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January 17, 2008
The Most Voted For Bugs in Flex
I just read Matt Chotin's post on Addressing Bugs in Flex, and I love the fact that Flex is so open. Unfortunately I don't have a teddy bear to give to the team, but I can give something to the community: a better way to see the most voted for bugs.
You may have already seen the "Popular Issues" tab in each project, but there's two problems with this view of votes. It's missing the deferred bugs, and it only shows the votes for one project at a time. You can fix both of these issues through a search and sort, but it's not immediately apparent that you can do this in the bug base.
Use this search to see the most voted for bugs. The most voted for bug, by the way, is design view for Linux.
With the search above, you can't see the number of votes in the main search listing. This can be fixed, however:
1. Log In, if you aren't already. After you log in, you should be back at main search listing.
2. On the right-hand side, click on Configure your Issue Navigator.
3. Next to Add New Column, select Votes, and click Add.
4. Go back to the main search listing, and you'll see the votes in the last column.
Matt said that not much is going to be fixed for Flex 3, but that's just a better chance to vote for big items for Flex 4. I have a humble suggestion for a place to put your votes: more refactorings in Flex Builder. A co-worker at Brightcove, Adam Brod, created a group of bugs on this that await your vote.
Posted by Brian at 10:00 PMJanuary 7, 2008
FlexSpy, a New Tool for Design
When I took a trip into HTML/Javascript work last year, I had to make some pages look like a given design. I asked a co-worker at Brightcove, Leonard Sutton, to check over what I was doing. He took one look at my computer and installed Firebug. My CSS work changed completely after this. The Firebug extension has a few purposes, but the most useful function is the dynamic setting of CSS. If you hadn't tried it, it may not seem like a big deal to reload a page on every CSS change... until you've made a few hundred of them. And half of them don't look the way you expect. I ended up making almost all my CSS changes in Firebug.
Now Flex has a similar tool in FlexSpy (found on riapedia.com). Unlike riapedia, I don't think of this as a "component for developers starting to learn Flex" but rather as a component for anybody making a lot of design changes in Flex.
Before FlexSpy, when I got handed a design, I'd make a few changes, recompile, navigate to a component (or change code to navigate to it), see the design (which sometimes didn't look the way I expected), and start the process over. This gets very tedious very quickly. Now I can make a change with FlexSpy and see it immediately in the application.
Hopefully Thermo will make me very happy, allowing me to stay away from more of the design implementation. Until then, I'll be using FlexSpy.
I didn't see a way in FlexSpy to grab all the changed values, which would be very helpful. I'd also love to have shorter lists for the properties and styles, both a list of the most commonly-changed keys and a list of the keys I changed most often. But hey, it's an open source project, so I only have myself to blame if those features aren't there.
January 6, 2008
Future Features in AS3
After reading Keith Peters' post on singleton's and abstract classes, I wanted to see if there was more public information about the state of abstract classes in ECMAScript 4. As most readers of this blog will know, AS3 will be an implementation of ECMAScript 4, and some of the lack of features in AS3 is related to the state of ECMAScript 4. But that also means that we can peer into the future of AS3 by looking into ECMAScript 4.
I found a bug on bugs.ecmascript.org titled "Private constructors are useful, common, and need to be supported" and marked as Resolved. That's great to read, and it means that someday we'll have a real way to create abstract classes in AS3. (Update: that could be wrong. Read the comments below.) The word "someday" is important here, though, as ECMAScript 4 looks very large, and I doubt anyone knows how long it will take to implement it all.
ecmascript.org has a lot more information to dig through, such as the proposals section of the wiki. There's way too much to read here that's interesting, but here's a few that stood out to me: type parameters, resurrected eval, generic functions, and Meta-object. Just this small snippet of the proposals page includes information on generics, method overriding, and class reflection.
Write a Book on Flex?
I've been thinking about co-authoring a book, and so Jesse's recent post and Joe's response really interested me. I've been meaning to ask on here for awhile: any authors have any advice or suggestions? All comments, happy or bitter, are appreciated. If you don't want to comment here, you can send me an email at brian at deitte dot com.
