April 30, 2008

FITC Feedback

I got my feedback from FITC already ( they are on the ball... ) and I got a nice 9.20 overall. Yipeeeeee!!! Thanks again for anyone who commented - its nice to get constructive feedback and really helps the presenters- never mind the fact that you could have won something .... :)

So thanks again for everyone who attended my session so early in the morning!

Posted by bitch at 12:38 AM | Comments (1)

April 29, 2008

Incompatible Override

So for the first time, I've seen this lovely 1023 error - Incompatible Override. I checked the code - the signatures are the same, the number and type of arguments are the same, the method declaration are the same... etc etc. It looks as it should be, but suddenly upon compilation, boom - getting this awesomeo highly descriptive error. If there was a difference between the methods in any way, I'd understand... but there isn't.

Any thoughts, ideas etc? People have suggested linking and unlinking classes in the fla etc as well... that has often worked for me in the past but not in this case...

Posted by bitch at 04:04 PM | Comments (4)

April 28, 2008

Bizarre Signs of Success

Pirated copies and ebay sales - two really bizarre signs of what I'd call success for a project we recently released at Fuel Industries - Fairies and Dragons. Now being handed out in various places throughout the UK and Europe, the interactive McDonalds happy meal toy was probably one of the largest projects I have worked on in terms of sheer team size, and is one of the bigger projects I think to come out of Fuel.

And for the first time, I just realized, I'll be able to go in-store and pick up the happy meal toy from hopefully one of those Alice in wonderland looking London McDonalds -taking the project from one of development to experience. Can't do a European vacation without picking up one of those...

I guess we have two more benchmarks for success now.

Posted by bitch at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

FITC Keynote Preso up

I am in the process of uploading the keynote file for my preso... the pdf export option is great but it screwed it up with the transitions and all.

Same Place different file - http://www.bitch
whocodes.com/fitc2008/preso.zip

Thanks again to everyone who attended, and more so for those checking out the preso who weren't there and giving me feedback!

Posted by bitch at 08:58 PM | Comments (1)

FWA Interview

Shameless self promo I suspect but an interview I did with FWA is now online - you can read it here. I think my fave comment is listed under greatest achievements :)

Posted by bitch at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

FITC Preso online

My preso - Project Management from the Developer's Perspective, is online. You can grab it at
http://www.bitchwhocodes.com/fitc2008/preso.pdf. I decided to just post a pdf generated from the Keynote - but if someone wants the keynote, post a comment and let me know.

Posted by bitch at 03:43 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

FITC Over and Out

Just got back from FITC - really impressed with the organization and some of presos. I think mine went over pretty good, can't complain from the audience response. I will be posting my preso as a keynote doc and a pdf sometime tonight - and will blog the link.

Just wanted to thank everyone for their great feedback, and thank the crew at FITC for having me!

Posted by bitch at 04:47 PM | Comments (3)

April 10, 2008

All Girl Arcade

Big shout out to my peeps at Fuel Industries we just released All Girl Arcade - a gaming and media portal targeted at girls ages 8-12. The sushi game is slightly addictive.. check it out if you get a chance!

Posted by bitch at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

Random Things I've Learned

Just a random dump of things I've learned the past couple of months, not all Flash related.I'm going to try to do this more often because its good to go back and remember the stuff that stumped you or you didn't know.

So just a few:

1. Don't try to snapshot a NetStream. Long gone are the days of creating a bitmap, and doing a transition with it. Release 115 of the player plugged what they considered a security hole. People had a shitload of pretty hackilious workarounds but from what I've seen the only way you can do it now is to pony up the $$$ for FMS and set a flag that allows you to do it. You get a nice little Bitmap related security sandbox error. I know this is old news for many people. It was new to me :(. Decent discussion on it - on Justin's blog

2. Namespaces in xml. I recently worked on a project where I thought I'd be all professional and shit, and extend the RSS format with custom namespaces. Then i realized, how the hell do I access these? So here you go:
var nameSpace:Namespace = yourXML.namespace("customNameSpace");
var tag:String = yourXML.nameSpace::customDescription.text();
//--------------
Where the tag would look much like Description here

3. Best workaround ever.... trying to get focus on a stage to capture a keydown event. I had some screens that had input fields, therefore the focus was put on the field and the key event was captured. As soon as I had a screen without a textfield, no event would be captured. Solved it by putting a textfield in a MC offstage and putting focus on that. I'm sure there is something a bit more classy, elegant, what you will but that did the trick for me. Ummm... lame.

4. Here's a heartache one. Mac OSX - run apps from the trash. Basically if you create an app and test it on the mac and then drag it to the trash - and bring the app over again, if there is an instance in the trash, it will run that one. I definitely added an array of new curse words to my vocabulary after learning that one.

4. Um using the list component in flash - i had an array of value objects and then did the whole list_mc.dataProvider = new DataProvider(myArray). I then set the labelField to a prop on the value object. I got a nice little " where the F is your iconField" error. Perhaps it wasn't as colourful as that... I'm sure I'm doing something retarded, cos I rarely use the components, but something as easy as that shouldn't really bitch at me that way. Or maybe it should, I likely deserve it for the most part.

5. Make sure you have your project bookends firmly in place - planning and qa.

6. Omniture released a new version of their actionsource component for AS3 - looks super easy to use. No more clicky clicky sound in the browser.

Posted by bitch at 02:45 PM | Comments (1)