Sunday, April 13th, 2008
From time to time I re-read the introductory articles on Cairngorm just to remind me of why I don’t use it and never will. This installment of the Architectural Atrocities series is a critique of the Cairngorm framework, and the Model Locator pattern in particular.
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
One thing that bugs me with event handling is that usually I’m not interested in every event that comes my way. This makes my event handlers more about filtering events than handling them — for example checking that shift is pressed when a KeyboardEvent comes around, or checking that a MouseEvent is above a specific area of a panel. To separate the concerns of filtering and handing I’ve come up with some AOP-like looking ActionScript. Read on for the full explanation.
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Included with Flex 3 is the “Adobe Flex 3 Compiler API”, a little-talked-about piece of code that lets developers create custom Flex compilers, embed the Flex compiler into other applications or just about anything imaginable. In this post I’m going to show how to use the compiler API to create a specialized Flex compiler that can be used to compile font packages for runtime loading of fonts.
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
For those of you using Ant to build your Flex applications, here is a quick tip to speed it all up. If you have a build script that builds more than one SWF or SWC, instead of building everything everytime you can use Ant’s uptodate task to have the script skip running targets whose sources haven’t changed.
Friday, February 15th, 2008
For two days I’ve had lots of problems with the Flex application I’m working on. Mysterious behaviour that doesn’t register any errors anywhere. I couldn’t understand what was going on until today when I accidentally right-clicked on the application. Seconds later my hand collided with my forehead and a long sigh could be heard.
It turns out that the 10.5.2 update for Mac OS X silently installed a new version of Flash Player, overwriting the debug version I had installed. Combined with the Font Explorer X problems and weird glitches and two complete system hangs that also came with the update I can tell you that I’ve lost too many hours of work because of that fucking update.
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
It’s probably the number one topic on Flash blogs today: O’Reilly launches InsideRIA and has an article about how Google indexes SWF files. As usual when it comes to SEO and Flash, almost no one understands what it means, but almost everyone talks about it as the New Big Thing. Guess what? It’s not.
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Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
This is really great: Flex Doc Team: Java-based Compiler API. It’s the Flex compiler exposed as a Java API, which means that finally someone (perhaps I) can write a set of proper Ant tasks for Flex.
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Flex’ CSS implementation isn’t very advanced and it gives me all kinds of trouble when I try to re-style my applications. For the most part Flex does a really good job of allowing customization, but it’s only good for the first 80%.
