Oscar Trelles

Reading Owen’s and Eric’s posts brought me back some nice memories from the beginning of my career as a web designer/technologist. To be completely honest (and risking to sound a little cheesy), learning about Flash changed the course of my life about 5 years ago.

I remember the first flash site I ever saw was Gabocorp (which has been recently relaunched, after years….). The experience was kinda tricky, since some folks were trying to trick me, challenging me to recreate those effects with my conventional techniques (conventional at the time, we are talking 1998 here). As you might expect, I was puzzled and wary… until I attempted to save one of the images, and realized that wasn’t and animated gif.

Well, lots of things have changed since then. For me, Flash was first the ultimate generator of computer art, and I used it almost exclusively for that, until ActionScript was revealed. Today Flash painfully evolves toward the distributed applications market, and despite the controversial discussions and currently unsuccessful financial aspects surrounding it, I tend to think Flash is yet to have its finest moment.

Longhorn, although still due in 2005, is already causing discussion around it’s new vector graphics rendering format, code named Avalon. From the information available, I understand that Avalon is supposed to be the standard for UI rendering in Longhorn, based on a special flavor of XML, or rather custom namespaces. Bill just had to have it…

Describing UI elements and their interactions through XML is not new. Projects like XML2SWF, X-Wave and Spark, to name a few, have been trying to implement the concept in the SWF format, not to mention Royale, Macromedia’s own implementation about to enter its beta stage. On the other hand, there’s something similar being implemented by the W3C for the SVG format, namely RCC, which stands for Rendering Custom Content. DENG is also on the same path.

It is still too early to be sure if this is something we should worry about. As Darron Schall points out, too much can happen in the following two years. Personally, I am looking forward to Royale.

Well, this time I don’t bring congratulations. Either they only spent a couple of hours with Studio, or just stuffed the article with what people have been blogging about for weeks, if no months. However, it is interesting that they criticize the Normal Mode turn down, after saying that the timeline and frame metaphor “never felt right for this type of application”.

I usually find eWeek’s product reviews interesting and trustworthy, but this particular article doesn’t add up at all. I’m afraid it seriously looks like they didn’t bother doing a revision of their own, and just copied someone else’s notes. If they did a serious revision, they would have found a whole lot of other great features, and holes too. As Vera just made me realize, they don’t say anything about Fireworks, nothing relevant to an “Web-oriented image editing tool” at least.

I just hope, the reviews I’ve read before on eWeek aren’t as weak as this one…

Last night at the NYMMUG meeting, we had an excellent presentation by Jonathan Kaye, who made it all the way from Philadelphia to share with us the core concepts found in his book “Flash MX for Interactive Simulation“.

Reading the book’s title might lead you to think it is all about creating interfaces for machine simulations, which is covered, but as important as creating a compelling and realistic simulation is, the process of designing the structure of the systems working underneath is, from my point of view, the most valuable contribution of Jonathan’s book, which was co-authored with David Castillo.

Jonathan focused in the process of translating a machine’s feature set and functionality into an scalable UCM engine. UCM stands for User Interface Control Model, the OOP architecture for the Event-State-Action paradigm. We didn’t get to see much of this done in ActionScript due to time constrains, but as I said above, the focus of the presentation was to show that good design is not rocket science, just a thoughtful job.

This is not Flash related, but thought I would share this link to a new generation of keyboards: Virtual Keyboard.

More on gadgets and stuf here.

Between one thing and another, I managed to forgot posting a mention on MXDU. Last week I was confirmed as a speaker in the event, and am already doing arrangements for travel and accommodations. If you’re planning to attend the conference, you might also want to do some research on aussie words

Courtesy of my better half, here is a link to a nice little research on ‘Australian words and definitions‘ you might find useful, even if you are not going down under on February, but rather chat with aussie friends (they’re all over.. hehe). Now many things start making sense to me…

Here is a couple more:
Strine and Australian Slang.
Aussiespeak.

I was having some issues trying to set tab indexes for a few input textfields components I had in a form inside a Central app. By now, it seems like I found a solution that suits my particular needs.

To start with, the adequate method to assign tab indexes to input textfield components is not documented. As indicated by Mike Williams in the a chat session, the index is not actually set to the textfield component itself, but to the textfield inside it:

myTexfield.Context_txt.tabIndex = int;

In this context, there is a method to get the maximum index already assigned, namely getLastTabIndex(), but it breaks when trying to do something like this:

myTexfield1.Context_txt.tabIndex = this.getLastTabIndex() + 1;
myTexfield2.Context_txt.tabIndex = this.getLastTabIndex() + 2;
...etc

Suddenly, the yellow square ends up highlighting an app’s icon in the menu…. hmmmm, are tab indexes global in Central? I don’t know, I haven’t asked the masters yet, but this works for me:

myTexfield1.Context_txt.tabIndex = 1001;
myTexfield2.Context_txt.tabIndex = 1002;
myTexfield3.Context_txt.tabIndex = 1003;
...etc

Assuming, of course, that you haven’t installed more than 1000 apps

Just a short one to let you know that you might have some trouble trying to access CentralMX.com, as its hosting company may be experiencing technical difficulties.

This is good news for all the fans of Full as a Goog out there. It took a little while, but finally Geoff and I found some time to work together and bring Goog Central to life.

Its feature set is far from complete, as we are still perfecting a variation of the web service that allows us to manipulate data taken from the Goog. So, we are counting on your suggestions and feature requests for future updates of the Goog Central. The feedback form will be working later today, in the meantime you can send me your comments directly. Thanks!

Being new to creating web services of my own, I liked the idea of how the new Web Services panel allows you to inspect a web service structure. So, I rolled back my shirt sleeves and tried an xml-rpc implementation, and spent some time trying to see something in my Web Services panel, but Flash always responded “no web service there”…

Since I still work with PHP, for the most part, an xml-rpc based web service seemed like the easiest thing to start with. My applications have been consuming all sorts of external data, and when you know exactly what to give and what you get from a certain web service, there shouldn’t be any trouble.

Any way, it seems like the Web Services panel will only work with CF-based web services. I’m yet to find out if it would let me inspect other kind of SOAP-based web services… Then again, I don’t know if I need it to. The fact that Flash Pro is not able to show the structure of my xml-rpc web service doesn’t mean it doesn’t work: it does perfectly, I just have to work the ‘old’ way