Archive for February, 2009

Tip of the Day – A new way to get involved with Flex

Feb 7th

Posted by Nate Beck in Flex

2 comments

So the reason I haven’t posted a tip the past couple of days is because I have been working on a new project.

Check it out here —> Bug Quash

Please vote on the poll. We’re trying to see how much interest there is in this kind of event.

Any questions, comments, ideas, complaints, suggestions, etc… please post them below.

p.s. I know… this wasn’t really a tip… but I’m tired and it’s beddy time for Nate.

:: Update ::

New information including how to sign up for notifications —> here.

Tip of the Day – Flipping Display Objects

Feb 5th

Posted by Nate Beck in Actionscript

1 comment

The tip that helped me the most lately is the with flipping objects with the help of matrices.

Here is the code:

function flip( display:DisplayObject, orientation:String ):void {
 
       var m:Matrix = display.transform.matrix;
 
       switch (orientation.toUpperCase()) {
 
               case "HORIZONTAL" :
                       m.a = -1;
                       m.tx = display.width + display.x;
                       break;
               case "VERTICAL" :
                       m.d = -1;
                       m.ty = display.height + display.y;
                       break;
       }
       display.transform.matrix = m;
}
 
flip(logo, "horizontal");


This tip was provided by Sidney K. Thanks Sidney!

Tip of the Day – Flex Coding Conventions

Feb 4th

Posted by Nate Beck in Actionscript

1 comment

Today’s tip is a short one… I have begun planning a very exciting Flex-centric event that is going to be held up here in Seattle. More on that later though.

Your tip for the day… The Flex SDK team has a guide that explains the coding conventions that they use within the SDK (for the most part).

Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices

I agree with almost all of the conventions they list here. If you’re planning on contributing the to Flex SDK, you NEED to be familiar with these conventions.

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Tip of the Day – Understanding the Flex bug system (JIRA)

Feb 3rd

Posted by Nate Beck in Flex

1 comment

Today a bug that I have been watching was resolved as ‘Not a Bug’. In the QA team’s defense, the original bug description was not very clear. I have commented on the bug explaining why it needed to be reopened.

This situation brings up a valid question.

How do we (the Flex community) effectively help the Flex SDK team in a way that doesn’t hinder them? Let’s face it, spamming the inbox of Flex team members isn’t going to get us anywhere.

As I was contemplating this situation, I opened up my Google Reader. It turns out that Joan (a member of the Flex SDK QA team) has a series of posts discussing tips and tricks to using JIRA, along with what we can do to escalate issues that are important.

So for today’s tip, I’m going to provide links to these great posts:

I’ll update these links as she posts more.

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Tip of the Day – Quick and inexpensive design work

Feb 2nd

Posted by Nate Beck in Tip of the day

No comments

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in combination with outsourcing your design task to Elance, you can get great designs and user feedback very quickly, easily and for very little money.

Step 1: Post your job “design a logo” on Elance (elance.com). Be sure to include instructions including other designs that inspire you and a description of your product vision and intended audience.

Step 2: After selecting a designer, ask them to create 3 to 5 draft design mocks

Step 3: Using mechanical turk (mturk.com), submit each design option to mechanical turk as a survey (e.g. “which design do you like best”). You can choose any number of people to answer your survey. Estimated cost: 100 people at $0.10 each = $10

Step 4: Review results.

I’ve found that using this technique that for about $10 I can get around 100 people to tell me which design they prefer and offer suggestions. Also, I usually ask for the age, country and background of the participant so I can filter down to an audience that matches my purposes.


This tip was provided by Joe H. Excellent tip Joe!

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Submit a Tip (Jan 09) winner announced!

Feb 1st

Posted by Nate Beck in Randomness

1 comment

Congratulations to Aaron E. for submitting his tip walking us through using Sprouts! He is the winner for my first Submit a Tip contest.

A license for Baslamiq Mockups is on it’s way to you. Aaron’s tip will be featured as today’s Tip of the Day.

Thanks everyone for submitting your tips… I will probably end up using them as time goes by and will be sure to give you recognition.

A special thanks also goes to Balsamiq for providing the license for this contest.

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