Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Firefox Parasite

    Another confession this week: I like Firefox.

    Before you go, “Aw man, no one gives a hoot… your so late to the party, brah!” or “I don’t care about browsers, dork”, here me out.

    This whole “blah blah site doesn’t support Firefox” etc. I find frankly annoying, whiny, and curious why I should give a frigin’ care. I use IE; it works, comes pre-installed, and most everything I do works in IE. The security flaws are only exploited, in my experience, on less savory websites where one shouldn’t frequent anyway (unless you know what your doing).

    I was tasked at work to research XUL and it’s capabilities. So, I’m really digging using Mozilla’s rendering engine for XUL. It’s pretty neat that it’s nearly identical to HTML and forms development, but they have their own framework + rendering engine + installation system devoted to just this process. I never could get my Chrome install to work, the lack of proper GUI’s for this 2 year-old (it’s older, but most good forum posts start in 2002 that I saw) technology is pathetic, and it was extremely diffucult to debug (I found out later about the developer install/debug version).

    So, I’m testing things in Firefox because it appears to be more progressive in it’s use of extensions. Therefore, I’d have a plethora of examples to take apart and examine. I consider myself a window management meister. In Windows, one must master this skill to remain sane and remotely productive. I’ve found the positives in that skillset to help justify the constant clicking and moving. I then started using tabs in Firefox to switch between XULPlanet.com, Macromedia’s LiveDoc’s on their implementation, and my sample app running locally because I had other IE windows open. On dual monitors with lots of RAM, I’ll load those suckers up with windows.

    Next thing I know, I’m using other tabs for normal websites like Full As A Goog, and others to browse in my spare time. As of yesterday, I started my day opening Firefox instead of IE to visit the Goog. I then started doing it at home.

    Now, my blatant disregard for web standards probably ticks off the w3c-nazi’s, and assure’s you I’m missing the whole point. My confusion, however, stems on how the heck did a “browser” grow on me? I’m not all into web browsing as an experience. To me, it’s a frikin’ tool, end of story. And yet… here I am writing a blog entry about how frustrated I am; I feel violated, befuddled, abashed, “How could this happen?”

    Anyway, if you have time, give Firefox a week, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s just a stupid browser, you think initially. Who cares. Mozilla sux, why would this be any different, right? Bloody hell, I just realized I’m blogging in it, too.

    Damn browser. I’ll tell you, though, if IE got tabbed browsing, I’d probably go back to IE… but the CSS button and the RSS buttons are cool too. Weird man. I never thought I’d care.

  • MUD Hyperlink Engine & XML Creator

    Another one of my failed experiments. Assuming some of the code is salvageable or perhaps one can learn something.

    Attempting to build a piece of a bigger game, and this started as a MUD engine of sorts where it’ll read an XML file, and you’ll interact with speakers. They’ll say something to you, and you can respond by clicking the hyperlink of what you want to say, in effect, having a limited interactive dialogue. The XML format was complicated, so I attempted to build a tool to easily create the XML files vs. writing some cryptic XML format in Dreamweaver all day. After a week, I’ve lost interest. Too much trouble for what I want to do. Back to the drawing board.

    D&D Simple Game: MUD Engine & XML Creator – ZIP

  • Draw Lines with Undo

    Question on Flashn00bz mailing list stuck with me today. A bloke wanted to draw some lines, one at a time, and then have an undo that you could actually see. I figured the command pattern was where it was at.

    Upon getting home, I tried working on a side project, but couldn’t concentrate (lot on my mind), so I fiddled with this. Was a lot easier than using that bloody pattern. It has undo as well as undo all, and you can see them undo. Draw on the gray square via clicking and holding, drag your mouse, and let go of left mouse click.

    Drawing Lines with Undo – HTML | ZIP

  • XUL Controls Inaccessible via JSFL

    …but not the other way around. Co-jacked, I know.

    Check it:
    – save the JSFL file wherever you want.
    – save the XML file wherever you want.
    – open Flash, make sure you have a fresh FLA open, go to Commands, and choose “Run Command…”.
    – select the JSFL file and click open
    – select the XML file and click open

    Notice that the button you click runs a JSFL function, but the function itself cannot call any native XUL methods on the control.

    The JSFL

    var fileURL = fl.browseForFileURL("open", "Select file");
    var propertySettings = fl.getDocumentDOM().xmlPanel(fileURL);

    The XML

    <dialog id="sample" title="Sample" buttons="accept,cancel">
    <script>
    function test()
    {
    alert("Ok, JSFL Launched this, but I can’t access the same button that launched this code…!");
    some_btn.label = "I wish this worked…";
    }
    </script>
    <label value="Click the button called ‘some_btn’" />
    <button id="some_btn" label="Click Me" oncommand="test();" />
    </dialog>

    I found out yesterday that Mozilla, and I think Firefox too, support this via getObjectById, or whatever. Basically you pass the object’s string name, and it’ll return the form control, just like accessing it via documents.all or however one does in IE.

    …this doesn’t work in Flash, though.

    Frankly, I think this is the last, important step that needs to be done to truly have JSFL make Flash extensible. A lot of custom form applications cannot be done using XML and JSFL alone… merely because the forms are only there for data holding; period. You cannot actually populate data into them in an interactive, and meaningful way. They are nice for simple text fields… but that’s it.

    In the meantime, I’ll just use the Flash tag, and write a form SWF to run in a panel, but it’s still lame. After messing with XUL in Mozilla last week, it’s pretty quick compared to Flash in forms creation in my opinion. If your trying to do quick utilities, XUL is where it’s at. I hope Macromedia finishes the implementation; it’d make Flash more rockin’ than it is now.