September 27, 2005

Rich Media Redefined

Flashcomm- putting the rich in rich media communications!!
My buddy was doing a bit or flashcomm research today and he discovered just how rich. Bit of an interesting chat occurring in the coMMchat app. I've officially seen something that I can't unsee, the image is forever burned into the bottom depths of my memory. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

I'll spare re-iterating the jokes in the office, but damn, did i come up with some catchy tag lines. Remind me NOT to do my job research at work.

Posted by bitch at 10:17 PM | Comments (3)

September 24, 2005

Work Hard

Work Hard. Get Flowers.
I had a very long couple of weeks at work, beginning to get crusty and tired and I was pleasantly suprised with these - not a huge fan of flowers in general, but these made my day. I wanted to share:

Posted by bitch at 03:22 AM | Comments (1)

September 21, 2005

Magical 31 Frames?

Does 31 fps still hold true for best performance on various platforms? Is there any reference for this?

Posted by bitch at 05:22 AM | Comments (4)

September 18, 2005

Director Features I long for

So, if Director is going to be thrown to the wayside and kicked to the curb like a sad little stray - it would be nice to steal some of those little features that made and makes Director a great product. Sad part of this, is that most of you haven't used Director extensively but more or less as a subset for your Flash development, not as a the primary tool. Here are a couple of small things I miss and would love to see in Flash.

1. Message Window.
Okay, so it would bulk up Flash a bit and it would come with its costs and yadda yadda. But I really miss the message window. Imagine not having to start a new fla just to test a three line bit of code to see if it would work. Imagine creating your objects and running their handlers all in the message window- I absolutely loved this about Director. And of course there are a multitude of reasons why it isn't in Flash. I'm just saying I *really* miss it and those who have used Director, you cannot possibly feel the same way.

2.Search all scripts by handler.
Maybe Flash has this. Maybe someone built an extension. I don't know. But in Director you can search all scripts associated and used in the movie by method name, returning the script and line number. How many times do you have to work with someone else's code and you spend so much time following the bootstrapping to find out where that method is defined.

3. Additional Text functionality
Well, they are considered Fields in Director. But I'd like to see things like mouseChar, mouseItem, mouseLine, mouseWord. These return what items/index the cursor is over when its over a field/textfield. Just that much more precision.

4. doubleClick - this is an inherent property in Director. Small but a nice little addition.

Flash 8 really incorporates some of the things I loved most about Director - BitmapData is the new Imaging Lingo. Certainly a great addition.

Anyways those are just but a few, but they certainly are what I miss.

Posted by bitch at 10:20 PM | Comments (1)

September 15, 2005

Explain this to me - SWC

Corruption in the library, I've been fortunate enough to only experience this maybe two times before. Each time it had pretty much the same affect, you try to drag an item from the library onto the stage and crashola- Flash screams bloody murder at you and goes into the fetal position by crashing. Um thanks.

But this time it was different. And I can't nail why it happened per say, but I know that something invariably funky happened as the result of an custom swc.

I had extended the v2 List component to support drag and drop with a visual avatar ( you see the element you are dragging from one list to the other rather than just a square icon that suggests you are dragging). Fine. Extending it was no problem. In doing so, however, I had to extend more than just MX.Controls.List. I had to extend the SelectableRow item. At this point I was using a the list component from the standardsComponent.fla to do this - it wasn't a swc. I wanted to make it a swc because I didn't want assets cluttering up the library of an already big library. So I created a swc which seemed to go okay.

Intergrating it into the new file was a different story.

1.First off, it overwrote the already existing UIScrollbar component - suddenly where scrollbars where there were none. Not even empty or blank clips in their place. I was never given the " do you want to replace this item" option at all. That would make sense to me then. It also didn't remove all the scrollbars. Ones that were attached worked fine.

2. The new swc dnd list works fine. Lists work fine. It just seemed to affect the scrollbars. The other weird thing is that the thumb of the scrollbar no longers seemed to getting sized by the setScrollProperties bit. When i replaced the scrollbars in sections,the thumb no longer resized. There was nothing in the code overwriting this.

3.Finally, I am not sure if it was the swc, but it appeared to have corrupted an unrelated mc in the library, something that was not using a component at all. Removing the questionable swc didn't change this either. For this particular clip it was subclassing another class. The super simply wasn't initializing. Calls to to the super weren't occuring. Removing and replacing the clips in this series fixed the issue. I thought perhaps I had missed the obivious linkage bit, but that definitely wasn't the case because the subclass was init'ing but the super definitely not - not for this item.

Is there any explanation for the above?
Any insight into swc's would be appreciated too. Do they reference the as file they are bound to at run time? Are they self contained? Why would extending the list component overwrite the UIScrollbar?

Interestingly enough, replacing the swc's from the components panel and deleting the config file seemed to resolve the weird thumb sizing bit.

Is this just a case of unlucky corruption of some sort?

Posted by bitch at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

I finally went and did it.

I finally went and did it. Thats right, I rediscovered and even embraced the inner girl in me and I went pink. As in my blog redesign. Don't underestimate the significance - I've always been deathly afraid of pink and all of barbiedom that I immediately associate with it. Still working on a bit of a logo update - soon to follow. Anyways, check it out, let me know what you think.

Posted by bitch at 12:31 PM | Comments (8)

September 11, 2005

Various Cheatsheets

Passed onto me from my buddy Michael at devbox, this site lists a bunch of great cheat sheets - ranging from mySQL to javascript to php/coldfusion. Check them here. Its bubblicious.

Posted by bitch at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2005

Various Cheatsheets

Passed onto me from my buddy Michael at devbox, this site lists a bunch of great cheat sheets - ranging from mySQL to javascript to php/coldfusion. Check them here. Its bubblicious.

Posted by bitch at 02:55 AM | Comments (0)