AS3 Yammer Library

By Mister | Published: January 27, 2010

For the past few months I have been working on an AS3 library that wraps the Yammer API for use in Flash, Flex, and AIR projects. The biggest hurdle was making the application work for the web. As it is now, for Flash projects, you still need to be targeting Flash player 10 so that you can upload the ByteArray information file attachments. The second hurdle was creating an easy Oauth flow that doesn’t add items to the header that would violate the Flash player security, something you don’t have to worry about when creating AIR applications.

With that work out of the way, I would like to introduce an AS3 Yammer API library that communicates with the Yammer service. The as3yammerlib is hosted on GitHub and the source code is publicly available. To use the library you will need your own consumer key and secret for the Yammer API available from Yammer’s developer site. The library is also dependent on the as3corelib for doing JSON parsing and as3-signals for broadcasting events.

I put together a Flex web-based example using Flex Builder 4 that walks you through the Oauth process and retrieves messages for the logged in user. To use the code, just create a new Flex project and paste the Main.mxml file in your main application file and create another mxml for the MessageItemRenderer file within the same directory:

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Posted in AIR, API, Flash Builder 4, Flex, Flex 4 | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

AIR: Migrating Expired Certificates using AIR 1.5.3

By Mister | Published: January 6, 2010

If you renew your certificate and you are running an earlier version of Adobe AIR than 1.5.3, you are in a world of hurt. The process of updating and renewing your certificate is enough of a pain, but trying to update your AIR application after your certificate expires prior to 1.5.3 required you to just uninstall your previous version and reinstall a new version of your application.

Adobe AIR 1.5.3 Update

Luckily with AIR 1.5.3 you now have a grace period of 6 months to renew your certificate and still be able to publish an update to your application that users can install over the previous application. The down side is that it’s is not easy to update your certificate once you update to 1.5.3. You can read more about the Adobe AIR 1.5.3 update and changes to certificate migration here:

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Posted in AIR, Flex 3 | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Preventing scrolling and mouse events on out of focus AIR application

By Mister | Published: September 29, 2009

This has been a little bit of annoyance for me for some time. When an AIR application (like any Twitter application) is out of focus and you click on the application activate it, you inadvertently click a link or button within the application. You are also able to scroll the application when the application has no focus, which may or may not be your desired behavior. I wanted a way to prevent mouse events and scrolling until the application has focus. I tried to find away around this annoyance by capturing if the application has focus by listening for Event.ACTIVATE or Event.DEACTIVATE events on the NativeApplication.nativeApplication:

NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(Event.ACTIVATE, handleAppActivate);
NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(Event.DEACTIVATE, handleAppDiactivate);

private function handleAppActivate(event:Event):void
{
    // set a flag that application has focus so now links and buttons work
}
           
private function handleAppDiactivate(event:Event):void
{
       // set some flag to let the application has no focus so disable links and buttons
}

This solution has a couple of problems. First the application has focus the instance you click on any link within the application window. So fine, the way around that is to use some kind of timer so that your flag that says application is now active is not set until some time after the application receives focus. This leads to the second problem, at least for larger scale applications. You have to pipe the flag that says the application has no focus to every button and link through the entire application, this is a huge pain.

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Posted in AIR | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Custom AIR updater interface using ApplicationUpdater

By Mister | Published: September 13, 2009

To tell you the truth, I never gave the ApplicationUpdaterUI much thought in terms of memory use before this post. I just thought it was a great way to add a complete update system to your AIR applications. I had not thought it could be so memory intensive until a recent conversation with Jesse Warden on Twitter:

Tweet Conversation

* Please note that Jesse is dude that looks about 17 and I am the older more distinguished gentleman.

Problem with ApplicationUpdaterUI

Indeed, that “mofo eats mad RAM” is putting it lightly. It turns out that the ApplicationUpdaterUI consumes about 14MB of RAM within the application. Furthermore, for the ApplicationUpdaterUI to even check for available updates, it must loads the entire UI in memory even if not displayed. So just by using the framework, you end adding 14MB to your application that won’t be garbage collected. Granted, in most cases 14MB of RAM is not that big of deal. However, for smaller applications you might want to consider an alternative approach.

There happens to another class file called ApplicationUpdater. This class basically gives you all the benefits of the ApplicationUpdaterUI framework without any of the visible elements. This means you have to build your own user interface. This might actually be a benefit in the long run as you may want to customize your application updater to match your application. The other benefit is that you can use the ApplicationUpdater class to check for updates without loading any user interface. The interface only needs to be loaded if there is an actual update available.

Custom Updater Interface with ApplicationUpdater

In building my own custom updater interface, I thought it might be nice to have the same look and feel of the ApplicationUpdaterUI along with some of the more polite features (like postpone update until restart). Building your own updater using the ApplicationUpdater turns out to be a little more involved than I had originally thought. However, when you start attacking a problem you persevere until the end, no matter what the pain.

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Posted in AIR, Flex | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Spark TextFlow LinkElement Rollover in Flex 4

By Mister | Published: August 30, 2009

This is a little example of how to create a skinned rollover popup on a LinkElement object in Flash Builder 4 (Flex 4) within a TextFlow object. This is something I have been waiting for since 2001. The old way to create a rollover action on an HTML link was to create an invisible MovieClip that floats over your hyperlink. Flex Builder 4 greatly simplifies this by adding rollover, mouse, and click events to all hyperlinks within the TextFlow object. This is a HUGE plus

I borrowed the click event action from an example by Peter deHaan posted on his blog Flex Examples. You will need the latest build of the Flex Builder 4 SDK and some helpful instructions on how to install the latest Flex Builder 4 SDK.

