David Heinemeier Hansson Article on UIRC

This is a very interesting article about how simplicity is best when it comes to usability. David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the co-creators of Basecamp, the Project Management system a lot of companies use.

Scalenine Skinning Contest

The “Skin to Win Challenge” is a contest sponsored by Adobe, EffectiveUI, and Scalenine for designers to show their Flex skinning skills. There’s a sweet prize package! Check it out here.

I’m back blogging again.

Yeah, I’m not the most outspoken guy out there and, in fact, once I’m done with work I prefer to stay away from a computer. But here I am again… Lots have happened since I last got on the “blogosphere” and there’s lots of catching up to do. I feel like I should share some of my past experiences and opinions. Perhaps there’s a good opportunity to get me out there in people’s mouths. (Not sure how I feel about that,, but let’s give it a shot). So this time around I’ll be posting some examples, tutorials, opinions, new ideas, new ventures, and what’s to come. Stay tuned…

Adding Skins to Custom SliderThumb States in Flex 2.0

My latest project required me to skin an HSlider component that was to be used as a volume control. The skin for the slider thumb was an image of a speaker that showed sound waves according to the position on the slider track to represent the volume level (no waves representing mute, and 5 waves representing max volume). I initially tried using setStyle() to dynamically set the three corresponding states (UP, OVER, DOWN) for each position of the thumb, but noticed that there was slight performance downgrade and decided to investigate. Turns out that setStyle() is very process intensive and should be used sparingly (Flex help has a comment on that). So after some more research I realized I could just create new custom skin states to the slider thumb in a subclass to the SliderThumb class. This allowed me to use css to define each skin asset and in the custom class write the methods to handle the skin swaps.

Customizing PublicIP’s redirect page – Brief description.

I had this idea based on the custom login page example provided by the site. If you don’t know it, the login page example hides the required login form inside an invisible <div> tag and creates a new one fully customized. There is another section that is not customizable: the redirect page that comes after the publicip server authenticates the user. So evidentally, that bugged me, so I thought out a plan to use my own redirect page. The idea is to split the login process between two frames and hide the frame that communicates with publicip. So, on the top frame goes the customized login page and on the bottom goes the form that will submit the info to the publicip server. At the time of submit, use javascript to populate user and password fields in the bottom frame form and then submit it. The bottom frame form will send the user info to the server and the publicip redirect page will follow. All this happening in the frame that is out of view. Of course all the technical details have been left out. I’ll post a complete set of instructions later.