Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Category: Flash

  • Code SWF RIA’s via C#, SVG-XUL’esque markup, and Command Line Compile

    Uh… yeah… I’ll let you go to the link and do the obligatory, “Holy shit…”.

    I learned a lot reading Robin’s book on OOP; most of my understanding how to meld OOP concepts with Flash was by reading his stuff in combination with Moock’s 1st AS book; I really dig Robin’s writing style… I guess I now dig his software product style as well!

    …unfortunately, I took his survey for the product in my “I hate Flex” stage (I’m way over that now, Flex r0X0r$), so I obviously didn’t rank amongst the masses when I answered “I have no use for a SWF that is compiled from XML markup, coded in C# in Visual Studio”. I guess that’s a good thing he ignored me, eh?

    >>>Xamlon Flash Beta Released<<<

  • Debunking False SVG & Flash Comparisons

    Mad props to my man Aral for taking the time to do the rough duty of picking apart the false statements made within the recently published article about SVG. Aral’s thorough debunking & correcting is here, and he makes some good points if you ever need ammo when someone compares oranges to apples. What I find astonishing is JD’s morning after response. He does make the mature and professional statement that we are not personally attacking the author, merely annihilating his incorrect statements. What got me is his, well it appeared to me, defense of how editors pass down a story, and the author runs with it. This, coming from someone who has time and time again pointed out pathetic journalism. I think the scariest part of the whole thing is I’m more forest for the tree’s, and JD isn’t, and I don’t even work for Macromedia. I got the similiar feeling during the search engine debate of the past; it really irks me when people discredit the Flash Player via inaccurate facts & research. It’s ok to fear what you don’t know, and even go so far as to make incorrect (not known to you at the time) in an effort to throw hypothetical questions out to the development community in order to garner information on how things really are.

    Someday I too may be able to take a step back, and view things in the proper context, and not take attacks on the Flash Player personally. I think if the whole skip intro thing had never existed, I’d still be in the same state I am now, feeling frustrated for having to help and/or support others in the education in the face of misinformation. In the meantime, eat page rank Aral!

  • Central ‘esque Methods for Flash’ & Flex’s ProgressBar

    For those of you in Central withdrawl, like me, here is a conversion of the 2 methods that Central uses for it’s Shell to control the progress bar it has at the bottom. Flash and Flex have a ProgressBar component, where the label is underneath the progress animation itself. However, I really liked the elegance of the methods, so converted for a project I am using. They are merely a simple wrapper around Flash’/Flex’ ProgressBar component to act like Central’s built in one. You can still use the indeterminate and label getter/settters as well as the setProgress method, but this way just felt more encapsulated to me.

    progress_pb.mode = "manual";

function setStatus(str:String):Void
{
        progress_pb.label = str;
}

function setProgress(val:Number):Void
{
        if(val < 0)
        {
                progress_pb.indeterminate = true;
        }
        else if(val == 0)
        {
                progress_pb.indeterminate = false;
                progress_pb.setProgress(0, 100);
        }
        else
        {
                progress_pb.indeterminate = false;
                progress_pb.setProgress(val, 100);
        }
}

    I’ve been using it mainly for web service calls, like so:

    // starting the call
setStatus("Calling remote method...");
setProgress(-1);

// in my result handler
setStatus("Method returned: " + result);
setProgress(0);

// in my fault handler
setStatus("Method failed to return: " + status);
setProgress(0);

// obviously, you can do the old-skool
// half-way done
setProgress(50);

  • JSFL: Image Compression Toggle

    Frankie Loscavio, homey from BellSouth’s Client Team, professional rollderblader, and member of The Dyslexics, needed a quicker way to toggle all images in a movie to use lossless (GIF/PNG) compression. I changed 2 lines on an older script last night to give him these. These scripts go through all of your bitmaps in your library, and change their compression settings. The only thing not included is modifying the JPEG quality levels since you’d typically do that on an image by image basis, and if not, just use the global movie setting.

    Image Compression Toggle – MXP | ZIP