Maybe it is because I am enamoured with the world's ugliest, but potentially coolest mouse, or maybe it's that my own mouse is developing quirks that cause me to believe that it is not long for this world, but I've been looking at acquiring a new primary HID. Along those travels, I came across a very old discussion comparing the Keyboards vs Mice. Apparently, Apple spent $50,000,000 in the late '80s, and that's when $50 million was worth something, to study the Apple Human Interface. The result was the discovery of two facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Like many things tech, and especially since Apple is involved, opinions run strongly in many directions. My own concerns are my own requirements for interfacing with the hunk of plastic, silicon and dopants at my desk and what sort of experience do I offer users in the applications that I create, web or otherwise.

I gotta imagine that there are thresholds and conditions that would impact the truth of those two "facts". One person mentioned in the article says that "there are NO command key equivalents in my product, Smart Labels, except for Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste". The reasoning is that, even though the user may perceive there to be a value in using additional shortcuts, he won't allow it. That seems extreme. What happens when the desired action is hidden behind several layers of menuing or if the action is contextual and you are already using the mouse to highlight the text (modifying case through shortcuts would be very preferable to highlighting and hunting). My own inclination is to add keyboard shortcuts when time or interface will allow me. That doesn't always work and I have lost some recent battles at work to implement minimalistic interfaces that use only keyboard shortcuts.

In that case, it was a dialog box, created by a mouse event that just contained a single text input with listeners for ENTER and ESCAPE. My reasoning was that the act of calling the dialog would provide the context for the input, hence no label, and that ENTER and ESCAPE are natural behaviors. As I said, I lost and now the little interface that could have been was obliged to support a Label, a submit Button, a Cancel button (as the corner "X") and an instruction line. My opinion is that, styling aside, the interface is uglier and code is heavier. (Apparently, I might be a little bitter about this)

Anyway, where are the lines between performance and usability? I've been perusing user experience resources and the focus has been on eliminating the need for a user to think. And, for casual use software, that makes a lot of sense. However, for productivity software where a user will spend much of the day, I gotta imagine that the kind and thoughtful UI developer is going to allow for improvements in performance that occur through user training - though that means a lot more than just adding keyboard shortcuts.

I saw a blog post discussing how to grab the separate composite colors from a unit in ActionScript. This has probably been addressed and solved many times, but there does not seem to be a built-in object to take care of this bit of functionality. You'd think that mx.utils.ColorUtil would be a natural place to find such things, but not so much.

So while the author chose to go with string manipulation, I figure it would be a good opportunity to do a little binary work and create a simple little class to keep everything tidy.

The general scheme is to perform a Right Shift and then an And. The color information is either 24 or 32 bit with the extra 8 bits in the latter describing the opacity of the pixel. Shifting makes the desired color channel the least significant amount and the logical and with 0xFF will remove any other remaining information. So, to get the channels, it would work out like the following:

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I think it goes without saying that we all want to be regular expression hipsters like Ben Nadel ... maybe it's just me? Anyway, there have been many occasions when a regular expression would have been the best tool for the job, but I wimped out and went with more cumbersome string manipulations with code. For a recent messaging system using templates, I started down that road but, luckily found a compelling reason to force myself to use the ActionScript RegEx class.

So the quick skinny is that I have a template with placeholders that I need to substitute completely before moving on. For the purposes of discussion, the reasons for the system will be unexplored and I'll try to leave everything simple enough to allow easy re-purposing.

The placeholder for the substitution needs to be fairly unique so that we don't collide with something that ought to be displayed. In this case, we'll denote all of the substitution values with the following form:

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Since I have recently hopped onto the Android bandwagon, I've been perusing the market. After installing the working Tricorder everything does some weak by comparison, but I did press on.

Surprisingly, I found two ActionScript related apps for Android lately:

• ActionScript Reference for Android
• Flubble

ActionScript Reference for Android

This ought to be rather self-explanatory. Jonathan Dunlap has whipped together a little android app that offers the AS3 helpdocs. Nothing earth shattering, but a nice way to spelunk the docs. I'm thinking that it'll be my go-to app when I have to kill some time.

Flubble

I haven't quite figured out what to make of Flubble yet. Ostensibly, it is a stubbing app for ActionScript classes. I haven't used this for an actual project yet, but I have run some tests and received my class files both as AS3 and XML. The XML is an interesting option that threatens to have some potential, though I haven't worked out quite how I would use it. It looks to be a nifty little app and I hope that I can fit it into the workflow in some way.

