BB10: Cascades: Dialog and SystemDialog
I leveraged Cascades Dialogs heavily in my first BlackBerry 10 App. While there is a bit of strange behavior, the Cascades Dialog and SystemDialog controls are servicable and can help provide an exceptional user experience.
My trouble with the controls stemmed around my use of .show() and the Dialog's onFinished event. The behavior was not consistent enough for me to release the app. Solution after the jump.
PFSense v1.2.3: Traffic won't route after reboot
After 852 days of uptime I had to power down my PFSense firewall machine. We had a power outage today that lasted about 30 minutes longer than I had UPS power so I took the opportunity to shut it down cleanly rather than hard-power it off.
I noticed after bringing it back online a few hours later that traffic would not route from my Wireless Network to the WAN Interface. In looking at the NAT and Firewll rules, everything seemed in order. Fortunately I was able to find a solution.
BB10: Cascades: Padding and Alignment
Figuring out how to assign Padding to Cascades controls took a little while. While each control accepts a topPadding / bottomPadding / leftPadding / rightPadding attribute, it doesn't seem to actually do anything.
The way padding works is inconsistent with Alignment where I can just set the alignment on the control and be done with it. Examples after the jump.
BB10: Cascades: Change Font Size for QML Controls
Now that I have my 5 BB10 apps submitted to AppWorld I can take a break and write up a few articles on things I discovered along the way. These will be concise and to the point, but I think documenting them will be worthwhile.
One thing I found out is that changing the font size for BlackBerry 10 Cascades controls involves a little more than just setting the size of text. Example after the jump.
Windows 8 BitLocker and a Black Screen
I'm starting to take mass transit (Commuter rail) into work and want to take some precautions with my laptop (in case it gets lost or stolen). Since my 'travelling' laptop has Windows 8 Pro on it, I decided to enable Bit Locker drive encryption.
While my first experience with BitLocker was a bit less than pleasant, I was able to get it working and ge past a Black Screen issue.
Updated c5Touch Theme for 2013 (PHP syntax fixed)
In case you couldn't tell, I've been working a lot with concrete5 recently. Now that I've got things in a stable condition I'm trying to get the c5Touch theme working. It's not as easy as drag & drop. I had to alter the source files to get it to work on my server which does not allow PHP Short Tags.
This article will help you get the theme updated & installed.
Note: Download link is at the bottom of the page if you want the fixed c5Touch theme.
Fixing the Auto Nav Bar in Concrete5 5.6.0.2
I'm fixing up another site of mine to use concrete5. As I'm migrating from static HTML files, I did a fresh install of concrete 5 with the latest version available (5.6.0.2). Unfortunately, I noticed that the Auto navigation bar was super ugly. Looks like some CSS may have changed. If you see your Nav bar looking like this, you've got the same problem:
BB10 Cascades: ComponentDefinition, Switches and if-else if statements
I just spent the morning troubleshooting a particularly annoying issue in a Cascades application I'm writing. Seems like there are times when QML execution will just 'stop' with no error message logged anywhere I can see. The behavior can be reproduced if you have a ComponentDefinition in an attachedObjects block that you try to instantiate inside a switch statement.
Read on for details.
nginx on Windows
While I normally use Apache as a local web server I thought it would be fun to try out somethig new last week: nginx!
This article explains how to get nginx up and running on Windows 7.
BB10 Cascades: Populate a DropDown from an XML File
A question was asked about how to populate a Cascades DropDown control from an XML File. Since I've populated DropDowns from SQLite data I decided to try my hand at pulling from a different datasource. The question was spawned from a discussion about creating a custom control.
A Cascades sample project is available for download at the bottom of the page.
Note: I don't have a good code highlighting plugin so the inline code samples don't look that great.