how to know when Map control was first manipulated? - windows-phone-8

I am using the Map control in Windows Phone 8.
I need to implement a page where user can select his location using the map control.
I am trying to know when the app was first manipulated by the user.
Some background info:
I saw that when the control is shown, it automatically centers the world map, and CenterChanged event is raised.
I am not able to understand how ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta and ManipulationCompleted work.
the first time I drag, ManipulationStarted is not called, only ManipulationCompleted.
I could consider the first manipulation by user as being the 2nd time the CenterChanged is fired.
But this is a hack or a guess, I am not happy not having a good understanding how it works.

The Map control intercepts and handles Manipulation events and as such you don't get all of them. Remember, once routed events are marked at e.Handled=true they no longer bubble up.
Depending on your Scenario WP8 exposes the UseOptimizedManipulationRouting property which might prove useful. Setting UseOptimizedManipulationRouting=false causes Map, Pivot and other controls to not swallow events for nested controls.
If that doesn't help, have a look at the following Nokia Wiki article where the author ran into the same problem as you did and used Touch.FrameReported to get out of it # http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Real-time_rotation_of_the_Windows_Phone_8_Map_Control

Related

Strategy for finding a missing mouse event in AS3

Will make this brief, I have a game map with units on it and had finalized a fully interactive minimap where the units on the minimap have event listeners for rollover/rollout (displays a small popup unit data summary) and click (selects the "real" unit on the main game map and scrolls the viewpoint to that location). All done, tested, working.
I then implement an interactive scrollable unit list with more status summary data and dozens of objects with rollover/rollout/click listeners. All tested and working fine.
Then I go back and look at my minimap, and the listeners on the mini-ships aren't working anymore. Things tried:
Debug code to make sure listeners still being added
Debug to watch the one place where I remove those listeners to make sure that ain't happening unexpectedly
Debug to watch all the places I refresh that dialog to make sure every iteration adds the listeners back
Can't see that there is any transparent object on top intercepting
Checked mini-ship parents to make sure I didn't turn off mouseChildren or something like that somewhere
No added stage-level listener, in fact I killed all of them temporarily to test this
What happens when I debug with a breakpoint on the mini-ship listener handler is nada. It's no longer receiving mouse events. So either something I haven't thought of has stopped them from listening or something I don't know of is intercepting.
So what is the strategy here? How can I find the break in the chain?
Well knowing what the actual problem was certainly gives us the advantage of hindsight... that being said, you could have detected the error by adding a trace call inside your function that adds the listener and another one inside your function that removes it. Then you would have seen that it isn't getting re-added. Or you could set break points there.

AS3 GestureEvent vs TouchEvent.TOUCH_BEGIN +TouchEvent.TOUCH_END

Creating an application that requires BOTH gesture(swipe) support as well as simple touch events. I understand that one limiation of the built-in touch support in actionscript is that you must choose either Gesture OR Touch events as input.
So I was wondering if you can easily simulate gesture events using the TouchEvent.TOUCH_BEGIN +TouchEvent.TOUCH_END events? Are they essentially the same thing as using Gesture events?
I believe you'll be able to simulate the gestures appropriately by using the touch events. Each time a finger goes down a temporary id is assigned to it so you can easily tell if this is the first or second finger down. In terms of them being the same, it's not exactly the same since the GestureEvents seem to be all dependent on the mobile OS to report as gestures instead of just as touches so any calculation for deltas (or whatever else) would be handled by the OS already instead of you doing it (with the overhead of the VM). http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS1ca064e08d7aa93023c59dfc1257b16a3d6-7ffd.html
Try making gestureevents with touchevents. There are lots of properties that can easily be converted / combined.

