Creating Bullet Graphs in Flex

I just saw this post on the IBM ILOG Elixir blog and thought it was a good time to remind everyone of the Free Flex Bullet Graph component I posted a couple of years ago.

Enjoy!

Klok - How-to videos now available

We have begun posting some How-to videos to help you get up and running with Klok even faster. Check them out on our Youtube channel.

If you think we need a video addressing some functionality that isn't already there, let us know in the comments.

A note about submitting Klok bug reports or feature requests

This is just a friendly reminder that if you would like to report a bug or make a feature request and there is a need for us to get in touch with you, please make sure you leave some method of contacting you when you submit the bug report or feature request. Alternatively if you have a problem specific to you, please contact us at support@mcgraphix.com.

If you have posted a bug or feature request that asks a question or just says "help me", if we don't have your contact info, we can't respond.

Thanks

Klok 2.1.6 Now Available - Enables custom first day of week

Klok Version 2.1.6 was just posted. You can now specify the first day of the week from the Tools > Preferences > General screen.

As usual, you can get the free version from http://getklok.com/features.html or buy a license for the full version at http://getklok.com/store/purchase.php

Klok updated to 2.1.5 - More Google Calendar Fixes

Last night, we posted an update to Klok (2.1.5) which fixes an issue that we discovered where all-day events were causing the Google calendar import to fail. Even though all-day events were working previously. There seem to have been several issues lately which appear to be caused by changes in the way Google is returning the time data. So, if you notice any new incorrect behavior with the Google import, please let us know ASAP by submitting a bug report at http://bugs.getklok.com or by emailing us at support@mcgraphix.com

Klokwork Team Console: Early screenshots now available

We are continuing to work to toward an initial release of the Klokwork Team Console. Just to whet your appetite, we just posted some early screenshots (which are subject to change) on the Klokwork Team Console page of the website.

Also, don't forget about the Klok 2 discount that is going on now through Sunday.

Klok: $5 off this weekend only

Just to celebrate to upcoming release of the Klokwork Team Console, we are now offering a special discount for this weekend only. Now though Aug 8th, get $5 off a single user license by using the coupon code FB20100806-1 on the Klok store page.

AIR: Custom Icon Not Showing in Install Dialogs

I must be losing my mind because I am 99% sure that I saw my custom icon show up in the install dialog before. But the Flex AIR application I am currently working on does not seem to want to show the icon in the installer. A Google search yielded no useful results, so I am wondering if I am the only one with this problem. Anyone else run into this before?

AIR Flex NativeMenu bug?

I think I have discovered a bug with the AIR native menu. I may be doing something that was not expected but here is what I am doing.

Let me set the stage. I have a Flex based workbench application that creates a basic native menu (File, Help, etc.). The application allows the user to install and launch various plugins using Christian Cantrell's example as an approach. When the user loads a plugin, the plugin contributes a menu item that I add to the main application's native menu. All works fine up until this point. The plugin can dispatch an event that exits the plugin module, which I capture in the main application. I unload the plugin and remove the contributed menu item from the main app's menu. Here is where the bug rears it's ugly head. The menu item only partially gets removed from the main menu. The resulting behavior is that the main menu still shows the plugin's menu item, but it appears to be disabled as clicking on it does nothing. Now for the really weird part. If you deactivate the window by minimizing it or activating another application, the phantom menu item disappears.

There doesn't seem to be any way to trigger the refresh of the menu programmatically.

Froyo is here... and it's Awesome

So Sprint pushed the Froyo update last night which was surprisingly painless. When I think of upgrading the operating system on any device I get a little scared, but in this case I really didn't have to do anything other than watch the progress bar for a few minutes. I wasn't timing it but the whole process took less than 20 minutes.

Now that I can watch all kinds of video and play all kinds of games on my phone, I realize that Flash on the phone drains the battery quicker, but not for the reasons you would expect. The reason was that I couldn't put it down. Having free access to all that stuff I was missing almost brought a tear to my eye. I spent more time using my phone than I ever had with my IPhone. My word of caution to people who are not able to try it first hand and have to listen to the media talk about it is that, when people say the battery drains faster, you really need to make sure that apples aren't being compared to oranges. Make sure that the reports are based on equivalent use of each device.

