Tuesday, September 18, 2007

NotesFX 0.2 - Stable, but still not perfect

Since intensive string concatenation with JS crashes the JS-engine in Notes, I moved the concatenations to the formula-engine in Notes, which is more or less rock solid.






>> Download Demo Application

To do this, I use a "proxy" (between JS and Formula) field per effect, where I set x and y values with JavaScript. I then use document.forms.nameOfButton.click() to click a hidden formula-button which makes the string needed to inflate the layer/sets fieldvalue.

The problem now, is that the mouse pointer "blinks" (between hourglass and regular pointer) when the button(s) are clicked with JS. *d'oh!*

In the flash, you can't see the mouse pointer blinking as much as it does in the app.

I'll do my best to find a perfect solution, but I'm not sure the right idea will pop up. Suggestions are appreciated :)

If you're downloading/running the demoapp:
The new demo-form is called DemoAnimation_formula.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Dontpanic-man,

A great job you did there, bringing this stuff to Notes. I wonder how you managed to position the layer with JavaScript in the Notesclient. Can you tell me what happens in essence? I did take a look at your code, but the OO is blinding me from what's really going on :-).

Greetings,
Martin Vereecken
http://www.bizzybee.be

Tommy Valand said...

It's all magic.. ;)

Seriously.. I'm using nested layers, and fields without borders to achieve the effect.

I fill the fields with whitespace (spaces and line-breaks). This "inflates" the layer containing the fields.

If I remember correctly, the moving layer is stuck to the bottom right of a layer that's being inflated.

Unknown said...

Tommy,

It's brilliant! Typically a case of "impossible in Notes" and a very creative way to make it happen... Thanks!