Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Compile Whore: FLA on a Tab Corner

    Dude, for real, that’s all a FLA is now. Got deep into Flash last night redoing some of my tile-based game tests. If your designing strictly an app, or a seriously dynamic one, all I have been using the FLA for is compiling, or putting a single breakpoint to start the debugging trail. I pretty much toggle to my class files, and then just hit the FLA to run it. Granted, for the smaller stuff, you really don’t have much on _root, but for bigger projects you would probably use _root extensively; SOMEONE has to start it off, and for me, _root’s usually the controller, even if just attaching a master component.

    However, some things that need improvments:
    – because I’m coding in the IDE, I should be able to put a breakpoint in my AS file; doesn’t have to be saved, but the IDE should know this (worked with Director’s external ls files)
    – having to toggle back to the FLA to compile blows; anyone know a keyboard shortcut mod?
    – rebuilding classes over and over again blows; when is someone gonna make an XUL window using JSAPI that mirrors VB 6’s Class builder?

    I guess for that last one, it’s gonna be me if no one else does, but I got too much going on… come on… someone?

  • UI Hype

    <a href=”http://www.onclipevent.com/archives/enterframe/000408.html”>Navneet over at enterFrame</a> asks is all this focus on cool UI’s is really worth all the hype, in our case, in RIA’s and Flash usage. He references a <a href=”http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/17/41OPstrategic_1.html”>Jon Udell article </a>and a snippet which explains rather than bigger tree menus, we need evolution as this method of more data into an existing UI element is not effective.

    Notice I added effective. The more “programmer” I’ve become over the years, I’ve wished to become more effective. When trying to code PHP, I approached it totally different than I approached learning ActionScript, and a lot better I might add. I used resources I knew I had, both people and research wise, and was able to accomplish a lot more in a shorter time frame with better quality code resulting.

    This same attitude I have applied to interfaces more. I want to empower the user to have the ability to get something done. Usability just comes into play to ensure this happens easily. Really, it’s a given though; if they are effectively getting something done, it’s a usable interface.

    This doesn’t mean there isn’t room improvment, though. However, I think it comes down to 2 main concepts, which is maybe how a lot of us got into this industry. Rather than speak for you, for me:
    – I wanted to do interfaces and Flash apps because the things I’ve seen elsewhere were done wrong. I thought to myself, “They did that wrong, I know how to that right.”
    – I think it’d be cool to do an interface for this type of information like this, and this tool allows me to focus on that problem solely

    That last one is the key here: The ability to focus on the problem. I admire web people because they can focus on this ability despite all of the unrealistic technical challenges thrown their way. Rather than focusing strictly on solving the problem of how to display information to the user, they are trying to figure out if the menu they’ve chosen will “display” correctly.

    Uh… Navneet talks about innovation. I’ll admit that necessity is the mother of invention, and that sometimes great things come from strife, but for innovation to really flourish, we need to remove all obstacles and focus on purely our ideas without any outside stimuli complicating the process of research and discovery. That’s why I liked Flash: you can be very creative in your test, and your stuff actually works.

    Now, works technically… doesn’t mean it’s an effective interface, but you can truly judge it from that angle rather than, “Well, … it doesn’t work on Mozilla, so this menu paradigm will have to take a back seat until we figure out how to get it to work.”

    No frikin’ wonder new concepts don’t come to fruition faster. For me, Flash is a great testing ground for real world interface concepts; it’s RAD environment allows you quickly put together your idea and test it. I’ve seen a good deal of interface concepts that have great potential as stanard UI’s, but more so from the games I play. Since I don’t have proprietary 3D engines with C++ skillz to boot, Flash is the next best thing, but one I can easily share with others and get feedback.

    I don’t think things will accelerate enough until we focus more on what can be done and put research into it’s effectiveness instead of if something works under certain, technical conditions.

  • I Miss My PuppetSprite & Show Peter Sydney @ MXDU

    Dude, I swear, I keep hearing dynamic animation through code like DynTween, and some of Flash 7’s stuff calling my name, but always cross the line somewhere. The current interface I’m implementing at work now I could definately see parts of it greatly benefitting from such a system, but as a whole, I personally think it wouldn’t work. There are just some complexities that wouldn’t be realistic to code, even with the heartache I had yesterday.

