The Magnet Blog

nirav May 11th, 2007

Vaishali told about the new Yahoo! Web messenger. And it’s all done in Flex (and PHP)! It looks good, works well, and is a good example of things to come! They have made the panels look much better with rounded corners et al, and have kept the standard Flex look for drop downs and text boxes.

Overall, it works well and looks good! I knew Yahoo! is doing a lot of things with Flex after Yahoo! Maps, but this is a good example of what’s possible.

• good , things , told , messenger , Flex , Flex & Flash , PHP
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nirav April 30th, 2007

I am a bit late to write about this, but Adobe has decided to open source Flex fully by the end of the year. It will be released under MPL. The Flex SDK, the compiler, debugger, flex components and AS3 libraries - all will be open sourced.

This is a major move! A very strategic one I must say. Adobe is certainly trying to kill competition - whether it is OpenLaszlo, or the upcoming Microsoft technologies including WPF/E & Silverlight. Making Flex open source will not only get a lot more visibility for Adobe & Flex, it will also mean a lot more developers who can contribute to Flex, while Adobe focuses on Apollo as a delivery platform for Flex and HTML. I am sensing that Adobe’s got plans to push Apollo real hard. They may even have a couple of very strong products using Flex coming out in the near future. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them is related to entertainment!

But heck, whatever is the business agenda behind this, it’s a great news for developers! We will see more news from Adobe soon!

And for all those who did not notice it yet, the announcement comes right before Mix 07 - the Microsoft conference where they are going to do a lot of talk / demos on Silverlight. (it was also an eyebrow raiser to notice the similarity in name of this conference with Adobe’s MAX!)

• fully , source , open , compiler , debugger , adobe , Flex & Flash , released , Flex
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nirav March 8th, 2007

As promised, here’s the post on IRCTC - India’s largest ecommerce site. I tell you how it does not work, and how we can make it work!

Last Thursday, I decided to go to Ahmedabad for some work. Went on to IRCTC to book a train ticket. I logged in, and entered the date of the travel and selected other options to find out what are the available options. What came up after two minutes’ wait was a blank page. I backed up and tried it again. And it asked me to login again. Did that, filled up the travel plan, and tried again. Blank page again!

Tried with another browser, same blank page. After struggling for an hour, I could finally see the list of available train. New screen, new challenges. Now the availability check option kept giving me blank pages. Or “Not Available” status. If there was no reservation possible in that train, why show me that option in the first place?

My commitment to book the ticket was higher than the tantrums the IRCTC site kept throwing on me. After about three hours of efforts, I could find a train and reservation option combination that was available. Went on for the online payment. Entered the credit card details. I was happy that finally my ticket will be booked. Hit the submit button, the system told me that it’s processing the payment. The next page came up, and said “Communication failure“, the payment was not processed. It said I could go to my “Failed payments” page, and see the transaction.

Too much to expect! I did not see the transaction in failed payment page either. What that means, is I have to now start the whole thing over again, pray god that things go smooth, and be a privileged customer to get a ticket!

This, after charging a fee for online reservations, and being the number one Indian ecommerce website. Sucks!

I know IRCTC has changed the way we book railway tickets. No more waiting in long queues to book tickets, no more paying high charges to the agents and all that. Frankly, IRCTC did deliver on the promises in the initial years. But lately, it’s been just too slow, just too difficult to use, and it simply doesn’t work!

It doesn’t work again and again. Over the last one year, I have booked more than 50 tickets using the system, and have had problems on more than 40 of them. That’s an 80% failure ratio.

Today, if you wanted to get a ticket through IRCTC, you better be prepared to spend 3 hours on it, or do it at 7AM (which is when I succeeded in getting that 20% success).

Frustrated with this experience, we sat down to find a solution. We developed a small rich internet application that will make the entire rail reservation process easier. We expect it will bring up satisfaction levels by 75% or more.

We wrote up a note about this and sent it to IRCTC officials. Contrary to my expectations, they did like the proposal. They agreed that some of the points mentioned, have been on their list too, but they have limitations. Primarily because the backend provider - CRIS - has certain limitations.

I am not willing to buy in these limitations. IRCTC really has a strong value proposition, and it’s a shame if we put brakes on the usage by clunky technology. I say it’s the right time to upgrade IRCTC/CRIS technology. People have been tired of the system for more than a year, and we deserve a better IRCTC!

Checkout the note and the prototype below. Post your comments and ideas here, and we will have IRCTC take notice.

You can download the full report here, and can see the “new and improved” suggested booking process here.

• bad , interaction , user , application , tourism , online , suggestion , comments , better , ticketing , internet , rich , Flex & Flash , Business , RIA , Flex , India , ecommerce , reservation , railway , online , irctc , Technology
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nirav December 19th, 2006

Here’s some Recommended Reading.

Adobe CSS Advisor
A community site that helps identify and resolve CSS rendering problems in various browsers. Since people can contribute and comment to ideas / suggestions, this has a huge potential of being a wealth of resources for CSS.

Setup Flex on Fedora Core 6
In this visual guide, Arul shows how to setup Flex 2 SDK on Fedora. I have been waiting to start working on Flex from a Linux box, and this is well in time. I even like the way he has done the visual guide. Simple steps, highlighted important items and virtually no other text. I am waiting for part 2!

Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking - the Toyota Way
Toyota implements 1 million ideas a year - that’s 3000 per day! Good enough never is! Read how Toyota does it, and see how you can do it!

And about books, read one chapter from “The Google Story”, and one from “Freakonomics” the other day! Both were inspiring. Waiting to complete them! If you get a chance, read them!

• 3000 , arul , adobe , fedora , Flex , toyota , Recommended Reading
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December 15th, 2005

To set focus on a particular cell in Datagrid in Flex use the setFocusedCell(object,boolean) function. The object requires two properties itemIndex and columnIndex. Column index as the name signifies is the index or the column number of the column you want to select. Item index is the index or the row number of the row you want to select.

So your code would look something like this (dg is the instance name of the DataGrid):

var __focusedCell:Object = new Object();
__focusedCell.itemIndex = 1;
__focusedCell.columnIndex = 2;
dg.setFocusedCell(__focusedCell,true);

So the above code would select the cell of 2nd row and the 3rd column. Remember indexes start from 0 and not 1

• Flex
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