Of course, there are a lot of generic supporting apps to be found (text editors, ftp clients, ftp server (odd), flash card makers and the like), but for some reason I was surprised to find an app like Flubble. It does get the wheels turning about what sort of apps could be created for the platform.

This has been haunting me this entire week, particularly since I found the solution more than once but chose to forget it. Thankfully we started this blog to help us provide the answer for the things we forget.

So, if the visual query builder does not show up when you try to edit a master page or edit detail page while using the Coldfusion Flex or Ajax application wizard, HERE IS THE SOLUTION:

Start Flex Builder as an ADMINISTATOR! (Windows Vista or 7)

I hope I will remember the next time...

To reiterate, starting flex builder 3 as an administrator fixes the issue where the Visual query builder does not seem to work while trying to edit master page.

Lately, I have been getting more involved into working with the visual aspect of Flex. Up to now, I had been able to pass off the styling to Alex after working on the functionality or have just worked on projects where the visuals weren't a concern. Anyway, it is often good to get opportunities to explore.

So, the simple thing that I needed to do was to create a rectangular component based on mx:Canvas with a tiling background and rounded corners. Figuring this ought to be a straightforward thing to do, I blithely set about it.

First snag: Flex doesn't seem to offer a straightforward way of identifying a repeatable background for the Canvas class. Quick searching revealed that one can do this with Degrafa, but I didn't want to go that route. (Not that Degrafa isn't tremendous, it just seems like a lot of overhead just to tile a background image.) There is another solution for setting a tiled image as a background.

That is a really nice solution, but, for my immediate purposes, has distracting elements like loading the image at run-time. Run-time loading could be an incredibly useful feature, and it is worth noting, but if you have a small, single image you want to use, it is nicer to just embed it and not have dependencies at deployment. The core of the solution is to use lower level AS3 functions to draw a rectangled that is filled with the bitmap of choice.

So, a quick bit of code that shows the embedded image written as a tiled background for the component:

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For those that may not be aware, Flash & Flex Developer Magazine has moved to a free, online distribution model. This is a plus because they used to be quite expensive. I'm not the biggest fan of their site layout, it used to be torturous to navigate it, but they seem to be improving it.

And, as a bonus, they have a flash and flex community section that allows you to add your own blog, along with whatever description you care to give yourself (here is the ShortFusion blog profile). They also have areas to promote usergroups and events.

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I mentioned in my last post that an iPhone developer attended a Flex presentation that I gave. He was hoping to get some info on how he might use Flash as a means of producing apps instead of Objective C. Not sure what development environments exist for iPhone development presently, but the idea of using Flash is obviously titillating to some.

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I gave my first real presentation last night, Flex Time¹. About 10 people showed up and only one left in the middle. To be fair, he did say something about having to "meet a stripper in 10 minutes" (that's what I heard), so how can you compete with that? Otherwise, it was a good crowd of varying backgrounds with thoughtful questions. We even had an iPhone developer show up hoping to get insight into how to use Flash in place of Object C development, so Adobe's iPhone announcement is reverberating beyond just its core fans.

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The tbfusion.org site is now a Network Solutions ad page (no link because it is now just an ad site). This is somewhat sad as there were about 10 people at the last meeting some months ago and it seemed like a renewed interest in revitalizing the group. Worse, our local Adobe Enterprise evangilist Greg Wilson had offered to help with the group and to coordinate with another potentially dead group, the Tampa Flash, Flex and AIR Developers group.

In the case of the Tampa Flash, Flex and AIR Developers Group (I would have called it the Tampa Actionscript MXML Plus Ajax (TAMPA) group, but rarely is my genius acronym ability consulted), I'm pretty sure that the folks at HD Interactive are busy. The presentation that they gave at barcampa Tampa 2009 showed that they are working with some really cool augmented reality projects so I can forgive them for being a little distracted. That said, when they have meetings, more than 50 people show up. From what I know of user group participation, that's frickin' tremendous.

Anyway, with the Tampa Bay CF group seemingly DOA, and the TFFA somewhat MIA, I guess I'll just have to be happy that the Central Florida Web Developers User Group is still meeting reguarly, even if they are set to endure my neophyte introductory Flex presentation next week (Tuesday, October 13 @ 6).