Off and on, I’ve been working making the Flex DragManager work in AIR. I’ve been vocal in trying to get SDK-13983 fixed. This feature is really useful because you have no control over the DragProxy’s alpha value in AIR because it’s controlled by the operating system. If all operating systems defaulted to 0.5 alpha, all would be well, but OSX thinks that the drag proxy should be completely opaque and Windows thinks it should be 0.5.

The MonkeyPatch to fix this issue was posted to my Google code repository. Its only problem was that the mouse cursor for drag feedback disappeared when you were using a child window. I’ve added one small patch to UIComponent which fixes this issue. Grab the latest code if this is of interest to you. Let me know here if you have trouble with it.

http://code.google.com/p/andrewwestberg/

I’ve worked out the majority of the kinks with Swift GPS, so I’m calling it in Alpha right now.  To give you a bit more information about the vision for this product, it will be a GPS track data logging device.  You stick a USB thumb drive in it, and it will track the movement of your car, wife’s car, dog, RC aircraft, whatever you want to attach it to.  The target market will be developers or GPS hobbyists, or geocachers who want a real challenge.  It outputs a GPX data file which is nothing more than a special XML file format for GPS data.  This should be useful for developers since it’s an open standard.

Click the image above for a screencast of my magnificently exciting trip to the bank. (Warning, screen recordings of Google Earth are HUGE).

I still have a few features to add such as adding a little screen so geocachers and others can view the raw lat/lon data in real-time.  I ordered a book from amazon that should help me with writing the microcontroller code necessary for that piece.

This will probably be my last GPS post for quite awhile.  I plan on going back to your regularly scheduled “Flex Junk” in the near future.

This blog’s comment section has been pretty quiet for some time.  Any comments on this project would be appreciated.  Even if it’s just to say, “Go back to posting on Flex topics dude!”

Well, my GPS device is coming along.  I’m getting my first batch of data off the board that is close to usable. I walked it to the end of my block and back at night with all the lights blinking and flashing on the board.  The neighbors probably think I’m a terrorist building a bomb or something.  Looks like I need to add a bit of code to ignore points whose accuracy is in question.  The start of my walk was all over the place (in my neighbors living room if you believe the device), but by the end, it seemed to hone in and nail down my position pretty well.

I’m targeting this device to output GPX data which should be an easily readable XML format for Flex/AIR developers to use.  Right now, the screenshot you’re viewing is from Google Earth which also accepts GPX data files.