Basic MVC pattern communication

I just started to study the Model View Controller pattern. I now understand the basic usage of MVC, but when i tried to implement MVC in a simple test, i ran into a problem. Ofcoarse I could easily adjust the code so it works, but I wish to learn how to correctly implement the MVC pattern.
The test:
I used actionscript 3 to make a simple program. It consist of a turret, and a mouseclick. The turret is in the middle of the screen. When I click anywhere the turret rotates towards the point where I clicked. Both the mouse and the turret have their own model,view and controller. When I click, the MouseModel changes correctly. But for the actual TurretView to respond, the TurretModel must change its rotation variable and send out an event.
The question is who responds to the MouseModel event?
/------->MouseControl------\
/ \
MouseView ?<---MouseModel
TurretView <------------------TurretModel
TurretControl
I figured its best not to have MouseModel directly influence TurretModel or TurretControl, because this would require them to be an eventListener. Making TurretView listen to the MouseModel, and then tell TurretControl to adjust TurretModel, after wich TurretView can update trough a TurretModel event looks like a lot of extra code for a simple task. Also I'd rather not have MouseControl affect TurretModel, this would break the flexibility of the mouse as input for future classes.
Ow, also in which class do I put the code for the angle calculation?
Thanks in advance
Remember that the goal with MVC is primarily the separation of Model and View, and the Controller can serve as the communicator between the two.
Unless you are planning on storing each action that occurs (clicking, rotating, etc.), there is no real need for an action (in this situation) to send data to the Model. Everything you'd like to do should be easily handled with the Controller. So the flow would be:
Mouse click
Event is fired to trigger a command (in the Controller), passing along the mouse location
The command calculates the turret's rotation
The command tells the View to rotate the turret
This is, of course, my suggestion based off of your example. In truth, depending on the project, the above flow could easily change (for instance, in this situation it seems good to do rotation calculation in the command, but in other situations that may not make as much sense). Look at MVC as a goal - you're trying to separate these elements as much as possible, but there is no 100% "works-every-time" way to do it.
Robotlegs, a popular MVC framework, has a great diagram on their site showing how they tackled MVC:
http://www.robotlegs.org/diagram/
I'm not advertising that you NEED to use Robotlegs (it's good, but there's plenty of other alternatives), but they definitely made a pretty diagram :)
You should have one model, which then has pieces in it that you are currently calling MouseModel and TurretModel. You can either keep those names and breakdowns, or do something else once you have a better "handle" on what needs to be done.
The View that is tracking the mouse clicks should dispatch an event that your Controller component catches to update the TurretModel (at this point, there's probably no need for a MouseModel). Your TurretView can then update itself based on the TurretModel, or the Controller can update the TurretView based on the new value. This will depend on how you have it wired.
Usin a Framework such as Robotlegs can help you figure out all the ins and outs of this process, and I've heard that this book http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021216.do provides a great explanation of MVC, even if you don't choose to use Robotlegs after you read it.

Flash/AS3 "Shutdown" or "close" event?

I am making a Flash puzzle game. When the user loads the game, it needs to ask whether to resume the game from the last state (if it exists). I have a serialization system in place, but I need to ensure that the loaded state is definitely the last state.
One solution is to save the state to a SharedObject every time the state changes (when the player makes a move). However, the game state sometimes includes a countdown, so I'd have to be constantly (or periodically) saving the state in order to retain it. I guess this is acceptable, but it seems kludgey.
Is there any event which is fired when the swf is closed? Or anyone else have another elegant solution to this?
(I'm not using AIR, but solutions requiring AIR are appreciated.)
Edit: Another important point is that I may not have control over the embedding HTML for the game, as it may be syndicated to many sites. So solutions involving javascript aren't ideal.
If your Flash is hosted on a HTML page, you can use the 'Window is closing' event notification to fire a message into your Flash object either using old-skool GetVariable() or new-stylee FlashCall() mechanisms.
Whether you'll actually be able to persist state before your Flash object is destroyed is another question... you could always do the (evil) 'Are you sure you want to close/navigate away from this window?' alert that some sites use.
Handling DOM Events in Flex
HTML 5 events
The on-close event sounds the right solution, but I wonder if you could 'split' your serialisation? i.e. save the full puzzle state on each move, but also have a secondary 'lightweight' state for your countdown (or anything similar) which could be updated each time the countdown changes.
That may be easier than trying to catch the close event and save before the page is destroyed (especially as browsers are not consistent in this area).
this one should help you

Open info window if user hovers longer than x milliseconds

What I'm trying to do is very simple:
open the marker's info window only if the user has hovered on the marker for longer than x millisecond.
I can't find how to do this anywhere. I would appreciate a little code snippet to show me how to set this up!
The jQuery HoverIntent plugin might be able to help you
http://cherne.net/brian/resources/jquery.hoverIntent.html
hoverIntent is a plug-in that attempts to determine the user's intent... like a crystal ball, only with mouse movement! It works like (and was derived from) jQuery's built-in hover. However, instead of immediately calling the onMouseOver function, it waits until the user's mouse slows down enough before making the call.
Actually I finally found the solution to it on the Google Maps Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api/browse_thread/thread/73cf193d42a0bbfe/fa531a39b353d198?lnk=gst&q=open+hover#fa531a39b353d198
Best of luck to all the late night coders out there :)