via blog.six4rty.ch

I like the article at http://blog.six4rty.ch/2010/07/31/as3-multiline-textfields-and-line-metrics/, mainly because of this graphic. I found it somewhere before long ago (maybe the same place) — it is a big help when dealing with customized text layout situations in flash where you have to do manual baseline aligment and such.

Posted via email from micro-plains

package {

	import fl.controls.TextInput;
	import fl.managers.IFocusManagerComponent;

	/**
	 * Extends the TextInput component in order to set the default width and
	 * height, and sets the focusRectPadding to 0 (so the focus rectangle lies
	 * directly on top of the grey text input border skin.
	 */
	public class TextInput2 extends TextInput implements IFocusManagerComponent {

		/**
		 * @constructor
		 */
		public function TextInput2() {
			super();
			textField.width = 1;
			textField.height = 1;
			width = 64;
			height = 18;
			setStyle("focusRectPadding", 0);
		}

		/**
		 * The UIComponent class, when the component is in focus, creates the
		 * uiFocusRect and sets it at childIndex 0. Unfortunately, the text input
		 * skin is then above the focus rect, and so the focus rect disappears
		 * when the focusRectPadding is 0. This calls the parent implementation,
		 * then ensures that the focus rect is visible by changing its
		 * child index.
		 */
		override public function drawFocus(draw:Boolean):void {
			super.drawFocus(draw);

			if (uiFocusRect != null) {
				setChildIndex(uiFocusRect, numChildren - 1);
			}
		}
	}
}

UPDATE: I updated the above script to set the size of the TextField in the TextInput component to be 1x1. This also fixes the problem that the TextField is created as 100x100 pixels when it is first created (as are all dynamically generated text fields). This matters if you wish to use any customized layout (such as the Yahoo astra layout managers), and don't want to have to call drawNow() or wait a frame to finalize layout settings in a UI.

Regardless of whether or not a shape, such as a rectangle, is drawn in Flash with a hairline border line, or a borderline of 1, the result on an unscaled shape is essentially the same. The crisp outline of the shape is drawn with a pixel width of 1. The downside of this occurs when trying to create pixel perfect UI's, and especially those using shapes with a scalenine grid assigned to them.

Using the AS3 drawing API, you can create a rectangle that has a lineStyle with a width of 1, and some fill, which would look something like this:

var sh:Shape = new Shape();
sh.graphics.lineStyle(1, 0xFF0000);
sh.graphics.beginFill(0xFF6600);
sh.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, 100, 100);
sh.graphics.endFill();
addChild(sh);
trace("Size: " + sh.width + " x " + sh.height);

The code above so draws an orange rectangle with a red border that is 201 pixels wide and 101 pixels tall. If you don't know why, the reason is because flash draws the line on the pixel width and height of the rectangle with a line size of 1. This makes your shape 201 x 101; thankfully, Flash will report the width and height correctly as 201 x 101.

This gets stickier if you have a shape that is used as a component skin, and has a scale9Grid applied to it. In this case you will likely be working with a component that you expect to take up 200x100 pixels on the stage when you tell it to be that size. However, if the skin used features "line" outlines at its borders, your component will get drawn on the stage with extra pixels. If you dig into the Flash component skins, you will notice that most of the skins use fills for any borders on the shapes (even 1 pixel wide borders) so that the scale9Grid enabled shapes will scale correctly to the pixel. That being said, the proper way to draw the simple skin shape in this case, programmatically, would be:

var sh2:Shape = new Shape();
sh2.graphics.beginFill(0xFF0000);
sh2.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, 200, 100);
sh2.graphics.beginFill(0xFF6600);
sh2.graphics.drawRect(1, 1, 198, 98);
sh2.graphics.endFill();
addChild(sh2);
trace("Size: " + sh2.width + " x " + sh2.height);

Incidentally, this also often cleans up some anti-aliasing at the corners of rectangular shapes which I believe is cause by some weirdness in the way the "caps" are drawn on the shapes. (but don't quote me on that...)

Flash 9 LiveDocs:  qss-http://www.google.com/search?&btnI&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Flivedocs.adobe.com%2Fflash%2F9.0%2FActionScriptLangRefV3%2F+***

Flash 10 Help Docs:  qss-http://www.google.com/search?&btnI&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fhelp.adobe.com%2Fen_US%2FAS3LCR%2FFlash_10.0%2F+***

Basically, since there is no convenient way I found to use the search mechanisms on the Adobe site, these queries are running a google lucky search on the wildcard applied search term, while restricting the search to the site pertinent to the docs of interest. Running the assigned key command will trigger the Quicksilver text entry box; simply enter the term, such as "vector" for Flash 10, and the google lucky search will be performed. Since the lucky search is restricted to the livedocs and the help docs, the first search result returned will be the frameless html page in the docs for the search term. When searching for the docs for a specific actionscript term, this cuts the search time for a term down to a couple of seconds, which is highly convenient...

