Flex is incredibly good at a lot of things, particularly data dashboards. I’ve had a number of business executives that have been stuck with Excel for years start drooling right in front of me after showing them some of the dashboards I’ve worked on. As Flex continues to evolve as a UI development tool for complex data dashboards, and as our clients continue to see it’s powerful capabilities, the logical progression is that Flex developers are now receiving requirements that involve reporting capabilities… and reporting capabilities means – you guessed it – PRINTING (gasps). The fact of the matter is, the line between data dashboards and reporting has become blurry at best.

Let’s take a moment to put this into perspective. There are so many areas of a business where employees of a company must be able to make sense of large amounts of data and form logical conclusions based on how that data is presented so that they can make important decisions.  Furthermore, as I stated earlier, Flex is particularly good at providing developers with the tools that are necessary to fulfill these needs. When you provide business professionals with a means of making decisions based on conclusive evidence in the form of data representation, it only makes sense that they must be able to print that data representation to show to their constituencies to support their argument for the decision that they made, which was based on the reports they generated.

Ok, so I’ve established the importance of being able to print from Flex, so let’s look at the current options for a business professional who is about to make a presentation to an important executive at his company. First, there is the ghetto way to do it: he could do a simple screenshot of the Flex data dashboard using shift-cmd-4 on Mac or Shift-”Print Screen” (I think that’s what it is) on PC and try to import the resulting image into his presentation tool. The problem here is that the result isn’t going to look very good when it’s printed because of the low resolution.

Developers have the option of implementing a third-party library to try and solve their print requirements. I did a lot of research on this, and found that AlivePDF is currently the best bet. However, there is still much work to be done; far more than Thibault Imbert could, the creator of AlivePDF, could handle alone. The library has been in development for four years and it’s capabilities are impressive in comparison to the pathetic print capabilities that are built into the Flex framework. It handles the printing of charting components wonderfully. However, it’s ability to handle the printing of lengthy datagrids is pretty terrible. Now, I don’t want to discredit the work of Thibault Imbert in any way. If it weren’t for him, I would have never made it as far as I have on my current requirement in such a short period of time. So believe me when I say that I have a lot of respect for Thibault (apparently Adobe felt the same way, because they made him Product Manager for the Flash Player, which is pretty cool!).

I have to also consider the fact that support for grid-printing has only really been implemented in the last year based on the release notes. The problem is that it is easy to think that grid printing would be pretty simple, but there are a lot of factors that play a role. For example, wrapping text in a cell increases the height of that row, resulting in part of the bottom row being sliced off on that page. Then, when attempting to truncate the text as a solution, the text for all of the rows became misaligned, with text from one row falling on top of the text of another. So my next endeavor is to figure that one out.

The bottom line here is that print really needs to get the attention it deserves now so we have it for the next major release of Flex, and I will certainly be voicing this concern to our friends at Adobe as a result of a particularly painful couple of months working on this.

http://www.battlespaceonline.org/

To quote my friend Omar in NY:

“…a dear friend of mine set up this exhibit in
NY. He lives in the apartment downstairs and called me
to the basement to show me the rough edit before he
took it to the gallery. And so in my own rush to pack
and get going on my own trip the next day, I was the
first person to see these images together, for
whatever that is worth.

It brought tears to my eyes (the Luke Wolagewiecz
picture in particular) Also the picture of the boy
with the blood on his face and staring straight in to
the lens of the camera struck me as an omen too of
foreboding of the real upshot of the ‘winning the
hearts of minds’ that we hear about. That is what is
coming back at us. And coming back at us with a
vengeance.

The whole project was born out of his and other conflict
photographers frustrations that newspapers and
magazines would not print the photographs in the
exhibit or worse yet recaption the images to to other
ends. I kid you not.”

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Adobe InDesign CS3 Tip – Why Would You Want to Allow Pages to Shuffle?

One of the choices under the Pages panel Options menu that is checked by default is “Allow Pages to Shuffle.” Years ago, when I first started using InDesign, my first reaction to this choice was, “What is shuffling and why would I want my pages to do it?” As I began to play with the feature, I quickly realized what this interesting choice of words was all about. If pages are allowed to shuffle and a single page is added before a particular spread, all pages “shuffle” forward in the rest of the document so that the even numbered pages become odd numbered pages to the right, and the odd numbered pages move down to become the even numbered left-hand side of the next spread. So “shuffling” maintains order in spread pagination. But what happens if this default is unchecked? You can create spreads with more than two pages (a gatefold spread in a magazine for example). So, if you need to make your spreads wider than two pages, simply “unshuffle” your document’s pages.

Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Adobe® Certified Training Provider.

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Also, there is now a demo of Pronto! at Communigate‘s web site. There is also a Beta download at O2 Apps but unfortunately not only does it not work with the latest release of AIR, but Communigate’s official stance is there will not be another Beta release – the next release will be the ‘fully baked’ version. For those of you who missed it, Kevin Lynch, Chief Software architect for Adobe did a demo where he dragged financial data from another AIR application into an email message he was composing in Pronto! The CEO of XIF also did a demo of Pronto! on Day 3 of MAX last year, alongside another demo by the guys at Cynergy. I think there were a total of three such demos that day, so two of them being from companies in D.C. is a pretty cool market indicator, I think. Then again, I’m biased as this is my area I suppose. Anyway, Pronto! was the first Flex application I ever worked on; we started on it when Flex 2 was still in the first alpha release…