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

The website Watwiljijmetwiet.nl (Dutch) from Tactus Verslavingszorg has won the Preffi-prijs 2009. theFactor.e has developed this website and I was one of the lead Flex developers.

Watwiljijmetwiet.nl is a site for prevention and decreasing of problematic cannabis usage. The site is mainly targeting people between 16 and 25 years of age. Watwiljijmetwiet.nl offers information, tips, but mainly a selftest and selfhelpprogram. Last year there where about 220.000 people using cannabis in the Netherlands.

The Preffi-prijs 2009 is an initiative of NIGZ and is handed out to the most promising project in the area of healthcare and illnessprevention.

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]) .

So I encountered a really weird, but probably “explainable” problem in AS2 yesterday.
We all know that
trace("200.1" == 200.1) //true
and
trace("200.2" == 200.2) //true
trace(”200.3″ == 200.3) //true

trace(”200.81″ == 200.81) //true
trace(”200.81″ != 200.81) //false


This above works fine…but the following is what scares me the most….
trace("200.82" == 200.82) //false
Why the hell is the above false ???? And the really weird thing is
trace("200.82" != 200.82) //false
also false ???
So… it is NOT the same and it is NOT NOT the same?…wtf is it. AS doesn’t seem to know what it is.

Ok, bear with me a second. The following:

trace(”200.83″ == 200.83) //true
trace(”200.83″ != 200.83) //false

…that seems alright

At this point, I tried to make some sense of it and applied the following rules….
If a string has one decimal….it turns out to work fine…
If a string has two decimals….it only works fine if the last digit is uneven…

The next thing to check is a string with three decimals and…there seems to be a different stupid rule here…check…

trace("200.811" == 200.811) //true
trace(”200.811″ != 200.811) //false

trace(”200.812″ == 200.812) //true (should be false according to last “rules”)
trace(”200.812″ != 200.812) //false


Hmmm, it seems that we can erase the above rules from our head. It works fine at this point…what is that about?

One more sample…the second decimal after decimal point is an even digit.

trace("200.821" == 200.821) //false
trace(”200.821″ != 200.821) //false

trace(”200.822″ == 200.822) //false
trace(”200.822″ != 200.822) //false


Oh my god…..the second digit after decimal point is even and it is always false?? I can’t seem to make sense of it….sorry…
I can probably go on and on with more samples (four / five / etc. decimal digits) but the point is clear….it’s fucked.

If I trace typeof, it all seems to be a Number

trace(typeof(parseFloat(”200.81″))) //number
trace(typeof(parseFloat(”200.82″))) //number
trace(typeof(parseFloat(”200.821″))) //number

Converting the String to a Number or use parseFloat doesn’t work….so don’t bother trying.

Maybe it has something (the way it parses a string to a number or visa versa) to do with rounding Numbers…see what Arno has to say…

Jaap

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