If it is ObjectHandles, this would be the second time I just ran into a use of them, that’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an email address on that site.

But that aside, the site is neat.  It lets you create some pretty "web 2.0" style buttons with stripes, highlights, etc.

I spent some time on the library yesterday.  I was tyring to get the rotation+resizing thing working better since it’s been somewhat broken for a while.  I’ve never needed that feature so it’s been neglected.  Unfortunately, I’m running into a bit of a brick wall.  I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it should do, nevermind how.  Luckily, most of my Trigonometry from High School is coming back to me since it’s heavy in that department.

So What is it about?

The book does a few things.  First, about a third of the book introduces you to some open source tools for doing flash development.  Things like FlashDevelop, MTASC, SwfMill, ANT, and ASDT.  It’ll show you how to create an AS2 and an AS3 based flash application using completely free and open software.  This goes all the way from installing the tools, creating a sample app, writing up some unit tests for it, and then to publishing it to the web.  Along the way it’ll give you a brief introduction to each tool, explain what it does, and then give a quick example of how to use it.  (That’s the 5 chapters I wrote)

The remaining 2/3 of the book dedicates a chapter to various open source projects going into a little more detail about them.  There’s a chapter on Papervision 3D, SWX, FUSE/Go, HAXE, AMFPHP, two for Red5 and a couple more.

This was a lot of fun to work on, and my only regret is not getting to know the other authors better.

If you’re looking for a place to buy it, check out Bookpool.   I worked for them for a year and they’re really stellar guys.  They offer good prices, but more importantly;  as long as the book is in stock, they do their damndest to get it on a truck the day you order it. (Of course, you’re at the mercy of the publisher if it’s out of stock)

The example application has source attached, and is licensed under the MIT license.  I hope someone can take it and make some really great application out of it.  Please drop me an email if you do!

I recorded a practice-run I did, so here it is…

• Run the application (Flex application with view-source enabled)
• Creating a simple diagramming application (14 Minute Video)

http://code.google.com/p/flex-object-handles/downloads/list

The neat thing is, I used an ant script to automatically post files there!

http://www.rogue-development.com/logViewer.xml

But much more interestingly, I made the changes in direct response for my desire to improve the logging facilities in XRay.

In case you’ve never heard of it before, XRay is the best tool for debugging Flash applications out there. It’s written by a guy named John Grden that I’ve had the opportunity to work with for the past year or so. Last week I told him about LogViewer and he added it in to XRay. But it just didn’t feel right. It looked clunky and there was some functionality that should be there but was missing. So for the past couple days I’ve been hacking apart LogViewer, adding in a few features, and making it look a little prettier. Here are the results…

As you can see, the search functionality remains, but with a find-previous option listed.

Two new features include the ability to filter based on a text string, and the ability to highlight lines that contain a text string. Both very useful when you have an application spewing large amounts of logging information at you.

With any Luck, we can get these changes wrapped up over the next week to a release-quality state and post it for all to use.

Changes include:

- Initial rotation support added (still needs some tweaks). Thanks
goes to Alexander Kludt for contribution of most of this feature.
- Metadata for events added. (Thanks Thomas Jakobi!)
- Bug fix for making ObjectHandles dynamically through actionscript
instead of in an MXML document.
- Ability to turn mouse cursor support off (since they are ugly right
now).

A new demo is up and downloads can be found at:
http://www.rogue-development.com/objectHandles.xml
(Clear your browser cache before viewing the demo again, I’ve seen it
not refresh sometimes, even on a shift-reload on my browser)

Enjoy!

People focus on the legal issues, but not the simple logistical and psychological issues that arise from the fact that while open source and commercial code may be the work of separate legal entities, in practice both types of code are written and used by the same people, either at home or at work, since hobbyist coders usually have a day job.

At every job I’ve had, if we’re considering incorporating an open source library, the license is the first thing to check. If the project page says GPL we immediately drop the library as a consideration. If it’s a commercial license then we can use it but we have to do paperwork for accounting. And if we see BSD, then we right click, download the library, and start looking into it from there. The predictable results of this process: my head fills up with information on the libraries I use, and I forget about the ones I rejected long ago.

Then I get home to my hobby project. Legally, completely different rules apply to me at home. I can release under the GPL (a choice I can’t simply make for my employer), use GPL code, etc etc. My own license restrictions as a hobbyist coder are supposedly orthogonal to those at my day job. But guess what? I have to use the same brain at work and at home, it only has so many brain cells to fill up with library APIs, there are only 24 hours in a day, and I barely have time to get drunk as it is. Even though I’m at home I’ll probably just build things with stuff I’m familiar with. Especially if I view the library as not being an interesting part of my application.

If my employer used the GPL for projects then I guess I’d be predisposed to use GPL code at home. I’ve just never worked at a place that incorporated GPL code into its projects, so I’m not familiar with it, and probably won’t adopt it.

The GPL is similar to any other proprietary license, from a proprietor it creates that hires anybody, pays nobody, and is legally bound to charge nothing. But it still shares (with the actual authors) proprietary rights to all derivative works because Richard Stallman wanted to confer upon it a competitive advantage enjoyed by other, commercial proprietors. It’s a very reasonable proprietary license but in the end that’s what it is, and some things should not be proprietary. We still need some public infrastructure in the software industry. Users (including most of you guys) want standard software conventions that always work in a predictable way. They want to leverage their knowledge of GPL software against non-GPL software (or MS software vs. non-MS software) in ways that are totally reasonable- or they say things like “well that’s not the way Microsoft does it”, “that’s not how GNU works”, etc. They especially want uninteresting things- like command line parsing, logging, etc. to work in a predictable way. This isn’t really served by forcing everyone to implement common infrastructure separately because then users have to learn implementation differences between modules that play common uninteresting roles. These rarely get addressed unless they spoil a sale. Usually they don’t; they just annoy users.

While in college and before working in the real world, I was a big supporter of GPL software. Anything I did I released under that license, and I spurned other less “open” licenses.

Lately, I’ve done nearly no work with GPL software. I might use it as a user, but I no longer use it as a developer. Any open source stuff I write now is MIT licensed. Any open source stuff I hope to use is either BSD or MIT.

When writing a piece of open source software you need to decide what’s more important to you.
If you want as many people using it, contributing to it, etc. Choose BSD, MIT, etc.
If you want to make sure nobody ever profits off of your work and any derivative of your work is forever free, choose GPL.

For me, I get more value by having more people using and contributing to my projects. I don’t care if the occasional person goes off and makes money off of work I’ve done.