To install, uncompress this script and put it in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions directory, and restart Quicksilver.

To use, invoke Quicksilver and type "." to enter text mode. Type all or part of the name of the person you wish to IM. Hit and type "Adium" (or "Ad" or "Adi") and select "AdiumContactor" with the arrow keys and hit .

The script will search for any instance of the text you enter in your contacts, both in their IM names, as well as their display names. If one match is found, it will open an IM window for that contact. If multiple contacts are found, a window will open allowing you to select the one you want, using whatever account it belongs to. (in other words, if you search "bil", you will be able to choose from "Bill Todd", bileInMyStomach@gmail.com, actionscriptAbility@hotmail.com, etc.) Careful using some search terms, such as "com", as it will return all your MSN messenger accounts (whose screennames are defined by the contact's email address)

PlasticWare Downloadable ::
AdiumContactor for Quicksilver (Aug. 07, 2008)
Download (~10,000 bytes) :: AdiumContactor.zip

export http_proxy=`proxy-config -h`
export https_proxy=`proxy-config -s`
export ftp_proxy=`proxy-config -f`

This will set your environment proxy variables to whatever they are currently set to in your Network Preferences. I got part of this also from Ryan Tomayko's blog.This is important if you are inside a firewall at work.

The simplest way to post a tweet to twitter from the command line would be to do so using cURL. If you don't have cURL installed, you will need to install it. If you aren't familiar with cURL, it is basically a command-line tool for grabbing html documents (or whatever else). See this post for another use. I got this idea, as well as the applescript for using it with Quicksilver, from Coda Hale's blog. Read that post for a full explanation of using Quicksilver and an applescript for posting to twitter from Quicksilver -- it has a pretty thorough explanation.

If you are inside a firewall, however, this will likely fail because the cURL command requires that the proxy settings be provided. So, I took the script from Coda's post, combined it with the comment on his post from Daan Kortenbach, and then enabled that for use with the system's proxy settings. The new script follows:

using terms from application "GrowlHelperApp"
	-- Register Growl
	on growlRegister()
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
			register as application "Tweet" all notifications {"Alert"} default notifications {"Alert"} icon of application "Quicksilver.app"
		end tell
	end growlRegister

	-- Notify using Growl
	-- Example: growlNotify("This is an Alert","This is a test of the Growl Alert System")
	on growlNotify(grrTitle, grrDescription)
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
			notify with name "Alert" title grrTitle description grrDescription application name "Tweet"
		end tell
	end growlNotify
end using terms from

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
	on process text tweet
		tell application "Keychain Scripting"
			set twitter_key to first Internet key of current keychain whose server is "twitter.com"
			set twitter_login to quoted form of (account of twitter_key & ":" & password of twitter_key)
		end tell
		set twitter_status to quoted form of ("status=" & tweet)

                -- I have proxy-config in a directory "~/bin"
		set the_proxy to do shell script "~/bin/proxy-config -h"

		try
			if (the_proxy = "") then
				set results to do shell script "curl --user " & twitter_login & " --data-binary " & twitter_status & " http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"
			else
				set results to do shell script "curl --proxy " & the_proxy & " --user " & twitter_login & " --data-binary " & twitter_status & " http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"
			end if
			growlRegister()
			growlNotify("Tweet Sent", tweet)
		on error
			(* In case curl fails for some reason,  alert us *)
			growlRegister()
			growlNotify("Error", "There was an error sending your tweet.")
		end try

	end process text
end using terms from

Today I deafened myself, but upon searching, discovered Alloc Init, which features a nice little app called Breakaway. The main feature of this app is to pause iTunes or launch the screensaver when the headphone jack status is changed (plugged in or out). However, the nicer thing about the app is that it also allows the user to trigger an applescript on the same events. I created the following script called setVolumeTo20of100:

tell application "Finder"
set volume output volume 20
end tell

After creating a custom trigger in Breakaway, my system volume will always be reset to 20 when I plug in something to the headphone jack. Since I don't care about having to increase the volume at home automatically, this is fine for now, since I will most importantly not deafen myself in the morning at work. I will perhaps post an update later that checks the the network preferences for the current location for setting the volume automatically based on location, which will automate things a little more. Meanwhile, I highly recommend this nice little app. (Note: the interface for creating custom triggers is a little clunky, so you may have to play with it a little first, but it does work -- just be patient.)

