Posted by Susie Sullivan, Developer, Thru-u.com.

If mouse events do not fire as you expect here are some things to consider.

1. mouseOver/mouseOut vs rollOver/rollOut:If, for example, you create a custom button out of other components, mouseOver and mouseOut can have undesirable results. Often rollOver/rollOut is more suitable. mouseOver/mouseOut will record mouse events for each internal component, whereas rollOver/rollOut will just return events for the main component.

Setting:

mouseChildren = false

will have the same effect when used with mouseOver/mouseOut.

2. Transparencies:
A canvas with no background will fire a rollout/mouseout event when you roll off child components. If the whole canvas is to be the source of the event, the background will need to be present, with alpha of 0 if necessary.

3. Depth of component:If rollover or click events are not being registered especially for parts of a canvas, consider whether a transparent canvas was added after the mouse effect object. To bring any component (in this case canv) to the front, call the following after the UI has been built:

canv.parent.setChildIndex(canv, Canvas(canv.parent).getChildren().length-1)

Posted by Benny Sheerin, web developer. 11.05.2008

We’re always looking several steps ahead when it comes to our development strategies at Thru-U.com.

Below is a link to a chart comparing some of the most popular (and relatively unknown) web frameworks. Please note that the chart is not yet complete so we’ll be updating it as we go.

http://thru-u.com/dev/frameworks/

Updated by: Daniel Griffin, Information Technology Manager – Thru-U.com

The Interaction, Design, ELearning and Speech (IDEAS) group meet monthly to discuss common research areas.

http://ideas.cs.ucc.ie/
The following are my notes from the last group meeting that I had the opportunity to attend (December 2007).
(more…)

By Noel Lynch – Research & Department Manager. May 2008

User interface frameworks have traditionally used a deep class hierarchy to represent user interface elements. This can lead to complex object functionality and relationships make modularisation and refactoring difficult and create bloated code especially for sophisticated and specialised user interface elements. One solution to this is to break large objects into sub objects however this can create an even more convoluted user interface hierarchy. A more simple solution is use an aggregation of components to develop object functionality.

The Component Aggregation Design

The design is relatively straight forward. An object is defined as an aggregation of components. These components may be related to the rendering of the object, the data for the object, the event handling of the object etc. The main principle is to implement components to only handle the functionality they have been designed for. For example a render component should never affect the data of an object, an event handler component should never handle the rendering of an object etc. User interface objects can then be developed by adding components to the object to implement the desired functionality. This can lead to complex objects being built from a number of simple components. However the complexity of this design arises from the fact that for it to work the design pattern must be strictly adhered to. (more…)