Wireframing

Making a trip to Smashing Magazine always means an hour if not more of internet browsing. It is amazing how they churn out relevant and interesting content post after post. One of the posts that I came across today was on wireframing and lists several interesting resources on the topic. Wireframing is a topic of interest for me and I came across the following interesting tidbits:

1. The ‘boxing glove’ method: Use Post-It’s for each page as the smaller page size forces you to concentrate on the bigger picture and also anyone can participate.

2. SEO Wireframing: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-wireframing

Flunking Flex : Another Random Day

Trying to develop my content in Illustrator and exporting them as symbols to be used as content in the Doodlepad.

Apparently not working because they are being read as AVM1. This isn’t an acceptable solution yet (sigh): http://paulofierro.com/archives/513/

Image Spacing in HTML E-mails in Hotmail

This post sums it up pretty well:

http://www.viget.com/inspire/hotmail-image-problems-in-html-emails/

You need to add a ‘display:block’ style attribute to all the images.

Flunking Flex: Day X

Long hiatus (which means things were going okay thus far)

Learnt that containers that support absolute positioning of children do not support the padding attribute.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FLEXDOCS-493

TextArea don’t autosize and one needs ActionScript to achieve that :(

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/rbotoole/entry/automatically_resizing_text/

 

If you’re trying to add a padding to the labels in a TabBar, styling the TabBar styleName won’t work, you need the assign a ‘tabStyleName’ and then apply padding to the labels.

Flunking Flex : Day 2

1. The bold font weight: Was still struggling with the font-weight issue on a button. The problem was that while the font was being applied to my TabBar after setting the Button font-weight to normal, on the active tab, there was still no text appearing since that was still bold. I finally found a solution but not before trying all kinds of random things – talk about taking the long route.

I set out solving the problem with the Button. Looked through available attributes that I can set through CSS – to no avail. Trying adding a font as an .swf – again to no avail. Then i googled away and found a solution which required editing the Font in a Font Editor and then setting the sub-family to bold. [http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/03/bitmap_fonts_in.html] That worked after much trial and error. Finally I decided it was time to post my Flex woes online for the day and realised I was approaching the problem from the wrong end.

I needed to set the font weight on the active tab.

Thus all I needed was adding this to my TabBar CSS declaration: selectedTabTextStyleName:"activeTab"; and then apply a normal weight to the activeTab.

2. What to use for styling?

There are too many ways to do things in Flex – all slightly inflexible. I’m unable to decide if I should use Degrafa, if I should use Illustrator or if I should use Photoshop to create my button skins. Guess, I better take an evolutionary approach to this one – so do the one that does the job right now – and worry about maintainability and size later.

Flunking Flex

1. Degrafa (Yay!) Using Degrafa in CSS to specify gradient fills and selectively round corners (makes life incredibly convenient)http://www.mikehuntington.com/?p=31 [Advanced CSS with Degrafa]

2. fontWeight on Button: You embed a font and then apply it to a Button and a Label. It works on the Label but not on the Button. Why so? Perhaps you embedded a normal weight font, but did not specify fontWeight:normal on the Button. Since, the default fontWeight on your button is bold, and your embedded font isn’t, you need to explicitly add fontWeight:normal to your Button style. Damn! hours wasted on this. [http://viconflex.blogspot.com/2006/11/deal-with-embedded-fonts-buttons-and.html] and more hilariously[http://polygeek.com/496_flex_issues-with-embeding-fonts-for-buttons-in-flex]

3. TabBar extends Button: You create a TabBar and gave it a nice new font. It doesn’t work. You scroll through your CSS and see you haven’t declared a style on the TabBar any-fucking-where. After an hour of trying stuff that even you know is inane, and deleting several parts of your CSS – you find a style declaration you had given in the beginning of the project : the Button component. Turns out the TabBar extends the Button component and this style will override a fontFamily applied to the TabBar separately.

4. Disappearing Flex Builder: Flex Builder 3, Project > Properties > Flex Build Path = Empty Screen in Vista x64. http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-12239

5. Hope this isn’t true: “Scale 9. As I wrote about in Introduction to Flex 2, the big difference between skins and background images is that you can use scale 9 on your skins to let one image work in many different sizes without looking awkward. But for whatever reason, and nobody ever tells you this, you can’t use scale 9 with assets embedded from symbols in SWFs. It just doesn’t work. Regardless of whether you build the guides in Flash yourself, or write them in the embed tag. If you want to use scale 9 in your skins, pull them in as PNGs, and use the all-but-hidden embed “grid” attributes:” from [http://dispatchevent.org/roger/flex-3-tips-tricks-and-gotchas-a-series/]. yflexskin.swf seems to work okay – so I’m hopeful.

IA diagrams

A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design: http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/