Lyrics

Oh well, one task down… many more todo… maybe I can actually setup my kurobox in the next few days and then some really nice things might be possible.

A passing knowledge of ant wouldn’t hurt either.

This tutorial uses the file blankapp.zip to help bootstrap you into the world of flex / actionscript development.

Prerequisites

Flex SDK

You will need the flex sdk available from the flex developer center

Apache ant

You will need apache ant, make sure that the bin folder is in your path.

Copy flexTasks.jar from the flex ant lib into your own ant lib folder.

Setup

Extract the blankapp.zip to a folder

Open build.xml and change the line <property name=”FLEX_HOME” value=”/usr/flex/sdk3″ /> to point to the flex sdk.

Build

You can build it by typing

ant build

You should see some output like this

Buildfile: build.xml

clean:
   [delete] Deleting directory C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\build

init:
    [mkdir] Created dir: C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\build

build:
    [mxmlc] Loading configuration file C:\usr\flex\sdk3\frameworks\flex-config.xml
    [mxmlc] Initial setup: 172ms
    [mxmlc] Loaded 8 SWCs: 391ms
    [mxmlc] C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\src\blankapp_333027.cache (The system cannot
 find the file specified)
    [mxmlc] Files: 328 Time: 1562ms
    [mxmlc] Linking... 16ms
    [mxmlc] Optimizing... 125ms
    [mxmlc] SWF Encoding... 47ms
    [mxmlc] C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\build\blankapp.swf (159158 bytes)
    [mxmlc] Persisting 33 compilation units... 15ms
    [mxmlc] Total time: 2328ms
    [mxmlc] Peak memory usage: 59 MB (Heap: 33, Non-Heap: 26)

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds

A new file, blankapp.swf should now be in the build folder

Type

ant deploy

To copy it to the deploy directory (later you can customise this later).

If you open the blankapp.swf in the browser you should see something like this

It’s fairly bare, but demonstrates some basic techniques and a couple of widgets.

Mxml and Actionscript, how they link together

There are two important parts, the blankapp.mxml and org/blankapp/BlankApp.as.

The mxml file defines the layout while the actionscript contains code to be executed.   In this case there is one mxml file, BlankApp.mxml which links to a single actionscript class, BlankApp (in the file src/org/blankapp/BlankApp.as).

The directory structure org/blankapp, defines the package, in much the same way as java packages.

The graphic below shows how the class is linked to the mxml and where the instance of the class is:

The app is very basic, but should provide a jumping off point.

Adding libraries

If you need to add any libraries, just place the swc files in the lib folder and they will be included, the build.xml can be changed if this isn’t satisfactory.

Afterword

I only wanted to get started with papervision, but found it a bit of hassle to get started, hopefully this post will help people get started quickly.

Acknowledgements

The ant build file is by no means my own, owes inspiration to previous ant files I’ve known, including the pyAMF one and information available on the web.

This blog entry: http://talsma.tv/post.cfm/ant-mxmlc-and-swc-files for the info on how to include swc files.

Click the image to view it in wordle where you can mess with it.

I love the way that Im is the biggest word, you can really see how egotistical they are on grouphug.

(Cheers to Andy for turning me onto wordle and helping with ideas).

If you just want to download Noodleglue skip to the end of the article.

Verse is a network protocol that lets 3d applications talk to each other in realtime, being developed by the Blender foundation.  I was wondering how difficult it would be to link the ease of use of processing with the power of Blender.

Processing being a simplified java, I started to look at ways of generating java bindings.

I knew that GTK had switched to generating their java bindings automatically, so started looking at technologies to do this, immediately I found out about noodleglue which seemed to fit the bill.

Slight problem - the site was down and the developers nowhere to be seen, after much searching I realised I should be looking for something written in C/C++ not java, searched for NoodleGlue.tar.gz and ‘bing!’ there it is on one persons website.

I’m uploading it here, although I should probably put it on google code as well.

NoodleGlue.tar.gz

NoodleGlueGenerator.jar

Snapshot of noodleglue.org in in the internet wayback machine.

I must also mention Cibyl, a project for compiling C to java, it worked best for me in linux… currently a bit of a pain to setup but an interesting project nonetheless.