The solution: I decided it was finally time to resurface the site, but do so quickly so as to actually get things working again. So, the current state you see here is the result. Not finished, but at least not entirely broken. I did a little research, and decided that I would try out the Sandbox theme. I appreciated what they are trying to do, and I also decided that I should go ahead and start basically from scratch with a foundation that has some nice semantic markup to build on.

The project: What you see here in progress is actually a new theme that I am building on top of Sandbox, tentatively called Plastic Laminate, utilizing pretty much just new CSS on top of the existing Sandbox for now, and then I may actually do some reskinning or plugin building as well, to cover any areas missing content I want. That being said, if things look a bit wonky or like a blog with little design effort applied at the moment, that's because its still in transition...

It was the simplest way I could find to do this. It isn't customizable, other than editing the code yourself, but it does a great job out of the box, and does pretty much what you would want it to do anyway, which is post things to your blog that you found interesting, without having to actually write a post about it...hooray for industrious laziness!

However, I stumbled on this gem the other day:

curl -C - -O file:///Volumes/samba_share/file/path/here.txt

Basically, curl allows you to copy a file with url syntax in the terminal. The capital "O" tells curl to copy the file to your desktop with the same name as the file on your server, and the capital "C" tells it to continue where it may have left off. You can monitor the download in the terminal window. If you need to leave work and finish the copy the next day, simply enter the command again in the terminal and it will pick up the copy where it left off.

PlasticWare Downloadable ::
Show Track in Finder (Mar. 11, 2008)
Download (~3,146 bytes) :: ShowTrackInFinder.zip

Update: the chumby widget can be found at http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/Japanese Syllabary Flash Card. Enjoy!

It seems that you can do a few nice little searches that aren't well publicized, so that you can, for instance, get an RSS stream featuring the union of two different Flickr tags in your stream (in other words, an OR search). The feed URL looks something like this (for the tags blue and green):

feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=74517463@N00&tags=blue,green&tagmode=any&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Replace the "tagmode" parameter with all, and you get an AND style search (only photos featuring all the specified tags). The problem is that the RSS feed provided by Flickr only allows you to grab 20 photos. If you perform the same search, you get a large amount of paged data, if there is more than one page. So, basically, this means that if you want to see ALL the photos of your children in your own home-grown chumby, OSX, or other widget, you are sadly stuck at seeing only 20.

"What about using something like Pipes?", you say. Well, I checked out using Yahoo pipes to create a custom RSS feed. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, you are really limited to what you can get via the Flickr API. You can get more than 20 photos in 1 person's photostream this way using the flickr.people.getPublicPhotos method, but that method does not provide the capability of filtering by tag.

I'd just about given up (well I still have for now) until I realized that you can do just this in the media bar in Flock, so there must be a way to do it that I am missing. In Flock, you can view your photostream and *fliter* by tags, and even use AND and OR for multiple tags. Not sure how they are doing this, because you can see way more than 20. I sent them an email to see what they are doing today. Anyone else have any idea?

Haven't posted anything useful here for a while so I thought I'd put something together today and post it -- something that I've wanted for a while. Occasionally when I want to zone out at work I just put iTunes in random, hide it, and go. Unfortunately, I end up wasting time flipping iTunes open and then hiding it again when I can't remember a track name or artist or album. I've been meaning to put together something to use in Quicksilver to enable being able to take a peek at what is playing, namely using the OSX system extension Growl. Download this:

PlasticWare Downloadable ::
Growl Track Info (Oct. 21, 2007)
Download (~3,645 bytes) :: growl_track_info.zip

I can't remember why I have Growl on my system, that is, what application or system version first installed it, so if you don't have Growl, you can find it here: http://growl.info/. Basically, if you aren't familiar with it, Growl allows for (sometimes annoying) pop-up bubbles that can notify you of things going on with applications that are currently not in the foreground (for example, when an upload completes in Transmit, or when you get an incoming message in Adium or iChat).Once you've installed Growl (or check to see if it exists in your System Prefs), download the script linked above, unzip it, and place it in your iTunes scripts folder (/Users/~YourUserName/Library/iTunes/Scripts). Now, if you restart iTunes, the script should show up in your iTunes applescript menu, and you can choose the script and see that it triggers the Growl pop-up -- which really isn't terribly interesting since you are already staring at iTunes anyway.

Now, assuming that you have Quicksilver installed on your system, you can add a custom trigger as seen below.