    Interface is made up of 2 parts, and for some reason, the 2nd part wasn’t moving out (think assembly interface). I traced the Output window the _currentframe, and yes it was on the right frame, but it seemed to be ignoring the timeline. I tried updateAfterEvent, and even toggling the _visible property of the movie clip, all to no avail; the freak wouldn’t move. Got <a href=”http://www.erikbianchi.com/”>Erik</a> involved, and he reminded me that setting some properties of tweened movie clip’s will stop them dead in their tracks. “Aw shhhhiiiiiii…..” I replied. Looking through my code, commenting out some of the _alpha settings I was making, and poof, it worked again. SO, I just gave the movie clip’s I was setting 2 states internally using frame 1 and frame 2, rather than affecting it’s _alpha. Granted, I could of wrapped the mc in another movie clip wrapper, but it was already deep enough, and using 2 states works great; very little code had to be added to switch it; just changed _alpha = 50 to gotoAndStop(“disabled”).

    Still, it’d be nice in the Flash 8 player if we had a command similiar to the puppetSprite command in Director. You know they are gonna have to update the internals of the Flash 8 Player anyway because all these frikin’ programmers are gonna want their classes to really compile to classes and their private variables to really work… of course, what I’m asking is a screen rendering thing be modified, so that’s not really fair, but hey… yeah, that’s it, just hey.

    *ahem*

    Basically, puppetSprite said, “Hey Director, Lingo is controlling this now, so ignore whatever the timeline says.” You can toggle this. In Flash, many people have seen what happens when you drag a movie clip to a positive depth, only to return the keyframe, and the sprite is duplicated or other “weird” things happen. Regardless, I know a lot of developers are probably using a lot of their own animation engines for simple transitions, etc., but for the custom interfaces I work with, I honestly don’t think it’s realistic in the long run, and I KNOW I’m not the only one doing this kind of work. I’m definately not the first hybrid to blend code and complex interfaces… that’s what Flash is all about.

    At any rate, <a href=”http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/”>wish-list</a> it with me!

    Also, talked to <a href=”http://www.peterjoel.com/blog/”>Peter Joel</a> yesterday. He wanted to know what is there to do in Sydney and see if we could hook up during the <a href=”http://www.mxdu.com/”>MXDU 2004 conference</a>. Like <a href=”http://www.darronschall.com/”>Darron</a>, it broke my heart but I had to let him know I couldn’t go because of no vacation time left and wanting to save dough since I’m buying a new house. It’d be nice to hang with fellow Flash peeps that I’ve never met personally but known for awhile online, especially in Sydney. Anyway, he was a little disappointed because I wouldn’t be able to entertain him for a week after the conference (I was more than happy to do so, that country’s tons of fun!), so since I can’t, I recommended tons of things. Don’t know how useful they were, but mainly:
    – get with the peeps at Daemon; Geof, his wife, and crew all are cool and know of fun things to do. Or, I guess you could just talk shop with Andrew for hours…
    – contact a local travel agent. In my limited experience, Australia was a country that was cool with non-Bush loving tourists, and I’m sure the UK has the same slant in plenty of travel packages
    – Get with Steve, Brian, (peeps that I hung with when I was there), or Scott Barnes (since he works for the government there).

    Regardless, if your at the conference, show my boy around town (cept for Red Cross).

  • Does this site work now?

    Ok, does my shite work now? Looking to see if I fixed the visual issues I was having with IE with different text sizes as well as text selection, Mozilla, and Safari on the Mac. I’m just caring about the front page currently, as I’m aware the rest of the site (archives, comments, etc.) are foobarred, however, the comments should work enough to allow you to comment on whether the front-page works, hehe.

    BTW, is there someplace I can go (I’ve seen it before) to see if …uh.. my site “validates” or whatever it’s called? I wanna make sure I’m doing it correctly. (No negative comments about the use of Table tags; I couldn’t get my DIVS to work even after looking at other sites, and my gf suggested it, and it worked, so BLEH).