The Danosphere.

Been trying to post more frequently, so here’s some more awesome for your day! Sweet video from vimeo, which is an homage to UX Designers. I spend all day working as a UX Designer/Developer so I just had to post this.

Recently while piddling around in the day-to-day tasks I handle here at DecisionLens I was deep within the List class when I came across something I had never seen before – a SandboxMouseEvent [gasp]. Upon seeing all the wonderous events I could listen to I thought- this is amazing! I can listen for all kinds of stuff happening outside of my sandboxed flash window! So I whipped together a little demo to see what this magical new event could do… [Click Here for Source]:

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As you can see, not performing as advertised! It seems the only even it captures is MouseUpSomwhere, and that fires when you roll out of the window? Very weird. I thought maybe it was an issue with being trapped in a browser window, so I threw the same code into an AIR application, and same thing- only event fired was MouseUpSomewhere. I don’t know if this is a bug (seems to be since mouseUp isn’t really occuring, its more of a RollOverSomewhere), or I’m just misunderstanding the functionality of this event, but in either case, it was certainly a letdown to see I was still pretty much trapped within my tiny SWF prison.

In a recent project of mine I had the need for a vertical resize cursor. Flex has a very nice vertical resize cursor already packaged along with the VDividedBox. There is a similar horizontal resize cursor for the HDividedBox. After some googling and a little sample project, I found out how to access the cursor assets of these components for independent use without an H or V DividedBox. Simply use the embed from below along with a CursorManager.setCursor() call and you’ve got pretty native horizontal and vertical resize cursors!

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Now it’s easier than ever to export and backup your Facebook photo albums with my latest app, FBPhotoExport. FBPhotoExport is incredibly easy to use and only costs $1.99 for lifetime unlimited use (sorry, it takes time to build these apps!). The app lets you view and explore your Facebook photo albums. You can download individual photos to your desktop, or pick and choose your images and download them to the folder of your choosing. The exported photos are automagically organized into folders named after the album which they belong in, making it easier than ever to backup your Facebook photo collections on your home computer.

FBPhotoExport is great for all kinds of people- If you have a new pc or mac and want to copy all your photos to your machine. If you lost your original photos and want to get the copies from Facebook. If you want to move all your photos to a different/better photo hosting service. If you just want to download the photos to share them with other people who aren’t on Facebook, the uses go on and on. Check it out and download it today!

Just wanted to stop by and let everyone who’s reading know that I have updated FacebookExport with some changes that should fix issues users in a previous post had brought up. For one reason or another some people could only export the first (preselected) item. I changed up how I passed the options between pages and it will *hopefully* fix the problem.

If you were one of the people who was experiencing problems exporting all of the data points please give it another try. If you could drop me a comment and let me know if the problem is resolved it would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Also, I’m almost done with the newest piece of the FacebookExport toolkit- the Facebook Photo Exporter. Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter so you can download it as soon as its posted.

You can now export your Facebook inbox, outbox, events, and status history all through FBE. I was going to just set it aside my for a while after releasing it just a few days ago but after receiving feedback from several people with requests for more data points in the export, I couldn’t resist but to roll up my sleeves and improve the tool. In addition to the new data points you can also customize the export so it only includes the information you want (a la carte if you will).

The customizable export was a nice addition, and certainly makes the tool more user friendly, but it was actually something I was forced to add just because the export was becoming so large that it was taking forever to test exporting ALL the data points EVERY time. So, a small developer aid proves to be a boon for the end user too! Anyway check it out, and if you’re one of those people using the tool to export and archive your data to your harddrive, make sure to update your FBE file with the new data points (the export format has changed slightly as well). Enjoy!