I’ve recently finished a project. It’s a website for a wedding gown boutique. The main function of the website is to show their products, just like a of photo gallery. There are loads of photos and I tracked every photo’s page view. While I was happily looking through the numbers in Google analytics I realise the page view duration is a very good indication of how good or popular the product is. People will stare at a photo longer if they like it and if they don’t like it they’ll quickly click at the next button. I feel this is very useful information to engage the customers’ taste.

UPDATE: as @ickydime mentioned, the tracking data is not 100% accurate. There are cases that users leave the window open, go to do something else and come back to their desks again, recording a very long page view duration. And there are also users accidentally closed the page, clicked away or some other stuff, which record very short page view duration. But all these inaccuracy will be minimised when more data is collected, the errors will be averaged with a big base. Based on the tracking data, no exact figure can be given, such as 53.4% users like product A. But the data can definitely tell that a product with average 30 seconds page view duration is more popular than a product with average 5 seconds page view duration.

I was trying to read a specific part of a file in AIR. I thought readBytes function in FileStream can serve the purpose but I was wrong.

public function readBytes(bytes:ByteArray, offset:uint = 0, length:uint = 0):void

Reads the number of data bytes, specified by the length parameter, from the file stream, byte stream, or byte array. The bytes are read into the ByteArray objected specified by the bytes parameter, starting at the position specified by offset.

The offset parameter is defined as the offset position in bytes. It defines where to store the data in bytes not where FileStream starts to read. The correct way is to move the FileStream.position and specify the length fo data needed.

Defining i:uint is not better than i:int since both of them take the same amount of memory. Besides, it’s risky to define i:unit because if i is accidentally assigned to a negative value it becomes a big positive int.

Excel files can be saved as XMLs. In ActionScript 2, reading Excel generated XML (EGX) files is really tedious and unreliable because EGX files’ data hierarchy is not fixed and they have lots of formatting/styling information. To ensure not missing any data, it requires traversing every single node. It’s very inefficient. With AS3, its XPath like approach allows to find nodes located anywhere in the document by using the “..” notation which is “//” in XPath (ActionScript 3 changed all the “/” into “.” which makes more sense for object oriented programmers”. But that’s not all for reading EGX files. (more…)

I think many programmers have encountered such situation: you need to modify some large amount data in plain text into a useful format, things like creating 1000 links in HTML based on 1000 web addresses, or generating some test data running in sequence user1, user2, user3 etc. This small Flash can do it for you. (more…)

Uploading file from Flash to PHP through FileReference is fairly simple.

move_uploaded_file($_FILES['Filedata']['tmp_name'], $_FILES['Filedata']['name']);

You can easily find it in any Flash upload file related tutorials or posts. But I spend almost one hour searching for a solution of how to upload file from Flash to ASP.NET.

dim myFile as HttpPostedFile=Request.Files(0)
myFile.SaveAs(Server.MapPath(myFile.FileName))

That’s it. Seems fairly simple. It’s in VB and the C# version you can get from The Algorithmist

It looks like something like this:

foreach(string fileKey in _context.Request.Files)
{
HttpPostedFile file = _context.Request.Files[fileKey];
file.SaveAs(Path.Combine(uploadDir, file.FileName));
}

Web Developer Tool Bar : I find the resize function is very useful.

Tamper Data: If a Flash website involves loading external data or communicating with backend scripts, this is a tool helps to see what Flash is doing.

Flash Tracer: Displays Flash trace function results in FireFox. The setup procedure is in this blog entry.

Before starting on the design a Flash website, first thing first, the dimension of the file must be decided. Even full browser flash (FBF) sites can’t run away from this. I’ve seen sites that have overlapping text due to wrong dimensions, such as this new FWA site. (more…)