I have been saving away to get a new 3G iphone, but an article struck me with its possibilities which is making me consider waiting a few months. Not to mention that New Zealands iPhone plans are the MOST expensive in the world.

I know its merely speculation but Macrumors.com has a post about upcoming releases from Apple that made me think. An apple PDA? Well it would make sense as they made such a hoopla over MS Exchange support and how business people were complaining about the first gen iPhone. Also by then they should have some serious data apps built on the platform that could enable PDA type people to do PDA type things.  Also seeing the huge response and profits Apple has been seeing with the iPhone it would make sense to branch this off and try a PDA again, seeing they almost invented the market with the Newton.

Why would I want a PDA? Well I’m more interested in the apps I can build on the Iphone and if a PDA could be expected to be that bit more grunty (read – powerful) then Im all for it, plus I find it hard to leave the laptop, so a PDA might be my answer. So waiting a few month if nothing else might see public pressure on the NZ iPhone plans make prices drop, or it means I just get an iPhone later rather than sooner. *sigh* off to the emulator under XCode I go.

Well for the past few months I have been contracting out on an interesting and challenging Flex application that is a part of a bigger site, projectmanager.com (not live yet). I was asked to build a Gantt Chart/Datagrid of the site allowing the viewing and editing of tasks in a project very similar to Microsoft’s Project. Infact one of the biggest challenges I faced was overriding Flex’s default behaviors to match MS Projects (especially key navigation for the data entry types).

This is why my blog has seen less posts than usual, and the New Zealand Flex User group meetings have been delayed a bit, and my girlfriend has been……..

Another Issue which has been raised on other blogs was the performance of the advanced data grid. And as you can see I have two instances to worry about (with linked selection, scrolling etc) Now this is by no means a simple application, but I found the performance barriers and had to work ways around them which led to the paging of the data. And I can tell you paging a Hierarchical collection (think a tree of tasks) is no easy feat. I look forward to the reports that <vector>’s in Flash player 10’s VM have a huge increase on performance and I may be pushing for the new player to be considered.

The control itself is tied into a much larger .NET website/application using WebOrbs .Net remoting, which bar a few hassles with earlier versions has been hugely successful, allowing me to work alongside the developers and deal with objects and structures in a common way and forgetting about the ushal serialization hassles or the prospect of having to deal with xml. Being RTMP and amf the comunications with the server are tiny in size and very fast to deal with once in the Flex application itself.

All of that out of the way it has some really cool features:

Picking the columns to display, all held in settings

Custom right click menus for indenting, copying pasting tasks etc

The Gantt Chart can have multiple views showing data for comparison ie the planned data verses the Actual data and the baseline (snapshot at a point of time) data.

The graph itself renders linked tasks, milestones and has drag linking

And as you would expect the tasks in the graph are all slider to adjust the timeframes and percent complete, and these all take into account resources holidays and Company working days (project Calendars) for calculations

You can also pull the separators around that separate the Two data views and show just the Gantt Chart or the Data grid, if your just after data entry.

And theres a “Task Information” panel with tabs for manipulating the data that corresponds to tasks.

All very cool Stay tuned for Beta releases soon

Update: Check out http://blog.projectmanager.com/ for more up to date news

I promised to post the files from my Air Camp NZ presentation so here they are.

The session was “An introduction to making Air applications in Flex” so we covered the basics of flex and made a rather minimalistic video player. The purpose of which was more to show how/what things had to be done in a flex app to make it an AIR app.

The video player first comes out at a Quicktime player using standard OSX chrome

Then with the flip of a css file and uncommenting of the app.xml file we turned it into an uber simple custom chrome sample player, which is actually cross platform

Note: you will need to download a video file to play in the video player (i didnt want to include it in the source due to file space on my server) There are comments in the mxml with a URL to an HD version location of Wall-e

Enjoy and ping me with any questions you may have.

SOURCE