Example AIR Application Output

LinkElement Rollover Example

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Posted in AIR, Flash Builder 4, Flex 4, Spark Skins | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Garbage collection and styles

By Mister | Published: August 21, 2009

I read a really great post in my endless search for better garbage collection in AIR and Flex. Bernd Bindreiter of firstrow RIA posted a 5-part series on garbage collection and one of them involves removing skins from Button controls in order to have them garbage collected properly. In his post he removes each individual skin from the button using something like:

myButton.setStyle("overSkin", null);
myButton.setStyle("upSkin", null);
myButton.setStyle("downSkin", null);

What I wondered was if I could do the same thing by just setting the styleName to null:

myButton.sytleName = null;

This does work for skins, but as Bernd’s comments point out, other styles such as “color, fontSize, paddingTop” don’t create memory leaks, so this method only works with skins. However, setting the styleName to null is also an effective way for marking the object ready to be garbage collected. I recommend reading the rest of his posts about garbage collection techniques. I am always searching for the holy grail of garbage collection and his posts were very insightful.

-Mister

Posted in Flex | 1 Comment

Adobe MAX 2009 – Los Angeles

By Mister | Published: August 21, 2009

This year Adobe Max 2009 is in my own backyard, well sort of 6 miles up the street, which means about an hour away in LA traffic. I am hoping to get in for free some how, either through Adobe Max Awards or by posting the Adobe Max Widget. See everyone there, maybe…

Posted in AIR, Flex, Flex News | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

AIR:: Adding Application Menu Bar Items

By Mister | Published: July 31, 2009

Just a quick how-to post on adding application menu bar items to your Adobe AIR application when running. Certain operating systems can support application menu bars, so this example will not be true for all systems. You can check this using “NativeApplication.supportsMenu == true”, which basically means you are on Mac OSX dude. If you were on a Windows or Linux box you would check for “NativeWindow.supportsMenu == true” and add the menu items to the NativeWindow rather than the NativeApplication.

As it turns out, I ran into just a small confusing snag that initially prevented the added application menu bar item from firing a select event. I eventually reached out to the Adobe AIR Tight discussion group and Jesse Warden had a quick fix. It turns out that if you do not use strong item references, they are swept away by Garbage Collection (GC) before you actually use the items. For example instead of creating the NativeMenuItem within the scope of the function, I had to create it within the scope of the class or in this case, the WindowedApplication.

In my application I only needed to add a single menu bar item. So instead of blowing away the entire application menu and then creating all my own menu items (as many of the examples show). I just wanted to add a single item to the exiting application menu bar. On Mac OS, you get 4 application menu items: YourAppName, File, Edit, and Window. YourAppName would be your applications name or if you are running in the Eclipse IDE, just simply “adl”. In my case I wanted to add a “Preferences” option under the YourAppName. You can do this by accessing the NativeMenuItem representing the YourAppName. Something like NativeApplication.nativeApplication.menu.items[0] will return a NativeMenuItem with that reference. Using that reference you can then add a new NativeMenuItem to the submenu of the referenced NativeMenuItem. In addition to adding items to the submenu, you can also detect when the new item is selected.

In any event, here is the complete application code example:

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Posted in AIR, Flex 3 | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

AIR :: TextField bug when resetting HTML text.

By Mister | Published: July 14, 2009

I ran into a really strange issue that only occurs within Adobe AIR applications (AIR 1.5.1/1.5.2). When I create a TextField control, set it’s style, and then assign it HTML text it appears fine. However, if I wish to reset that TextField content and the original content has links, the entire replaced content becomes one HTML link. I think the issue can be better explained with some images and some code samples.

Issue Context

The first image is a TextField with one HTML link. The link fires a TextEvent which is handled by a function which replaces the text. The original TextField out put is in the image below withe the “more” HTML link at the end:

The second image shows the result when the “more” link is clicked and the text is replaced. You can see that when the mouse is over the text the entire text becomes a “more” link even though the new content has no HTML links. The rollover style on the TextField underlines the text.

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Posted in AIR, Bugs, Flex | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Flex :: Truncating HTML Text

By Mister | Published: July 12, 2009

With Flex truncating text within a Label control is easily done by setting the property “truncateToFit” to true. This parameter doesn’t do much when using the Text or TextArea controls in Flex. To truncate text in these controls you would have to build your own function to count characters and add the ellipses. There is one good example of creating your own custom Text control that truncates the text in the same manner as the Label control based on size of the control.

Now if you want to truncate HTML text within a Text or TextArea control thinks become more complicated. Currently in Flex doing anything with HTML is pretty dismal as there are not many ways to control the display of HTML or capture user interaction with HTML text. This seems to be changing with the upcoming release of Flash Builder 4 and the new spark components for displaying text and also the new Text Layout Framework . In the mean time you still might like to truncate HTML text in Text and TextArea controls.

I did find one blog post describing one method for truncating HTML text based on the size of the control. However, I wanted more restriction of the length of my HTML displayed and also wanted a way to better handle links that use the TextEvent to fire events from links clicks. There seem to be plenty of examples of HTML truncation within JavaScript and Java. I am lucky to have a girlfriend who also develops Java (and is also good looking :D). I asked her for an example of HTML truncation and then translated that code in to working Flex code, which was surprisingly easy to convert.

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Posted in AIR, Flex, Flex 3 | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments


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