anyway, the speaker line up is top notch. I’m pretty psyched to be included in such an impressive group. My topic is Five Minute Design Patterns. Description below…

Screw eight minute abbs. We’ll be learning a new design pattern every five minutes in this high-impact non-aerobic session. That’s ten whole patterns: Adapter, Template, Singleton, Factory, Strategy, Facade, Iterator, Command, Bridge, and Composite. Why so many in so little time? Because patterns are used for many things, but, mostly they are used to impress other developers. So volume counts. “Composite your tree structure!”; “Facade those classes!”; “UML your bridge!”; and “Iterate this!” are just some things you might say after you’ve paid a little bit of attention during this session. Feel the burn!

We’ll see if the preso works (I think it will be fun), but, hey, if it doesn’t, what do you care? You get to drink beer.

Updated Design Pattern Group Page

Doug — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:55:44 +0000

[UPDATE July 18, 2008]

Daniel sent me a link to his preso on the Proxy class. Interesting stuff - Proxy is the new __resolve. Uhh kind of.

Finally got around to updating the Design Pattern Group page. Posted James’s preso on FlyWeight and Phil’s on Template vs Strategy. And added other topics and speakers (I guess for posterity)

Formatting the FlexLib Window Shade

Doug — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:10:54 +0000

Our designer wanted to know how to skin the FlexLib Window Shade, so I put this together. Might be useful to someone. Shows how to set the button property on the Window Shade - but, more generally (and probably more importantly) shows multiple ways to set item renderers. Right click to view source.

Primary Election Center Finished

Doug — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:23:11 +0000

Finally updated the Election Center. Obama won! That’ll be the final update. There are things I’d change - but, time to start looking at the General Election.

Data Grid and ADG Footers

Doug — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:54:43 +0000

[UPDATE 26 Jun 2008] - view source is now fully functional

I made some enhancements to the DataGrid footer posted in Alex’s Flex Closet. This supports resizing columns, locked columns, and horizontal scrolling. It is also implemented in both the Data Grid and the Advanced Data Grid. Licensed under MIT (which I believe is the do whatever the hell you want license - commercial, non-commercial, sell it unedited to someone (although that would be morally wrong)).

I haven’t tested these very much. If you find a bug, please comment.

Demo here. The functions that calculate the content of the footers are in the main mxml. Right click to view source.

Obama Wins Nomination!

Doug — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:14:55 +0000

OK - well that’ll be tonight. Hilary’s bringing in her big supporters to New York. Bill’s said that he won’t be involved in a presidential campaign for while. And Obama needs 43 delegates to win. All signs point to yes. I’ve updated the Election Center. Unfortunately the state by state data is totally screwed up (not sure if it’s me or CNN (probably me)), so I commented out that tab. I’ll try to fix that tonight.

103 Delegates Today

Doug — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:51:54 +0000

Getting near the end - Oregon and Kentucky hold their primaries today. Looks like Clinton will win Kentucky (51 delegates). Obama will win Oregon (52 delegates). And Clinton will continue to smoke the high grade and think she can somehow win. I updated the election center and added a summary tab. The tab contains two charts: a pie chart showing current totals; and a bar chart showing how many delegates each candidate needs to win. Most telling is Clinton needs to win 72% of the remaining delegates to win.

Bridge Pattern Talk Files

Doug — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:03:09 +0000

Here is the swf - right-click to view source. And here’s the preso. The source has very little commenting and the preso doesn’t have any notes. But, it still might make sense. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Presentation is in OpenOffice. Here’s a PDF version as well.

Obama 92.6% There

Doug — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:27:44 +0000

It’s looking pretty tough for Hillary after yesterday. But, we still might have to wait until monkeys fly out of Paul Begala’s butt. Anyway, the election center is fairly updated (totals were this morning). Take a look.
Source MSNBC (which has the highest Obama numbers)

Bridge Pattern

Doug — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:56:03 +0000

I’ll be giving a talk on the Bridge Pattern at the BFPUG Design Patterns Group(I really need to update that page) this Wednesday (May 7, 2008). As always, it’ll take place at Brightcove and will start at 7pm. And as always, we will get together for beers afterwards at Characters (which is located beneath Brightcove). Please stop by. These are really fun nights. Map here.