Background thinking

iCal shows duplicate reminders after enabling iCloud

backgroundthinking — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:59:30 +0000

Today I launched iCal and noticed that all my entries were duplicated. Removing unnecessary copies would be so time consuming it’s not even funny. After I opened Calendars List, it showed two sets of calendars – On My Mac and iCloud. Unchecking every calendar in one of them, even thought seemed to help, was not …

Flex: Where are you headed?

backgroundthinking — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:50:45 +0000

I read an interesting post on official Flex blog few days ago. Flex: Where we are headed tries to summarise Adobe’s view on Flex framework and it’s future. Unfortunately my comment has not been approved for about two weeks now (holidays?) so I decided to post in on my blog. Hopefully some of these concerns will be …

Changing default workspace in FB 4.5.1

backgroundthinking — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:01:55 +0000

I find it really annoying when applications I use keep creating their own folders in my Documents directory. Luckily some applications can be configured not to do it. Today I was fighting against Flash Builder, trying to make persuade it not to create workspace in Documents (I have separate folder for development). Using File > …

Performance of Google’s Protocol Buffers in Flex (redux)

backgroundthinking — Mon, 24 May 2010 21:14:54 +0000

Atry pointed me to latest release (0.8.7) of his protoc-gen-as3 library. I re-ran my tests to see if it brings any performance improvements – and it does! Deserialization times are very similar to 0.8.4 which I used previously. I would assume any differences are statistical errors. Deserialization AMF 3 Protocol Buffers Class: Small Medium Large …

Performance of Google’s Protocol Buffers in Flex

backgroundthinking — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 21:13:59 +0000

Update: I ran tests again using newer version of protoc-gen-as3. They can be found here. For last couple of days I have been investigating Google’s Protocol Buffers with intention to use it in Flex application. While in Flex world such idea instantly raises at least a couple of questions, let me explain our situation a little …

Simple solution for parsing dates in AS3/Flex

backgroundthinking — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:09:23 +0000

I’ve recently had to parse dates and it turned out that Flex is not very good at it. According to specs, Date.parse() only handle following formats: MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD HH:MM:SS TZD Day Mon/DD/YYYY Mon DD YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD Day Mon DD HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY Day DD Mon HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY Mon/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS TZD YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS …

Inconsistency in handling width and height for rotated components

backgroundthinking — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:33:51 +0000

I’ve been recently working on a component that contained rotated label in it and I discovered that using width and height attributes (MXML) in such case might result in unexpected behaviour. The problem occurs when you start using absolute values for these properties. If for example you set height to be 100% then actual height …

Autocomplete Parsley tags with SourceMate

backgroundthinking — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:20:16 +0000

I am using SourceMate with latest prerelase build of Adobe Flash Builder. It still has some issues but otherwise it’s quite cool. It adds features that most Java developers can expect in either IDE they choose. Personally I like refactoring features, implement/override and code assist for metadata the most. Since we extensively use Parsley in …

Problems with autocompletion and latest Flex 4 SDK

backgroundthinking — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:37:19 +0000

You may encounter some problems with code autocompletion when switching to one of the latest builds of Adobe Flex SDK, especially if you are using Flash Builder Beta 2 and not one of the latest prerelease builds. Flash Builder will be unable to complete class names and add imports from flash.* package. This is because …