Acumen Development

Despite great Evangelism about the breakthroughs of Web2.0, the design limitations of HTML still live on – a total lack of CSS3 uptake, and a highly restrictive set of web fonts – barely three serifs and sans serifs to match. While possibilities with content and navigation have been opened up, design limitations of standard web pages are leaving DHTML standing for Dilapidated HTML, and has driven so many style-conscious sites to be poorly implemented in flash – which due to a lack of complex positioning tools can be very ignorant of viewport size. The birth of sIFR was a breakthrough crossover between Flash and HTML, but this still comes with some restrictions and risks that many companies find hard to justify on their sites.

At Acumen, we’ve never wanted to restrain designers too much by forcing them to use web fonts, but then we also take on a responsibility to offer our customers sites that they can fully control. Matting down a title font for each page makes it hard for webmasters without a design background to make the changes they need, and so we’ve used a number of tools along the way to bring that control back to the maintainers.

Key among these is a system to render non-webfonts on the fly, determined by user-generated content. You can see this in use on the Acumen site, for instance the use of Bank Gothic on the title of this page. This is accomplished using a WordPress plugin we’ve written to replace specific page tags and CSS selectors – and it works fairly seemlessly, requiring only Javascript and PHP to run.

Anyway, by request, we’ve decided to release the plugin for general use – enjoy!

I’m releasing this filter as I couldn’t find an appropriate one out there. It lets you twirl a spiral into any Actionscript display object, and is fast enough to allow it to be animated.

You can get the source from here, both an animated and static examples are included.

Rotations and reflections are easy enough with the Actionscript 3 Matrix class as long as you want a reflection whose mirror line passes through the origin, or a rotation about the origin.

However I recently was stumped with producing transformation matrices that included rotations about any point and reflection along any line. As there was little example code out there for this, I’ve decided to publish the two methods I’ve written to perform this. Both methods take the Matrix to set the transformation to as the first argument.

/**
* Constructs an affine rotation matrix.
*
* @param m The matrix to set the affine rotation to.
* @param angle The angle of rotation in radian.
* @param ox center of rotation in the x axis
* @param oy center of rotation in the y axis
*
*/
private function rotation(m:Matrix,angle:Number=0,ox:Number=0,oy:Number=0):void
{
m.rotate(angle);
m.tx=ox-(m.a*ox)+(m.b*oy);
m.ty=oy+(m.c*ox)-(m.d*oy);
}

/**
* Constructs an affine reflection matrix. The line of reflection
* is defined by the last three parameters of the method.
* @param m Matrix The matrix to set the affine reflection to.
* @param angle Number The angle of rotation in radians.
* @param ox Number The reflection lines relative position from the origin.
* @param oy Number The reflection lines relative position from the origin.
*
*/
private function reflection(m:Matrix,angle:Number=0,ox:Number=0,oy:Number=0):void
{
m.a= Math.cos(2*angle);
m.b= Math.sin(2*angle);
m.c= Math.sin(2*angle);
m.d= -Math.cos(2*angle);

m.tx=ox-(m.a*ox)+(m.b*oy);
m.ty=oy+(m.c*ox)-(m.d*oy);
}

My eye balls nearly popped out of my head when I stumbled across Adobe’s alpha of flex builder for Linux. I say beta, but it does everything I want, is faster and seems even more stable than flex builder in windows. The fact this is released as a plugin for eclipse (the windows and mac versions of flex builder are built on eclipse) is quite a break from Adobe’s previous behaviour. But then so was releasing the flex SDK for free!

Anyway as a native Ubuntu user I’ve been enjoying this immensely. The only disappointing thing is that Adobe have seen fit once again to only bless Linux users with 32bit binaries. Now I think that it’s pretty hard to get a new pc or laptop that doesn’t have 64bit support, so why the reluctance?

I managed to get it working in the end of course. But it meant taking off my 64bit version of eclipse, and installing 32bit version of this and Firefox. The instructions were all clear enough on adobe’s site. What makes me laugh is the fact it might have just been easier for them to build a 64bit version rather than wasting time writing a detailed HowTo.

In other related 64bit Linux news, I got my dirty little paws on a 64bit Ubuntu package! Great stuff Skype, glad to see you listened to everyone who relentlessly bombed your forums.

Ok this is my last Ubuntu fanboy post for a while I promise. I just wanted to spread the love.

Ok it’s a problem. It’s the effect of having been stuck in Windows for so many years. Trying time and again to change to linux but always having problems with cross platform compatibility, portability, finding and implementing functionality. Now a lot of these problems haven’t been solved by Ubuntu itself, in fact all flavours of Linux have come a huge way in the past 5 years in improving the general user experience. Addtionally exotic hardware support has been growing too, so don’t get me wrong, I know that all the perks are not because of Ubuntu, but it’s stepped into the fray at exactly the right time.

This is the first OS that I can show to inexperienced people with pride, showing that features can be added by them with no help by me. But most of all this is the first OS I’ve enjoyed using, my laptop now makes me happy, not frustrated. All those little things, like having ssh filesystem access from the desktop, that just makes my job so easy. It helps now and again being an old hand with the CLI, which always intimidates new users who want to go a bit deeper into Linux.

My next adventure will be installing kvm, I’m going to set up a freebsd testbed on my laptop. Reports here later as to my success.

Nowadays almost every developer makes use of third party libraries and frameworks, especially when developing Web Applications.
So we’ve all spent a fair amount of time in support forums for these libraries.

Attitudes to posting

Some ideas and attitudes that need to prevail, and some need to be discouraged, in order for these forums to effectively minimise the noise to signal ratio, and provide true value for all members of the community.

The worst case attitude is a borderline parasitic / vampiric one, with people posting impolite, vague and demanding questions, expecting to do no independent thought, and have some magic code snippet dropped in front of them.

How to Respond to a post

Don’t insult, berate, or chide needy posters – at least not immediately!
You’re an ambassador for the project, and if you want it to become more and more popular and hence more understood, documented, extended and supported, then don’t discourage people from posting! You’re creating a barrier to entry for the ‘market’.

Instead, encourage good posting practices, and discourage bad ones.

Do this by encouraging independent learning.

Don’t spell out something for the sake of providing immediate help – instead, point to fairly specific articles or documentation that applies to their problem.

This will encourage them to use these resources more throughly, rather than expect magic fairies to drop solutions on their laps via forums.

It’s a surprising little bit of info this, after all we take the results of evaluations like this to be self evident, but quite a few of these results where surprising for me.

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