Stretching Images in Flex

I needed to do this today and I had to search a lot before I found the right article that explained it so I decided to share it.

If you need to put an image in your application and you want it to stretch/shrink to the size of the Image component, just change the image's 'maintainAspectRatio' property to false.

You can see the article where I learned this along with an explanation here.

Deep Linking in Flex

Two weeks back I was looking for a Flex-based social network when I found Doof and I couldn't help but notice that the address in address bar changes as I switch between the different states of the site.

I asked at #flex and googled a bit and found that it's using something called deep linking to do that, here's the article I read.

After reading that article I thought that it's too hard to do that every time so to day I created a class to make life easier, you can find it on my website.

Have fun :)

Falling in Love with Programming

The other day I was reading Dreaming in Code, it's a book that talks about software development and why we still have bugs after more than half a decade since the invention of computers, when I found a saying by Jaron Lanier that I've been thinking about since I learned about OOP, here's what he said "We start off writing little programs--'Hello World,' or whatever it might be. Everyone has a wonderful experience. They start to love computers. They've done some little thing that's just marvelous. How do you get over that first love? It sets the course for the rest of your career. And yet, as you scale up, everything just degenerates."

It's true, I started programming when I was 8! I started with BASIC, just writing sentences that are executed one after the other from top to bottom. Then I was introduced to VB, I never knew about classes or anything then, I just dragged controls to the form, I set their properties, put code in events and voila! I have a working GUI application, which is probably why people recommend against it for beginners.

Then I moved to C, there were some features that I wasn't aware of (recursion, pointers, etc) but that wasn't hard to get used to.

Then came C++, I borrowed a book from the library and started reading it, I thought the only difference was just in the sentences and the libraries used (iostream, cout, cin, etc) but then I reached chapter 7, it started talking about OOP, it was complicated and I started thinking "Why on earth would I want to learn this?", so I just read it because I didn't want to skip anything, what made it worse is that chapter 9 (chapter 8 is about OOP too) was about programming for windows which is the main reason why I borrowed the book.

It wasn't until recently when I started using Flex and started planning for Deviyo that I realized that OOP is important.

All this time I've been in love with programming, I used to think it's the coolest thing on earth, I'm taking a course in IT, I'm convinced it's what I'll be doing for a living.

The result is? I fell in love with programming, it rejected me and I can't seam to get over it, but I'll keep fighting for it.

Projects, projects, and more projects

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be working on Junia but I'm also working on many other projects, one of them is Game of the Generals, another is a resumes' website that I should help my dad's colleague creating, another potential project is a blog for Be In Oman.

A list of the things I need to do right now are:
1. Finish my assignments.
2. Learn Flex.
3. Finish Game of the Generals.

Things I might need to do/will do later are:
1. Create the blog for Be In Oman.
2. Help creating that resumes' website.