Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

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Willow, Our New Golden Retriever Puppy

So cute!!!

More Photos of Willow

June 10, 2005
Remote & Local Debugging in Flash & Flex
There are a plethora of new and old tools out there to debug your Flash movies. However, just a reminder you can use Flash to see your trace statements and use your debugger while a SWF is running in a browser. Steps are as follows:
1. Close all browsers and Flash.
2. Go to your Flash installation directory, and look in the players directory. Mine on my PC is:
  C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash MX 2004\Players
3. Make a folder called “backup”. Cut and paste the following files into it:
  - SAFlashPlayer.data
  - SAFlashPlayer.exe
  - SAFlashPlayer.rsrc
4. Go into the debug folder, and copy the same files. Paste them one directory up, in the players folder. These are the files Flash MX 2004 Professional will utilize to make a debuggable SWF.
5. Go back in the debug folder and install the appropriate debug player. The AX one is for IE (ActiveX), and other uses of embedded Flash, OSX for duh, exe for Firefox, and hqx for non-OSX Macs (maybe Linux? :: shrugs ::).
6. Re-open Flash, and when compiling your FLA, make sure Debugging is enabled in your File > Publish Settings, Flash Tab > Debugging Permitted. This will ensure your SWD file, the ASCII holder of your ActionScript, will be created upon each compile. Careful, though; it has the nasty habit of caching just like ASO’s, causing the code you are debugging to be different than what’s in the SWF running. Delete if you’re paranoid like me.
7. Open your Debugger, and ensure “Enable Remote Debugging” is on (drop down menu, top right).
8. Finally, upload your SWF and SWD file to your server. When you hit the SWF in a browser, it’ll ask where do you want to connect; choose localhost, and go back to Flash if it doesn’t auto-focus it back for you; click OK (assuming no password), and your Output window should show traces, and your Debugger should work as normal (although a tad slower).
This’ll work for Flex too; it comes with a debug player in:
C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flex\bin

For offline debugging where Flash is embedded, such as Zinc, you can log using Afterthought.

There are a plethora of other debugging tools as well, a lot made in Flash, but just so you know you have your standard ones by default which can be used for web deployed content.

If you have one you know of not mentioned here, please feel free to leave a link in the comments; we’d all like to hear about it.
June 10, 2005
Flex Chronicles#11: Nesting Tags For Attributes
I’m not a big fan of doing ActionScript inline within tags and/or within attributes. However, it does make data binding to properties extremely simple. Example, if you want to show a city & state based on a result from a webservice that takes a zipcode, you can do:

<mx:Label id="cityState_lbl" text="{ws.result}" />

Extremely simple binding. I’d personally rather do this in code because I’m an MXML purist, but you cannot deny the power of it.

What I just learned today was that sometimes naturally your data binding results from web services can be long making your MXML unreadable since you have a long object property name list in your MXML attribute tag.

I’ve always wondered why the dataProvider tag starts with a lowercase “d”, for example like the ComboBox:
```
<mx:ComboBox id="SoftwareSelection">
 <mx:dataProvider>

      <mx:Array>

         <mx:String>Macromedia Flex</mx:String>

         <mx:String>Macromedia Dreamweaver</mx:String>

         <mx:String>Macromedia ColdFusion</mx:String>

         <mx:String>Macromedia Flash</mx:String>

      </mx:Array>

   </mx:dataProvider>
</mx:ComboBox></pre>
```
That always threw me off, but today I learned why.

You can nest ANY attribute of a Component/Class/Tag in Flex. So, for the above, if your webservice result is obnoxiously long, you can instead nest it for readability:
```
<mx:Label id="cityState_lbl">

   <mx:text>

      {yourLongWebServiceName.result.nestedPropName}

   </mx:text>

</mx:Label>
```
Wow… that’s awesome! Thanks David George for that pimp technique.
June 7, 2005
Hormone Appears to Increase Trust

Next time I have allergies and hit the nasal spray, I’ll end up using Internet Explorer and install the Yahoo! Toolbar…

…NOT!

Hormone Appears to Increase Trust

Via her majesty.

June 2, 2005