Labs Jaap Kooiker AKA Flashcoders - Flash, Flex, AIR, IPhone

Last Wednesday our Senior Rich Internet Consultant aka Joost Nuijten has presented the Tactive platform (see my previous post) at the Adobe Usergroup Netherlands.
You can watch it here : Tactive presentation (Dutch)

Last year at TFE we (Gerben and I) have been working on a project called Tactive. It’s an online platform for treatment of addictions. This platform is a replacement for the already existing treatment for an alcohol addiction. It seems to be easier for people to sign up for a treatment online rather than meeting an expert face to face.

The platform is build generic and can be extended for other addictions but the first release is for an alcohol addiction. The platform consists of seven Flex applications, from these applications the client uses three. The other applications are used by counselors and administrators.

The Clientapplication

Via this application the client communicates with the counselor. The counselor can send assignments which help the client to complete the treatment. From this application the diary and help can be openend.

The Diary

During the treatment a client can fill in his alcohol consumption. Also the counselor can monitor the drinking habit and set a drinking target for the clients.

Via the moment description panel a client can describe what he was feeling and why they wanted to drink.

The other applications which are used by administrators and counselors are used for administration and maintainability.

Tips

Define your stylesheets beforehand! Doing this after a couple of months without any good structure in the beginning isn’t the best thing to do.

We learned a lot about security. Medical information has the highest privacy rating so it needs to be kept as save as possible.

We used subversion and cruisecontrol on a remote server to develop and deploy our project with ease.

Potential clients can sign up via a website called alcoholdebaas.nl (alcohol treatment [dutch]) .

This is like…. what?
I recently discovered that there’s a problem with the registration point when a html layer (eg div) is placed above the flash runtime. For some weird reason the Application registration point is set to zero according to the x and y of the overlay div (see sample). I for sure cannot change that registration point so why is it changing. The other thing is that all content stays in place at the right coordinates, but the mouse position shows us (see example below) that the registration point changes - it looks like that anyway.
From my opinion this is a bug of the player. The weird thing is that this only occurs in FireFox and not in IE.
It could be a serious problem when you wan’t to know last registered mouseX and mouseY before “leaving” the stage.

note:
I got a rather “innovative” (read: not nice) sollution to know the last real mouseX and mouseY postion.
Keep the last 2 known positions in an array and stop registering on Event.MouseLeave. Use the fore-last position in you’re application to determine the last valid position.

Check this Sample

Is there someone who can tell me why this “Phenomenon” occurs? I would like to know….why…

Edit Firefox 2.0.0.12 / Fp 9.0.115.0:

Jaap Kooiker

My…my…my…
Internet Explorer is like….bad for your health (but you already know that)

In one of the projects I was working on, we used the custom preloader class by Jesse Warden. This way we were able to define our own preloader and it works great, but ofcours not in IE. The alignment in IE doesn’t seem to work after a refresh - or not even at all. This doesn’t happen in any other respectable browser and when using the default flex html template. But we use SWFObject in our projects and then the problem occurs (again only in IE). For the record…it isn’t a SWFObject problem.

After placing a resize event listener on the stage the following occurs.
For some weird reason IE triggers a Resize event at a point when stage width and height is still zero. And at init both width and height are also zero. These 2 resize events aren’t dispatched in for instance FireFox. So no problem there : )

To solve this IE problem (yes…just so you know that’s an IE problem) a resize eventListener has to be declared in the set preloader method (see sample below). Then a modification in the centerPreloader has to be made.
Jesse placed :
x = (stageWidth / 2) - (clip.width / 2);
y = (stageHeight / 2) - (clip.height / 2);

instead use the following:
x = (stage.stageWidth / 2) - (clip.width / 2);
y = (stage.stageHeight / 2) - (clip.height / 2);


And there you go…now it works fine, even in IE : )

Sample - Source

Recently I heard about a few Fireworks plugins. One plugin that especially caught my attention is the “Smart Punch” plugin. Why? Because it is so much more usable than the “normal puch” in Fireworks. Ever had the idea to punch a vector image with a bitmap or visa versa? The “normal” Fireworks punch can’t do that, “Smart Punch” can do it. Ever had the idea to punch multiple objects? Smart punch can do it.

Vector Bitmap Punch

Not much more to say about it….just try it out…

Jaap Kooiker