Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Category: Flex

  • AIR App: Powerz – Play Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Faster

    This is a long post, so I’ve provided a short version, and content links to relevant sections if you want to skip around.

    Short Version

    Powerz Start PageI’ve built an AIR application in my spare time using Flex that helps you play Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition faster. It took 6 months in my spare time and cost around $50k to build, and $40 a month to maintain.

    See and download it here.

    It was created in response to my new players, who are tech saavy, having a slow time getting a game going. I copied the design metaphor used in MMORPG games, as well as creating an online database via Django of user submitted content to help the process go faster, as well as supporting house rules. In doing market research, I found my product is for a younger generation, and this makes it challenging to market. I used an Iterative/Agile development process to ensure it got completed.

    The app had 3 goals: make money, make our games quicker & easier, and prove to myself I could execute. I succeeded in the latter 2, and failed in the making money… so far.

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  • Fix for Ely’s SuperImage

    SuperImage does not abort previous loads in it’s internal Loader. This means those Loader’s no longer have IOErrorEvent handlers. If you do have a case where the image fails to load after you’ve attempted to load a second image, this’ll cause an uncaught exception. This can happen when SuperImage is used within an itemRenderer where multiple image requests can occur during scrolling.

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  • Flash Player 11: Gaming Platform?

    When Director was being overtaken by Flash, you could see the signs by what they were teaching at local colleges, what jobs were hiring for, and activity centers online based more around Flash’ growth vs. Director. The same happened with Flex; Macromedia employee’s typically involved on the Flashcoders email list started to go quiet and a significant amount of new blood, and old, popped up on the Flexcoders email list. Product strategies favored new features for the Flex component set and not Flash.

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  • Utilizing Namespaces to Indicate Framework Usage

    When utilizing PureMVC Mediator’s, there are 2 ways I’ve seen people write them. The first way is to have the Mediator call methods on the View, passing data it retrieved from a Proxy. This can also be done from a Command as well. The second way is to actually give the Mediator/Command more responsibility of State management for a particular View, and call more than 1 method on it, doing a lot of code that’s often done in the View.

    Both have the same problem: methods in the View that only PureMVC calls, yet exist for others to inadvertently use because they are public.

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