FlashApe

If there’s one subject in flash programming that’s been beaten to death over the last couple of years, it’s the MVC, Model-View-Controller, design pattern. With good reason, no doubt…it’s very effective, and also a little difficult to pick up for people just getting used to programming with patterns.

I was having a conversation with someone today who was saying that he just wasn’t getting it. I then started explaining to him that MVC is really what they call a ‘compound patttern’…a pattern made up of subpatterns. I asked if he was familiar with Observer, he was, he got that part. Then I asked if he was familiar with the State pattern, to which he responded that no, he hadn’t gotten to that yet. I pointed out that the ‘controller’ in MVC is really just an implementation of the Strategy pattern. Then he stated something which occured to me as true, that I hadn’t realized before, which is that none of the other Flash books that talk about MVC really mention that.

So, like I always do when talking aboutdesign patterns, I recommended the book Head First Design Patterns, which does a great job of explaining the design patterns separately first, then a great job again how they work together to form the MVC pattern.

My browser relationships are usually pretty monogamous…I usually only switch if I’m not getting what I need from my current browser of choice, and it’s only temporary, I always come back to the one I left.

Recently, however, I found my relationship with Safari getting stale. It’s cool and all, but just didnt feel as smooth as I liked. There were a few issues that kept rearing their ugly heads, which would force me to wander over to Firefox every now and then. Now Firefox, she’s a cool one to, dont get me wrong, I couldnt have lived without her in the dark times (when i was forced to work on a pc). She’s pretty flexible, but, not be mean, she seems a little slow.

So, looking for something a little different, I had a quick fling with Opera. She was pretty sweet (actually, she’s got a pretty cute little sister too)…but, I dunno, it just didnt feel right.

Then, enter Camino. I started off not expecting too much, but she has really shined. What do I like most about her? I’m not really sure…it just feels good…maybe it’s because it just feels more like an OS X app than any of the others I’ve tried. She’s a quick one too, you should see how fast she loads her pages Things were working out so well I decided to get her a few things from Pimp My Camino, an extensions site, and they’ve really helped to solidify our relationship:

• CamiTools - Adds a preference pane with a bunch more options (including cool syncronize bookmarks with ftp option).
• Inquisitor - Cool predictive search (there’s a small price tag to unlock all the features, but I thought it was worth it).

One thing I didn’t see was a WebDeveloper-style extension…that would rock.

So, Camino’s pretty much won me over, and I think we’ll be together for a while.

Every once in a while I’ll see a post somewhere about how someone’s site got blatatnly ripped..well I guess it was my turn. I decided to try and search for some web sites that deal with this sort of thing (like busting the people out) and found http://forums.pirated-sites.com…anyone know of any others out there?

Wow, i never knew this existed…when writing a new message, start typing a word and hit escape, you’ll get autocomplete:

I wonder what other interesting stuff I can find by mashing my cereal bowl into my keyboard.

just a note: if you get this error in flash 8, when you are targeting flash player 7 or lower, it’s most likely because you created a stroke in flash 8 while it was still set to publish to flash player 8..in which case it will add enhanced stroke data to your stroke, but not take it off when you publish an earlier player. The key is to set it to publish to set teh target player before you draw the stroke.

ok, just throwing this out there, for no other reason than to see what everyone else thinks, and also because i’ve had way too much coffee this morning.

The way I see it, adobe is doing a really good thing by continuing to purse the whole “occaisonally connected” thing, and I’m glad they didnt give up after Central (though I never actually got around to developing anything for Central anyway). I think it’s apparent that eventually, the web browser we know it will be obsolete…or at least relegated to the backburner somewhere. It feels like apollo would be the next step after “widgets”…bascially when you launch an app on your desktop, its internet ready and enabled, and more importantly, specifically designed for internet connectivity.

Adobe Apollo FAQ

I was in a situation where i needed to refer to an instance of a Tween in a separate method than where it was created. The first two thoughts that come to mind are storing it as a var in the class, or attaching it to a property to an object(usually a dynamic property of a movieclip). That’s always bothered me a little cause its a hack…granted that’s the bread and butter of AS1, but there’s a reason people are moving away from that.

I dawned on me how many other times i need to store references somewhere for other things…for example, cases where I need to store a reference to the function returned from a Delegate.create() in order to delete it later or something.

So, i just whipped together this ReferenceLocator class (a little nod to ARP). basically you just pass an object to its addReference() method that contains two properties: referenceName and referenceTo. Optionally, you can add a method to the object named overwrite, and set it to true, and that will overwrite an existing reference with the same name. To get the object, you just pass its referenceName to the getReference() method. There’s also a deleteReference() method, which will delete the reference with the given name, optionally deleting the object as well.

You can read more about and download it from the downloads page.

what a crazy year this has been for me professionally. I started off the year at Heavenspot, where I have been for the past few years. For a long while I had been growing a littel frustrated with the work there…maybe not so much the work as there was not really any growth potential. I was trying to push myself more into flash application development, but being a design studio mostly geared towards the entertainment industry, there was barely a chance really for me to use things like arp/amfphp etc…it was overkill. And there was about zero chance that I’d be getting any chance to work with Flex.

So right about the time it was really starting to wear on me, a friend of mine who has another studio here in L.A.got in touch and asked me if I’d like to come in. Now, it was a hard decision for me, because even though i was frustrated at Heavenspot, I still felt loyal to there, being that I was there from the beginning. I decided to go meet witht hem and after about an hour (and a little bit of sake) later, we felt like it was a good fit, and I made the jump over to the new place.

While I was there I got to things I really never got a chance to do in my flash development career, the biggest thing being really getting to work with component-based application development. (right about the same time I started there, the book Advanced Actionscript Components came out, which made everything gel real nice). Wound up putting together some pretty decent apps, some of which may get open-sourced here shortly, if I can get the time.

Well, after about about two months into the new job, the work available at the new place dried up real quick due to circumstances beyond their control, and I was low man on the totem pole.

Now, a few years ago, this would have affected me differently. But luckily, by now I had built up a pretty good client list of my own over the years, and just from having my name out there on sites like actionscript.org I am constantly getting new job contacts. So, I took the opportunity to do something else I’ve really been wanting to do for a while, and thats going into business on my own…so I went ahead and formed F1 Flash Development.

So far, everything’s been working out great. Now, I hope to get back into the scene a little bit as posting a little more often again and jumping back into the various mailing lists.  It’s funny how much i’ve missed that.