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James Urquhart

2 years ago

in Cuppadev » Cloning ActiveCollab on CuppaDev
Gaz,

Good idea, although RailsCollab by nature isn't very multi-user friendly so i'm slightly reluctant with regard to hosting a demo.

Still, i guess it couldn't hurt. Although i'm going to wait till i have time to plonk on a decent ruby rails installation on the box till i do anything further with it.

Thanks,

James

2 years ago

in A Blast from the Past: Tyrian on CuppaDev
Casey,

PPC is big-endian, so i pretty much expected opentyrian not to work at all - though i was pleasantly suprised when the intro screen's worked. It might not look that much, but then again one can only begin to imagine how much Pascal spaghetti code you've had to unravel to even get that far. :)

I look forward to seeing OpenTyrian running a copy of Tyrian 2.1 in the future from start to finish. Its great that you guy's are taking your time to port everything across correctly.

Thanks for taking the time to post, i appreciate it! :)

2 years ago

in Cuppadev » Javascript Draw on CuppaDev
Hey mike,

Performance is interesting. Obviously it starts to choke when you have a lot of objects in the scene. I actually bumped into this early on, and changed the code so that it only redraws when an input event has been dispatched. Still, even then it can get quite chuggy. I'd imagine if i re-did it all in Flash it would be *much* faster.

Cross browser support isn't bad, as every browser which supports the WhatWG canvas supports it well (with the exception of issues with Apple's Safari). Sadly Internet Explorer is a bit of a lost cause at the moment, though i have seen a few promising workarounds which use Flash as a replacement (which sadly defeats the whole point).

Onto the mini howto...

Both versions of the JavaScript draw tool i posted follow the same control scheme - you basically select objects in the canvas (which has a dashed border to let you see where it is) and drag them about.

If you want to edit the points on an object, you select it and then click on the "Point Mode" (or "PM") button. You can then move the points around, etc. You can then re-enter the normal mode by pressing the "Object Mode" (or "OM") button.

If you want to make a new object, there are a few links in the first version of the JSDT to create things such as line's, which work on a click & drag principle. The latter version of the JSDT has none of these functions (yet), except for the "TEST" button which adds a square polygon in the top left hand corner.

Objects in both versions can be selected and dragged using the mouse. Multi-selection works by holding SHIFT down when selecting (though this doesn't work in all browsers since the key doesn't seem to be exposed).

Objects in the latter version can also be rotated an scaled, using the "ROT" and "SCL" buttons. For the rotate, select your object and then drag to the left or right. For the scale, select your object then drag the little blue box which appears. Press the arrow button to go back into selection mode again.

Another feature is the ability to group objects. The best implementation of this is in the latter version. To group objects, select them and press the "Group Objects" (or "GRP") button. To un-group object's, just click on the "Destroy Object" (or "DEL") button.
Finally, when you have grouped objects, you can enter the group by double clicking on it. This will cause all interaction (including the addition of objects) to occur within the objects list of the group, rather than the global objects list. To go back to the main object list, just double click on an empty space. You can pretty much create an infinite hierarchy of groups-within-groups by exploiting this feature.

Thanks for the feedback.

2 years ago

in Cuppadev » The JavaScript Bandwagon on CuppaDev
Gary,

The power of JavaScript has certainly become more evident over the years, especially if you take into account how sophisticated webmail services have become (e.g. zimbra).
Sad to say though, as you mentioned AJAX and JSON are more or less security nightmares, although i suspect that is mainly because developers aren't security minded in general when dealing with javascript requests (e.g. exec'ing JSON instead of parsing it). There are also still too many unknown's with regards to security in the actual browser (e.g. bookmarklets are inherently insecure).

I think its worth learning JavaScript if you are also thinking about developing Flash-based apps (e.g. using FLEX), as the scripting language that uses (i.e. ActionScript) is more or less based on ECMAScript, otherwise known as JavaScript.
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