FlashApe

I’m just starting to crack into the world of design patterns, and I’m curious as to how many people actually use them (with actionscript). Also, after doing some research I feel a little overwhelmed, because I’ve run across many different dp’s and no real info on where and when to use a particular pattern. The one main one that seems to be the standard when developing with flash is the MVC (or MVP), and I can pretty much grasp the concept behind that one — the controller is like the middle man between the model and the view. When it comes to the other ones though, i seem to find a lot of “heres how to implement the [insert name here] design pattern”, then some code and thats about it. Can anyone offer up some really good info on using design patterns? Web sites or books will work…

awww yeah….just bought my copy of Essential Actionscript 2.0. I ordered it through moock.org’s link to give some support, it’s the very least I could do after all he’s done for me.

O’Reilly has put together a History of Programming languages poster. Pretty interesting to check out the timeline and lifespan of various languages.

ok, my last post on comemnting your code caused a bit of a reaction (which is a good thing — always glad to get other people’s points of view). But, just to show what I have been dealing with, heres a small sample:

(whoops - i broke my blog posting this code — see the extended entry).

and this is just one function of many scattered across various timelines. Now, this defintely goes along with some of the other comments in teh last post about meaningful variable names and all that…but i think a comment here and there in this one wouldnt have hurt.

bc[as]. function stateselected(thestate) {
var sf;
var ds;
var xs;
var ys;
if (not swos) {
trace(”state selected =”+thestate);
curstate = thestate;
as.ss2.sh.statewinners.removeAll();
bs.ss2.sh.biowinners.removeAll();
//More Info”, datalist[i][0]);
bs.ss2.sh.biowinners.addItem(datalist[i][10][1]+”, “+datalist[i][9][0]);
}
}
}
}
}
}

Seriously, if you are writing code, do yourself and anyone else who may need to look at your code in the future a favor and comment it out. In the past two weeks I have worked on four different flash sites that were already completed and I had to go in and make updates to. Every single one, the code was scattered across the entire fla, and completely uncommented. It took me hours just figure out the logic flow for something that should have been really simple. Leaving notes for yourslef or someone else who has to deal with the code just makes life that much easier.

(And stop parsing loaded xml into arrays. learn how to use xml…its really easy.)

Bonus: How to Write Unmaintainable Code

people search people search is peekyou.com

I was just running into this situation yesterday (ok, almost every day) that I found myself wishing I could trace output without having to open test the swf within flash…now I can, with SOS

JesterXL has just posted a pretty sweet tutorial for building AS2 components using the MX04 framework.

This is great…Beware the dive-bombing buzzard!

I got back from my vegas trip to find out that I have been picked up by fullasagoog. Thanks!

Someone also pointed out my style sheet isnt working in firefox, I’ll check it out and see whats up.

macromedia recently released updated Flash Remoting components.

* The Flash Remoting ActionScript API has been updated to comply with ActionScript 2.0.
* The new RemotingConnector component allows you to work directly with the new data binding features in Flash MX 2004 Professional
* Significant improvements to the Documentation, including new ASDoc format and sample applications.

This is great news because I am a big fan and supporter of Flash Remoting, and was worried about macromedia’s support for it in mx04.