I am independent web contractor who specializes in developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). I work with clients throughout North America on a wide variety of interesting and challenging projects.
May 16, 2008 . Comments (0)
Over the past few months I have been helping develop a Flex based instructional design application for Instructional Spice. For those of you who don't know (I didn't), instructional design is a huge market for flash development, but most of the work relies on custom development of training and learning modules by flash developers, who just happen to be in very short supply. Instructional Spice does for instructional design what Sprout and Wix do for creating flash content, it allows regular joes to build flash based instructional design modules and content in a simple to use GUI, with no development experience required.
The most amazing aspect of working on this project was that the lead developer had no prior Flex experience, he came from a .Net background but he had the interest and passion to learn Flex and build something great. I think he succeeded and based on feedback from beta and initial users, others agree.
Apr 23, 2008 . Comments (1)
As they say necessity is the mother of all invention. In this case I need a simple tool to prep comma delimited files before importing them into a MySQL database. I had tried using the tools provided in PhpMyAdmin for importing csv and tab delimited text files without any luck. Each file required some tweaks for string delimiting, column names, etc. After a few hours of frustration I decided to create a tool to convert csv and tab delimited text files into import or update SQL statements, which can easily be used in any RDBMS. Download it here.
Apr 15, 2008 . Comments (4)
A friend of mine asked if it was possible to create a pie chart component using Degrafa instead of using the Flex pie chart component. Before this I had only looked at a few Degrafa samples but had never actually tried to create anything using their classes. I hummed and hawed and wondered how I would come up with something useful that looked good and functioned properly.
After a few hours of tinkering around and getting the basics of Degrafa down I came up with a rough first pass at a pie chart. A few more hours of how to build in the right functionality for handling different sized data sets and interpolating the data when the data sets changed and I came up with my first version (follow this link to see the source code) of a functional pie chart. For a first pass I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There is still obviously a lot to add in, like labels and event handling, but the basics are there. Overall the learning process was not to painful.
The Degrafa docs are little lacking in places, especially when it comes to creating objects that can fire events (ie click, mouse over). Thankfully they have a ton of good samples and by picking apart some of the source code I was able to figure out some things the documentation did not really cover.
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