Rich Rodecker’s blog on flash, flex, actionscript, javascript, and php, with a dash of randomness
rich
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Homepage: http://www.visible-form.com/blog
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AIM: flashape
Posts by rich
Flash Builder
May 18th
Everybody knows by now that Flex Builder is now Flash Builder, which i think is a great move. With all the chatter about it, one thought just keeps popping up for me: how much of a non-impact this is on my daily work and career. Yeah, I’ve gone through the whole thing about explaining flex to clients, but for the most part, I haven’t really run into issues where clients/employers are confused over the IDEs.
I’ve starting tweeting
May 4th
I’ve finally had enough of hearing about Twitter and not checking it out, so I went and signed up. You can follow me as flashape Any pointers for a twitter newb are appreciated…I’d like to integrate my blog and my tweets actually. Is there an adobe twitter aggregator or anything?
The “New RegFly.com”…seriously???
Apr 16th
Got an email today about the “new RegFly.com”….ugh. That’s kind of like hearing about “the new Enron”. If you don’t remember RegisterFly read about them here, but long story short they were one of the worst domain name registrar scandals, ultimately losing their ICANN accreditation and causing me and plenty of others A LOT of grief. The fact that they are using a different domain name to avoid having to display the court-ordered notice about losing their accreditation speaks volumes to the fact that things haven’t changed at all. Please spare yourself some agony and avoid them like the plague.
DockableFlex – Nice!
Apr 14th
Wow, just came across DockableFlex:
DockableFlex is an open source component library based on Adobe Flex 3.
It provides basic dock support for the Panel Component.
Looks pretty slick, if you’ve ever tried dragging tabbed panels around in photoshop or in the Eclipse IDE, you get the idea.
TextMate Jump to Function
Mar 25th
My personal battle between TextMate and Eclipse continues. In this case, I wanted to to see if it was possible to recreate the “jump to definition” functionality of Eclipse within TM…you know, when you control click a function name in eclipse will take you to that definition. Well, I found this post which pretty much re-creates this functionality, except using a key commmand instead of control-click, which is fine by me. I just need to add ‘as’ and ‘mxml’ to the list of file names to search through and it worked great. Currently it doesn’t work for getters/setters, I’ll see if I can hook that up as well.
Next up I’d like to see about jumping back and forth between edit locations in files (the option-apple-arrow key combos in eclipse on mac).
Burned by hoisting
Mar 18th
A while back I read a post about variable hoisting in Actionscript , and remember thinking how it was weird how that was the first time I'd ever heard about that, and how I'd probably never need to know that if I hadn't until that point anyway. So today I get burned by it. When you declare a variable anywhere within a function, Actionscript 'hoists' that declaration to the top of the function. To quote the original article:
Any variable defined within a function scope, in any structure, at any location, is automatically moved at compile-time to the top of the scope. And it’s accessible anywhere in any of those scopes. In most languages, this would be a compile error.
This is what got me today. In this sample, mainUI and someArray are other properties of the object, but vo is not:
Actionscript:
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override public function execute():void {
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var container:Canvas = mainUI.getContainer(vo.dataProvider);
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var dp:ArrayCollection = container.dataProvider;
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for each(var vo:ItemVO in someArray){
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doStuff(vo);
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}
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}
As you can see, in the first line of code I try to call vo.dataProvider, but it should not be defined yet. However, since I declare the var 'vo' in the for each loop, the compiler lifted the declaration to the top of the function, which means that as far as the compiler cares, the vo variable existed before my first line of code.
Safari 4 Beta Crash
Feb 25th
Safari 4 Beta kept crashing on launch for me, turns out the Glims plugin was the culprit. Removing that solved the issue. Safari 4 looks pretty sweet...though the tabs on top thing is throwing me off a little.
Simple regex to comment out all uncommented trace() calls
Feb 24th
Sometimes I want to comment all lines with trace() from my project. Doing a simple search for "trace" and replacing it with "//trace" might leave some previously commented out lines looking like ////trace() (or worse). I don't like that because then I can't uncomment the line with a key command. About 10 seconds with RegExr showed me that you can
comment out uncommented trace() calls using the regular expression \strace and replacing it with "//trace".
Conventions for Bound Properties
Feb 11th
At the Adobe Open Source site they have a pretty good article about using the [Bindable] metadata tag in Flex, why you might not want to do that, why you might want to use custom event names for the property change events, and what types of issues can occur. It also offers some insight on how to handle various scenarios when using the tag. Some good insight in there, so if you work with Flex you might want to give it a read.
TweenLite/TweenMax get major update
Feb 3rd
TweenLite (and big brother TweenMax), the best tweening engine on the planet, received a major update today. This update introduces a plugin architecture...making it easy to include the functionality you want, and leave out the functionality you don't. He has also created a plugin explorer to give you a clear view of what your file size would be if you wanted to include or exclude certain plugins. Go check it out!
