Simeon Says

I like community. I think its great. In fact I dont think there is anything more fun than hanging out with folks and talking about what excites them.

Last night I attended my first Ruby usergroup meeting. The Portland Ruby Brigade had their April meeting. We were supposed to meet at FreeGeek here in Portland but, they ended up just getting together at the Lucky Labrador pub down the street.

I actually started my evening at Lucky Lab with cfChris ( check out his new blog) to grab some bento and talk CF before the meeting. It was great to visit as we have been out of touch for a bit. Then when he and I were dont eating I wandered over to FreeGeek just in time to see all the ruby folks ( I didnt know it was them then) evacuate the building to head down to Lucky Lab. So I wandered around till someone told me they left and I headed back to the pub.

I had a great time talking with folks about Ruby and what they are doing. The creator of UrbanDrinks.com showed me his fun little project. I actually spent a bunch of the night talking from someone who lives near my old stomping grounds on the Oregon Coast.

It was a fun night and I am glad I made it to the group. I needed a little interaction because I missed last months PDXRIA meeting, and it looks like I am gonna miss this months too. But I got some tech time with beer in anyway!

I was playing with some navigation on an application the other day. I decided as I changed the elements in the view stack I wanted to fade from one to the next. I added a fade effect to the hide of the children of my viewstack so I could see how it worked. The problem showed itself right off the bat, I wasnt seeing any effect. I thought it was weird, but being a problem solver I knew I could use the dissolve effect with transitions. So I rewrote the nav real quick so that instead of using a view stack it used a container with states. That worked great.

But it really wasnt what I wanted. I just wanted to use my viewstack. So I started looking into why the viewstack with hideEffect was not working. I quickly reverted my code (source control rocks!) and started testing. I noticed that pages that had form/ui controls on them faded just fine. But text never did fade correctly. Now this was really starting to bother me. So I looked up using behaviors in the help docs. (sidenote: effects applied to components are behaviors. effects applied to state changes are called transitions) After a little digging I found this article on Using embedded fonts with effects, the important part goes something like this:


The Dissolve, Fade, and Rotate effects only work with text rendered using an embedded font. If you apply these effects to a control that uses a system font, nothing happens to the text.


And voiala! I embedded a font and just like that my fade behaviors worked just like I thought they should. You can find out more about embedding fonts here. And remember to set up a regular and bold version of your font or it wont apply you font to controls which are bold by default (ie, button, link and panel headers). Mine looked like this



@font-face {
src:local(”Harrington”);
fontFamily: myFontFamily;
flashType: true;
}
@font-face {
src:local(”Harrington”);
font-weight:bold;
fontFamily: myFontFamily;
flashType: true;
}
@font-face {
src:local(”Harrington”);
font-style:italic;
fontFamily: myFontFamily;
flashType: true;
}



Implement setSize on module interface
onReady - set to loaders size h & w
onResize set to loaders size h & w

I am such a kind and trusting soul. I dont deserve the pain and anguish I encounter every year at the start of april. You would think I might learn but I dont. Every year I look at the calendar and think “oh look its almost april fools day” and then i completely forget about its existence.

This years big hitter was Ryan Stewart’s post on his new job. I think its always the job ones that get me. I caught this one pretty quick after he posted so I didnt read any comments. I actually deleted his feed from google reader. I had actually thought about canceling my plans with him later this month. I was sooo mad!

But to be honest, nothing hit me as hard as when in 2005 Rob Rohan told us he was going to work for Microsoft. I actually cried that morning. TEARS!!! What a waste I thought, because now I was gonna have to kill him.

I keep waiting for Scott Barnes to come out and tell me it was a joke and he didnt really switch sides. Friends tell me not to hold my breathe, but I dont really want to have to kick him in the balls when we finally do meet.

Well here is hoping I dont get fooled again next year. Or if you are a real friend, you will warn me.