Senior Project Week 14

Richard Banister
CSC 4790 Senior Projects
Work Log

Week 14: 1 December - 7 December, 2008

Working on editor. Got edit region working - needed a method to explicitly set region information. Now does this on keyUp event. Maybe not the best place, but we'll see. Other controls won't have a keyUp method (because you'll use a mouse with them) so I may need to revise this idea. Actions in editor; still need to be able to update them somehow, but this is a little complex. Also need to switch controls to be a combo box; but I fear this because of Flex. Disabled actions for interactive objects in editor, added a "test" control to test actions. Improved drawing regions: added region now selected in regions listbox. Needed to hack this in order to get it working, sadly. 4h

Idea for adding/editing/deleting keys and moving them through time. I still don't know of a good way to do this through direct manipulation, though. 0.25h

Got region drawing working real nice. Drawing is now visible to the user, which is a vast improvement. Strange how difficult this was, though. No good way to get the mouse position within a parent canvas from a MouseEvent. My architecture is all messed up now, from all the hackery I've needed to introduce to get things working. A redesign is warranted at some point (but not before the end of the semester). Add region now a pretty much done deal. Fixed quirk in region list not updating on add: because ArrayCollection doesn't detect changes to its source automatically. Needed to refresh manually. Moved Delete button to more sensible location. Contemplated adding key detector for delete, but apps running a browser are so spotty with key detection. That's something I'd really like to look at when I get the chance. Regions now indicate with color when they are selected. 2.5h

Revised action architecture yet again. This time it makes a LOT more sense. Eliminated like 300 lines of code, but the resulting code is like 300 times more elegant. That's a good thing. Actions now editable. All properties of region editable, and update at the right time. Action editing took some mental power, but it works and it's satisfying. Controls are more suitable: Actions in a combo box on region edit panel. Width and Height in NumericSteppers. Doing the comboboxes with Flex bindings made me feel smart. Selecting a region in the list now selects it in the video display. TAB'ing between fields in lists now works. Had to write a stupid amount of code to do this, which made me feel like there must be a better way, but it will not be found tonight. Other various fixes and enhancements. 10h

TODO: Make lists in edit panel use the Flex built-in edit mode stuff. ex. Name appears as a label but you can click it to edit it. That gives a better indication of when something is actually being edited, and may afford some other nice bonuses also.

Immense amount of suffering trying to get a ComboBox deselect working. Flex's problem. Notes in development blog. Needed this to work for the next step. Ended up using an adobe-approved hack. Fixing/tweaking Region edit panel; integrating new action combobox (with hacked item deselect) into Region panel. Code has really become inelegant, thanks to all the fixes I've had to heap on top of this component. Needless to say it's unstable. Designed and implemented action edit panel. Edit actions. It works, surprisingly. Other fixes. 8h

Working on project poster. Preparation of demonstration material (encoding video, translating, editing, etc); Preparation of screen shots; preparation of verbiage. Composition of poster. Don't know what I'm doing. 9h