Monthly Archives: May 2007

Destruction, Resurrection, and a New Design

Posted on by
Reply

At times I get the feeling that life would be simpler if I were to just totally remove all references of myself from the internet. This is, of course, pointless… once you have as much material out there as I do over the number of years I’ve been active within these “tubes”, it’s really impossible to wipe every trace of yourself from existence. But this does not mean that I do not long for it at times. I sometimes get in a real mood and want to “remove myself” for lack of a better term. Yesterday I totally wiped this website from my servers; files, database, everything. I just felt so compelled to do this and I really don’t have any idea why.

So this evening I’ve rebuilt everything (and upgraded to WordPress 2.2 to boot) along with the beginnings of a new design. Really a fresh look was probably all that was needed. I do wonder whether others in my profession have the same periodic compulsion for digital annihilation that I experience…

Flash CS3 ActionScript Editor Improvements

Posted on by
4

Flash CS3 has some long-awaited improvements in the integrated ActionScript editor. These are things that really used to drive me nuts and it’s great to see that Adobe has sought to make their tool nicer for developers to use. With increased pressure from external editors like SE|PY and FlashDevelop, I had hoped for more- but this is a good start with some very simple fixes.

You can see in the image above that along the left side of the editor there are now two columns. The right column contains line numbers and the thinner, left column is set aside for breakpoints. Clicking a line number will now highlight that line of code (no more CTRL+CLICK to select lines!) and clicking on the other column will set and remove breakpoints. Ever since they changed the click behavior in MX2004(?) I’ve learned to do a CTRL+CLICK but this is a lot more elegant.

One feature not visible in the image: when the “Auto format” button is pressed to tidy up the code, it will no longer remove empty lines. Thanks, Adobe! I often separate certain code blocks with empty lines and if I were to auto-format previous to CS3, it would result in my code getting all crammed together.

Also of note are some additions to the toolbar. these include code collapse and expansion options, block-level commenting and uncommenting, and the ability to set the “Target” FLA to your class files. All nice additions. I was really hoping to see a nice class viewer in this release but I can live without it (obviously). There are a lot of small improvements like this that I’m finding throughout the application and I’m really very pleased overall.

DUVAGAII in ‘The Clarion’

Posted on by
Reply

There is an article in the ‘Featured’ section of the University of Denver student newspaper ‘The Clarion’ this week. The article is entitled “Program improves media, audio in classrooms” and goes into a lot more detail than previous articles in other publications. A lot of emphasis is placed on fair use and student access to copyrighted materials which is a big part of the project. Metadata associated with each media object is a hugely important feature and this gets some nice treatment as well. I could pick apart a lot of things stated here as not-so-accurate… but for a student newspaper it really isn’t such a bad write-up.

ApolloRanch: Boulder – The Day After

Posted on by
Reply


It was raining the entire evening so I left for Boulder fairly early. I actually arrived at the planetarium (the entire conference was inside a planetarium!) 20 minutes early and they hadn’t even begun setting up the registration tables. So I just hung back and had a look at all the materials posted along the walls. Lots of Planetarium articles, prints, and so forth. Not-so-interesting… but it passed the time.

When I did check in, I was given an Apollo-branded shirt and goodie bag. The goodie bag contained a copy of Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide, sticker, Apollo CD, and conference schedule. the CD contains everything that is currently available on Labs including SDKs, Flex Builder, Apollo extensions, sample applications, and goodies.

After check-in, I hung around in the main area and had a look at more planetarium displays. There is a really neat projection system which displays mapped images upon a sphere. These range from images of the moon to various earth mappings such as ocean currents and weather patterns. Very interesting to watch but it gets a little old after an hour… which was about the total time I had to stare at the thing before the keynote began. No fault of the presenters- I was just way too early.

The keynote was presented by Mike Chambers who presented a nice overview of Apollo for us. The following presentations were pretty informative as a lot of the weird details I was unsure of were taken up. One example would be that when defining an Apollo app- you don’t need to necessarily specify all 4 icon sizes- Apollo SDK does a pretty good job of creating derivatives based on your 128×128 icon so that’s all you really need. Nice to know. Also the advantages of synchronous vs. asynchronous file handling was very informative.

I stayed for most of the presentations but decided to leave at around 10:00 for a number of reasons:

  • It was way past my bedtime anyway (now that I have a baby in the house)
  • We normally go to mass pretty early on Sunday and with a baby… it takes some time to get ready.
  • I’ve been sick since the VRA conference in March. I’ll blame my daughter for this one too :)
  • Lastly, I was just tired and ready to get home. Having been gone since 4:00- that’s a lot of time to spend away on a Saturday evening.

All in all- a really nice event. I’m still a big supporter of Apollo and am looking forward to the public beta this summer.

Flash Remoting (AS2) in Flash CS3

Posted on by
7

I’m surprised that while any sort of remote connection classes you could want are included in the core packages of ActionScript 3.0, if you are working with ActionScript 2.0 within Flash CS3, the classes you need are still not included under a default install. I’ve lamented this fact for years as it has held true each time Macromedia/Adobe releases a new version of the IDE. There may be an excellent reason for this but I do not know what it could be.

Flash CS3 does not include the NetConnection Debugger either. I’ve found that the simplest thing to do is to use the SWC files from Flash 8 alongside the NetConnectionDebugger.swf which is launched separately. It works quite well so I’ve packaged both an FLA with the Remoting SWC components along with the NetConnectionDebugger.swf which can all be used to get around the fact that none this vital stuff is shipped along with the new authoring environment.

Remoting Components

You can also download the unpackaged classes from here.