To add the trigger, open Quicksilver and go to Catalog. Select Modules and make sure that you have the iTunes module showing there. If not, you need to enable the iTunes module. Click the circle arrow thing on the bottom right to rescan your catalog - you may notice that the count for the iTunes applescripts increases by 1. Next, select Triggers, and then select Custom Triggers. Find the little plus sign button at the middle bottom and choose HotKey. This will slide open a Quicksilver selector thing, whatever it's called. You can now type part of "growl track info" the same way as you would normally using Quicksilver, and select the Applescript "Growl Track Info.scpt" where it shows up in the list; it will default to Run as the action, which is fine. Now double click the line in the Trigger column on the right and set up your hotkey for On Press (my friends make fun of me for choosing something like Control-Option-Command-Shift-I so I can just mash the bottom left of the keyboard and one other letter and not interfere with other application keystrokes, but if you do that I won't make fun of you). You should now be able to hide iTunes and use the Quicksilver trigger to see whats playing in iTunes, as well as control iTunes with the rest of the iTunes module available for Quicksilver, and free up whatever corner of your screen you were keeping the mini player before.

View as Plain Text

In a nutshell, as the comments indicate, we capture the contents of the field in the dialog that is opened, and stick them into the applescript that we want to run. The applescript part checks to see if there is already a Terminal session window open, and will run the command in the Terminal. If Terminal isn't open, then it launches it. You (or maybe me in the future) could fancy this up a bit if you wanted by having the Terminal change directory to the directory in which the file you are working on exists. Not sure that is always desirable though for my purposes.

Enjoy it. (if you're a total geek you probably will, at least in principle)

Additional work needed:
1. Escape quotes (you have to do that manually now).
2. Have Terminal spawn a new window if it is already running but has no open windows. (need to check for window count in addition to process running)

View as Plain Text

If you would like to see which files were skipped due to no error or warning, you can remove the "-nofilelisting" portion of the else statement in the for loop. I especially like the way that you can specify a URL in the html output in TextMate that will allow you to link back to documents that can be opened in TextMate, even down to the line. I'm not sure where that is referenced specifically, but its a pretty cool trick; I found that litte tidbit somewhere out there - I lost it in my browser. Anyway, the above script dumps your jslint output in the HTML output window, and clicking the links for the errors will take you to the document and line where the error was found.

eval arr=("$TM_SELECTED_FILES")
for (( i = 0; i < ${#arr[@]}; i++ )); do
    $JSLINT -process ${arr[$i]}
    echo "<br/><br/>"
done

The variable $JSLINT I have defined in the TextMate preferences in the "Shell Variables" tab of the "Advanced" preferences. Right now, all this does is run jslint on the selected files and adds a blank line in between the output for the different files. Hopefully I can put together something a bit smarter. Ideally, it would be great to be able to click a link that takes you to the document and specific line where the error is found.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

So, to accomplish this, you need to create 2 files, ".bashrc" and ".bash_profile" in your user directory. The contents of the .bash_profile file need to be as such for starters:

. ~/.bashrc
ENV=$HOME/.bashrc
export ENV

Then, the contents of .bashrc need to be something like this:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin
alias ls="ls -a"
SHELL=/bin/bash

This will get you started. If you have any questions beyond that, do some online searches for .bashrc and shell configuration. (I'm no expert, I just figure out what I need to do to get stuff done...)

#!/bin/sh
osascript -e "tell application \"TextMate\" to open POSIX file \"$TM_SELECTED_FILE\""

You can set a Key Equivalent if you like. When done, select a folder in your project drawer. If the folder is a file system folder (rather than a group), the script will spawn a new project window containing all the files in that folder. Selecting a "group" folder will do nothing (may work on that one later...).

So I spent a few minutes looking about today for something that would allow me to tile my open windows in TextMate. I couldn't find anything except for people wishing that TextMate could arrange windows like BBEdit, so I mocked up a little applescript application and then copied it over into a TextMate command in the bundle editor wrapped in an osascript call. Its by far not perfect, but here is what it does in a nutshell.

The script gets all the TextMate windows and, for now, grabs only the ones that are both zoomable and visible. I didn't yet filter out some of the possible windows that would be caught by this that you wouldn't want, such as the Bundle Editor window, but I wanted to get something working. It then runs through the windows and does a little math to determine which of the windows is closest to where the new positions should be, and moves them. This algorithm isn't perfect, but it does ok. The default minimum window width is 700px. The default setting for the key command is control-option-command-shift-T (didn't want to overwrite something else ).

You should be able to unzip and install the bundle as you would any other TextMate bundle. Enjoy it, and if you have any thoughts, let me know.