My old Wordpress blog - page 4 Oh the memories

A couple of weekends ago I was about to begin a large amount of re-factoring of our Ruby on Rails app (more on that to follow) to move it from a functional wireframe of the app to the final polished first version that users can use without cursing us. However I’d knocked together the wireframe version fairly quickly and had not taken time out to put down some decent test coverage, yes I know, and doing the amount of re-factoring I was planning without having any tests to verify that I haven’t broken anything isn’t a good idea.

I used the BBC iPlayer for the first time yesterday so I decided I’d share my thoughts on that and as it turns out a few other things with regards to on demand TV.

I’ve just read this interesting post on how to speed up your web application with an automated system for working with browsers cache for your assets (CSS, JavaScript, images etc.).

I’ve had a list of changes and updates to apply to the JavaScript Image Cropper for quite a while now and I have been thinking of these in a lot more detail recently. There are lots of changes that I plan to make that would bring the cropper up to V2 level and ensure that it remains a viable cropping solution for the future.

Recently I was creating a set of in place editor custom components for our project at work and I noticed that when I placed them inside a FormItem that they didn’t line up with the label of the FormItem. I left it when I first noticed it as I didn’t have time to fix the issue but when I returned to it I had to do plenty of digging to figure out the problem. My custom component consisted of (in it’s default state) something like the following:

<mx:HBox verticalAlign="middle">
    <mx:Text id="textValue" text="{this.textValue}" ... />
</mx:HBox>

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for some more examples of using the measure() method in one of my custom Flex components and I found this series of excellent tutorials of how to create a custom component by Peter Ent:

The FlexUnit Custom Test Runner is a customised FlexUnit test runner which aims to improve the presentation and ease of use of running FlexUnit tests.

I was just reading my RSS feeds (in the fabulous FeedDemon) and I followed a link to an Excel spreadsheet (on purpose).

Towards the end of last week I spent quite a lot of time working with customisations of theComboBox</a></a> in Flex 2 for work, and it was really beginning to bug me how when I typed to select an item, the selection was only ever the first item that matched the letter I was typing. Having had it become second nature, since it’s a feature of my browser of choice Firefox, that I can type the beginning of a word to jump to an option (e.g. “United K” to jump to “United Kingdom” in a list of countries) I now really missed it when using Flex.</p>

While just writing my first post about Flex which required some code examples in MXML, I found that currently GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter) doesn’t have a MXML language file, and I couldn’t find one when I did a few searches.