As I was playing around with it, I watched some videos on Adobe TV, played some of the games that were in the Adobe's Flash Showcase app and spend quite a while playing with it. Of course the battery went down slightly... very slightly. Nothing near the "OH MY GOD... I CAN HEAR THE BATTERY DRAINING BECAUSE IT IS DYING SO FAST" fud that is coming out of Apple. I was surprised at how little it actually affected the battery. Note that I was over WIFI, not 3G/4G so that probably would have an effect on battery life.

Overall I am very pleased with my EVO and Froyo so far. I will be posting about my experiences with it as I find new interesting things.

UPDATE: I said that Sprint "pushed" Froyo, but they actually didn't. They made it available for geeks like me to check for updates manually. If you can't wait, you can go into the Settings > System Updates > HTC Software Update menu.

OpenPlug Elips - update but still no joy

Well I was able to get past my original problems but after 5 minutes of playing with it I seem to have broken it again. With a very simple app with just text in it it compiles and tests ok from within FlashBuilder and when I package and install to my Android emulator set up with Froyo. However, when I add what I think is bare bones application funcionality, it starts to go haywire again. Basically I have a List that I want to populate with XML from a webservice. My initial thought was to use an mx:WebService (which is what I am doing in the browser version). No luck though... WebService doesn't seem to exist in the ElipsFlexSDK. I could always get the data another way via URLLoader so I forged ahead and figured I would just compile in the XML using an mx:XML tag and come back to the remote data access later.

"Sorry folks, park's closed"... This error: "Could not resolve mx:XML to a component implementation" is particularly frustrating because when prototyping, I use this all the time. (If there was a 6 foot moose to punch in the nose I would have). I am not giving up yet though. So I create local variable of type XML and initialize it to a chunk of XML. Voila... it builds again and I can run it in the emulator in FlashBuilder. So at this point all I have to do is package into an APK file.

....Um....no. I get a whole bunch of errors starting with one like this:

C:\OpenPlug\My Systems\Flex_XD\ElipsProject\elips_bin\ElipsProject.cpp:582: error: invalid conversion from 'avmplus::Atom' to 'avmplus::ScriptObject*'

This is where I am giving up for now. It just doesn't seem friendly enough for me to start going down this path. The upside of it is that it supports iOS but I am personally starting to care less about the iPlatform altogether anyway. Especially now that I scrapped my iPhone in favor of the HTC Evo... which totally rocks by the way... I missed Flash on my phone way more than I even realized but I really am enjoying it. Plus I now can start on the Klok for Android app... I've said too much already. Stay tuned.

Note: I keep putting "emulator" in quotes because it doesn't appear to really emulate the real Android. It doesn't look anything like what it looked like when I packaged and installed the apk file to the actual Android emulator. This may be because Elips seems to only have profiles for Android 1.6. More importantly, if something works in the emulator in FlashBuilder I would expect it to work similarly in the Android SDK emulator.

OpenPlug Elips - Sounds great but...

Don't you hate when you get all excited about how easy something is and then try it out and it just doesn't work the way you expect it to?

Well, OpenPlug Elips Studio sounds pretty great (except for the price) so I decided to give it a quick try while I await Flex Hero. So I created a very simple app with some text on it and tested in FlashBuilder and saw the Android emulator (I think... it kind of looks like an emulator comes up and then the air app comes up and is positioned over top of the emulator) come up and show me my application. So far so good. Then I decided I wanted to try creating the APK file and install it on the emulator myself and eventually on my Evo (Froyo is coming tomorrow so I hear).

This is where things started to go wrong. First off, I had an Actionscript error where I had a creationComplete handler specified on the application but didn't have a matching method in my code. The error message shown in the console was pretty big considering the error. So it took me a few to find my problem.

Then I compiled again and got a different error regarding the keystore being in the wrong format. I thought the issue was that in the configuration I hadn't correctly specified the necessary parameters to generate a key. So I specified all the values that were required and tried again. No joy though. The new error... "Incorrect AVA format". I don't really know what that means. A search of the support forum, returns exactly 1 result that mentions "rebuilding the keystore". Not exactly sure what that means either so I am dead in the water at this point.

Hey Adobe... help me out here. A beta of Hero would really help right about now.

Klok 2.1.2 Released - annoying bugs fixed

This latest Klok update (2.1.2) contains mainly fixes for the Time Entries tab where updates, and deletes were not correctly updating the screen until you picked a different project and came back.