Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Volte-face on Work & New Ride

    I’d say on average I get a new job opportunity every 3 days. It’s either:
    – someone looking for Flash developers for a contract here in Atlanta
    – someone looking for a Flash developer to work on a project wherever
    – someone looking for a fulltime Flash developer
    – someone looking for a designer to contract

    …in order of reaccurrance. I feel bad because I send them the same 7 people I know and feel confident recommending for contract/employment. It’s nice meeting people at various meetings, keeping their business cards in an ever amassing pile, re-saying their name after you meet them to ensure they get a spare synapse, hoping to help them or have them help you in the future, and in the meantime, talk tech.

    Regardless of how my networking circle grows, even globally, I still am finding a large gap in supply and demand. There’s a divergence in the talent pool (glad to hear the opposite of the c word, eh?) amongst Flash developers. The ones that are out there are usually busy out of their minds (me for instance), so the propensity to take on new work is usually non-existent anytime soon. Now, I’d be more favorable towards the amount if said amount were to pay insane dollar outputs. However, experience has shown they typically don’t, but then again, the price ranges have grown over time, in lieu of my own growth, so I could be full of it… I haven’t looked lately being swamped my full time job, fun small projects and economics homework out the yang, but I have pushed off some favorable projects, both in fun to create and good pay to others with more time to bequeath. I’ve been telling everyone I meet in the same discipline to milk it. For those of you who don’t know, we’ve reached the apex of the Golden Years of Flash Development. I’m sure there is time left to add to the above, but I recognize pinnacles and this is one. Can’t imagine what it will be like when the economy gets better.

    BTW, I sold my Sol…

    …bought her majesty an Element (yes, she helped w/bling)…

    …and apprehended da 2k1.

  • Buffering

    The only thing this is missing is little spy camera’s all along the sides complete with docking clamps on file extensions, topped with a muscled arm squeezing a stick of RAM…

    …or just a pile of dung. Take your pick. At any rate, this made my Friday. I know, doesn’t take much.

    http://www.palfloat.com/commentpics/real-buffering.jpg

  • Mass Symbol Swapper

    Dude on LJ had 1000 instances he needed to swap from Symbol A to Symbol B. Didn’t want to do it manually, so I wrote this command for him. Maybe you’ll find a use for it too.

    You select a frame, and it’ll swap all instances to use a different symbol that you specify. Instead of clicking the instance on the stage, clicking swap, and repeating for each symbol, this just does it en-masse at light speed.

    *** Updated to 1.0.1 ***

    Mass Symbol Swapper – MXP | ZIP

  • getNextHighestDepth Gotcha

    Ok, this one pisses me off hardcore. It technically works correctly on paper, but so did Marxism… or so the saying goes… whatever.

    I’ve been using getNextHighestDepth for movie clips that are expendable. Timers, counters, one time processes, etc. However, movie clips created in negative depths are protected, meaning removeMovieClip will not work on them. The same goes for movie clips created at or above 1048576. Unfortunately, getNextHighestDepth will return that depth. I haven’t pinned down at what situation those depths are returned. With nothing, it’ll return 0. With a clip at 1000, it’ll return 1001. I guess at some point it just jumps to that value.

    At any rate, tracking down some bugs, and this is the 2nd time I was burned by this gotcha. I don’t give a flying fizz-nuck-chuck what ECMA says, this is bs functionality. In my understanding, this command was to help me not worry about depth management. Now, however, I’m back to where I started: worrying about depth management.

    Consider yourself warned.