Cibyl Project

Eplilogue - There was a version on the internet wayback machine the whole time, not sure why I didn’t check, however the version I’ve found is newer - at least 18/Apr/2007.

I’ve been interested for a while in putting virtual machines into version control - I haven’t tried it yet as I’d imagine most modern vcs would grind to a halt.    The idea is - keep your machine in something like git (I hear it’s the most space efficient - svn would be a definate nono), and keep a copy on one of the large usb sticks that are now available.

After using your machine push the updates to git, then when you go somewhere else put in the usb stick and pull the latest version of it back off.

You’d end up being able to carry your computer with you very easily, and only download the changes when you moved to a new location - keeping copies wherever you needed it.

At some point when I have better hardware I might give this a go, in the meantime if anybody tries it, let me know how it goes.

Shortly after they turn it, on a message comes up “Warn:  There is another system”, it turns out the Russians have done the same thing, and the system wants a link.  I won’t give away any more of the film, which has some seriously cool looking 70s tech in it (and obligatory wooden panelling everywhere).  I did like the message in the “computer” writing of the time, so made an version in Inkscape, as it would probably make a cool T-Shirt.

Colour Your folders with iColorFolder

IColorFolder gives folders a context menu which lets you change the colour.  Unfortunately this doesn’t work fully in Vista yet, and you’ll need to manually change the icon, navigate to Program Files\iColorFolder\iColorFolder.dll to get access to the folder icons.

Incidentally if you want have a shortcut to a folder, you can use the same workaround to use a coloured icon.

Colourise your commandline

Colour ls

It’s equally useful to have colour folders when using the commandline, to achieve this you can use msls from utools.

Download it and place it somewhere within the path (I use \usr\bin, which I added to the path earlier).

Now, to get colour directories you can type “ls –color”.  However it would be better to have that happen all the time.

To set color as the default, set the environment variable LS_OPTIONS to –color:

1. Press Windows+Pause,
2. Click through these buttons: Advanced, Environment Variables, New
3. Set the name as LS_OPTIONS and the variable to –color

Next time you launch the commandline and type ls, it will be in colour.  You can also combine options here, for instance if you want -l to be default as well.

Using 4NT/TCC-LE

Another way of getting colour directories is to use 4/NT or TakeCommand-LE (The free cut down version) from JPSoft.  This replaces the whole command shell and has many enhancements that help day-to-day.

Once you’ve downloaded the shell, if you want to change colours for particular kinds of files, then type option, go to the windows tab, and you can set directory colours.

To set EXE CMD and BAT files to be bright white enter:

EXE,CMD,BAT:15

If you want bright white on blue enter

EXE,CMD,BAT:15,1

Semicolons seperate file types - here I’ve set executables yellow and documents white:

EXE,CMD,BAT:14;TXT,DOC,PDF:15

The colours are arranged foreground, background and can be any of the ones used below (note background only has 8 colours to choose from, while foreground has 16, the last being the brighter versions).

Note:  These are the default textmode colours, if you change the command prompt colours yours may be different.

Tango in putty

The tango project is a usability project for free software, the colours are very pleasing and have been ported to putty, alternatively the Igvita theme is nice.

The tango port comes with the bitstream vera mono fonts too, so everything should look pretty good once installed.

Colourise your browser

If you use firefox you can install ColourfulTabs which makes it easier to find that tab among the crowd (especially useful if like me, you have lots open).

Colourise gmail (sometimes)

This one is a little annoying as it seems to be broken, but I’ll include it anyway in case it gets fixed.

If you install greasemonkey and the gmail colouriser, then all your gmail will be coloured by label (for instance I have a label for mailing lists I subscribe to).      When the gmail colouriser is working this works great for finding certain kinds of mail in the long list.

Unfortunately this isn’t working for me at the moment, so no screenshot… if I knew how to debug greasemonkey scripts I might have a look at fixing this as it’s so useful - it seems to choke on certain mail names but I’m not sure what they are.

Go forth and download…

Via  http://deadcabbit.blogspot.com/2008/05/jedit-pre14-tango-has-arrived.html

Tango is a project to bring tasty icons to open source projects, those on windows can also see tango icons in the current version of the gimp, in linux you can see them in gnome and kde.