Tech Blog

The Flash Player on OS X currently lacks support for mousewheel events. This means that users cannot use their mousewheel on OS X, in the Floorplanner we use the mousewheel to easily zoom in to your Floorplan. After reading this post from pixelbreaker, I was inspired to implement this in the Floorplanner which was, in fact, very easy. I decided to only use the JavaScript class of pixelbreaker, which sends the mousewheel events to the Flash Player (on the Mac). In the Floorplanner ActionScript this event is handled by our own internal Event management system, which sends the Event to the reponsible part of the code. So thumbs up for pixelbreaker, for making this really easy to implement!

I’m currently working on a JSON export from the Floorplanner and I’m glad I found the excelent JSON Validator made by arc90 lab. They made the debugging process a lot easier. Thanks guys!

Today, I have added a server switch to Floorplanner.com. Now, it will load the floorplanner elements from the server that is nearest to you, which can yield a significant improvement in the initial loading time of your floorplans.

To determine your location, your IP address is matched against a table of locations. This worked fine in our development version, but it didn’t work at all on the production server. After some searching, I found that our server configuration was causing this. We use Apache as our web server, which uses mod_proxy to send the request to our Mongrel cluster. This intermediary step caused the IP address that Rails would receive to always be the IP address of the Apache server: 127.0.0.1. Therefore, the location matching did not work.

However, I found that mod_proxy adds an additional header to the request with the original IP address: HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR. This header can be used for our purpose. Now, I use the following function to determine the correct IP address:

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def determine_ip(request)
  # use HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR if available
  # otherwise fall back to default header
  request.env["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] || request.remote_addr
end

On a related note: to match an IP address against ranges of IP addresses in our location table, it must be converted from a string (“1.2.3.4″) to a number (16909060). I use the following oneliner, which uses some nice functional programming tricks and an application of bit-shifting:

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def numeric_ip(ip_str)
  ip_str.split('.').inject(0) { |ip_num, part|
            ( ip_num << 8 ) + part.to_i }
end

Yes, I am really proud if this function!

UPDATE: I just found out that request.remote_ip does the same as my determine_ip-function. Unfortunately, it only works in Rails 2.0.

Last week we wanted to see if we could speed up the loading of the Floorplanner Flash app. The Flash app (AS2) consists of 1 main app that loads several swf forms (the windows you see, like the library). The library itself holds a lot of furniture elements, which are separate swf files that are loaded one by one.

When a user creates a floor plan and adds furniture to it, it’s not strange that the design holds more than 50 furniture elements. Though all elements are small swf files, it takes a lot of time to handle all resource requests on our server. We thought it would be nice if we didn’t have to load all the elements one by one, but that we could bundle them into one big swf file. Then the generated bundle-swf is loaded into the flash app and the furniture elements are loaded from the bundle-swf.

We looked at Swfmill and Ming, and we did manage to create a setup that could dynamically bundle the furniture elements into one big swf. The problem was that it didn’t work for all our furniture elements. Almost 10% failed.

In the Flash app we also experienced some unexpected issues. You can only add mc’s (furniture elements) from the library to the stage by using attachMovie(). That means that all elements must have the same parent mc (AS2). So you can only use one bundle-swf, because if you load another, your attached mc’s will be removed.

With all the issues we encountered we decided to keep things as they are right now, and tackle this issue when we’re upgrading to AS3.

Our Floorplanner is gaining momentum! Since the release last April more than 200.000 users have registered and every day more and more new users are signing up.

And consumers are not the only ones interested. A lot of companies have found their way to us with requests for custom work. Various internet portals, broadcasting firms and real estate agents are just a few of the interested parties. They all are looking for a custom version of the Floorplanner with things like custom furniture libraries, a different look & feel or advertising opportunities.

To keep up with the demand, and to create all the other stuff we can think of, we want to expand our development team. So if you are a Flash guru, a PHP or Ruby on Rails super star and you want to work at a highly innovative and creative internet startup in Rotterdam, the Netherlands drop me a line!

For the project V-Factor we integrated a couple of Floorplanner widgets into their site. We used iframes to embed the widgets into the pages. You can click on the link next to the widget to get a better view of the floor plan. A new window with a full screen Floorplanner is opened.

On Firefox and Safari everything runned like a charm, but when we tested it on Internet Explorer it sometimes crashed. And it crashed hard, IE shuts down completly (after it alerts that Flash9d.ocx is to blame). Stange that the Flash Player can crash IE…

Anyway, we still havn’t figured out the exact cause. We have two theories. The first is that IE doesn’t like embeded Flash content via an iframe in multiple windows. The other theory is that IE doesn’t like different ways of embedding Flash content in multiple windows. The page contains more Flash content then our widgets. It has a banner and some animated buttons. We use SWFObject but the banner and the buttons are using the old skool object-tag.

Phew… we kind of solved the problem by opening the full screen floor plan in the same window as the widgets. That way we don’t have multiple windows open with flash content. But it’s not a real solution of course.

To be continued…

Last week I wanted to make a small chart to display the number of users that signed up at Floorplanner per month. This is easily done by using query with a GROUP BY statement:

SELECT MONTH(created_on), COUNT(*)
  FROM users
  GROUP BY MONTH(created_on)

It returns a result with rows like this: [month number,number of accounts that month]. Since we have different kind of users (free and a couple of paid accounts) I thought it would be nice to put them in the equation too. After a while I came up with this query (actually not very different from the first one):

SELECT MONTH(created_on), account_type_id, COUNT(*)
  FROM users
  GROUP BY MONTH(created_on), account_type_id

Now it returns a result with rows like this: [month number, account type id, number of accounts that month for this type]. With some filtering I made it into a nice chart but I have the feeling that there is an easier solution.

Suggestions anyone?

Today I had (actually I still have) an issue with subdomains, SWF’s and Javascript. For the Floorplanner we communicate with our Flash application via Javascript (using ExternalInterface). On www.floorplanner.com everything works fine, but when I tried to use a subdomain (like whatever.floorplanner.com) an error appeared. First I thought it was a Javascript error, but it turned out to be the Flash Security Sandbox blocking the communication.

To solve this I added the following line to the Flash app:

System.security.allowDomain('http://whatever.floorplanner.com/');

It did the trick, but the thing is that every (paying) user can create and use its own subdomain, so i needed something like this:

System.security.allowDomain('http://*.floorplanner.com/');

That didn’t work. After trying all kinds of different things like crossdomain.xml, I settled with

System.security.allowDomain('*');

This feels like a really nasty hack, but it’s all I can come up with. There has to be a better way…

Get your daily dose of fresh floorplanners at www.floorplanner.com/fresh
This pages displays a list of the 10 last saved design of public floorplanners. Some things still have to be tuned but already it gives a good idea of the type of floorplans people are creating. More to come….