kuwamoto.org

Ok.. The examples should be working again. Sorry about that.

My @()*&$ SWFs timed out! The funny thing is that I’ve sat through meetings (as a a manager) where we discussed this very thing, so I should have known better. :-)

Anyway, I’ll find a public facing MXML server I can use to post examples. In the meantime, the example links in my earlier posts won’t function.

Several people have written me to say that they are confronted with an error when they try to view the comments. This is due to an anti-spam measure that sometimes gets confused. It will be fixed soon, but to work around it, go to the entry detail page before viewing and adding comments.

BTW, I shortened all the entries on the main index and put the remainder of the text on the entry detail page. I thought that MT did that for you automatically, but I was wrong.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for commenting!

Originally, I wanted the “new user…” label to animate into position between the welcome screen and the new user screen. As it turns out, moving the label while its parent container is moving leads to some jagged animation.

Stare at the label as you go through the animation. Notice how it appears to jump up and down? I had to ask a lot of questions before I got to the bottom of the issue. When animations run in parallel, do all tweens update at the same time? Yes, theoretically. If there isn’t enough time between frames to do all the updates, do some of the updates get dropped? No, the answer is that the frame is delayed. etc., etc.

The answer, as it turns out, is obvious in hindsight. It has to do with the layout managers and how they work.
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One thing I wanted to do was to create nice effects between pages. This turned out to be harder than I thought.

As you recall, I’d settled on separating my app into “pages” which were implemented as components inside of a ViewStack. To go to a new page, you flip to different index of the ViewStack.

As it turns out, this makes it hard to do smooth effects. For example, the effect that I wanted between the welcome panel and the new user panel was that the the welcome panel contents would fade out, and then the panel would smoothly change size to be the same size as the new user panel, after which the ViewStack would flip to the new user panel. The page flip was triggered off of the effectEnd event.

Some issues:

1. I couldn’t figure out the size of the new user panel because it hadn’t been created yet.
2. The panel contents didn’t fade nicely because of device fonts.
3. The last frame of the resize effect ended up not being played, which meant that the transition felt “glitchy”.
4. There is sometimes a flash of gray when the page is flipped

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