Archive for the 'ActionScript' Category

Stumbled upon a link in a mail from 2001: Gravité, a control panel for old Mac OS which made it look as if you were really dragging icons. Oh, the happy times.

Someone should revive this for drag & drop in Flex.

In Flex 3 there is support for deep linking in the BrowserManager class. Unfortunately it requires that you use the Flex HTML templates which, frankly, are really ugly. I prefer to use SWFObject to embed my Flash and Flex applications. To solve this I have created a simple package that makes it possible to use the BrowserManager class with SWFAddress. You can find it and a description on what it does here: Flex BrowserManager + SWFAddress integration.

The collections in Flex are good as data providers for list and tree components, doing the dirty work of making sure that the components know of changes made to the underlying data, but frankly they suck at most other things. Most importantly they suck at being collections. In this post I’m going to show you why and how to alleviate the problem somewhat.

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The -verbose-stacktraces flag to mxmlc is really useful, but it also has a fun, but disturbing, side effect: you can discover how the person who packaged a swc organized their project. If an error is thrown in a context where the call stack includes methods defined by classes inside a swc the getStackTrace method on Error reveals the location of the .as file as it was when it was compiled.

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This might be obvious to everyone, but I thought I’d share a snipplet containing a generic way of removing an event listener:

event.currentTarget.removeEventListener(event.type, arguments.callee)

Place it in your handler function, I prefer to put mine on the first line.

It’s useful in situations where you want to stop listening after the first event has fired, for example. You can use it when the listener is an anonymous inner function, if you don’t know the type of the event, if the dispatcher is unknown or any combination of these.

Most of the time using weak references is probably more appropriate, but in some situations the snipplet above is handy.

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The asynchronous API:s in Flash, Flex and AIR don’t all work the same in regards to garbage collection. I discovered this the other day when testing out file uploading in Flash. I made the mistake of not keeping a reference to the object that was going to dispatch events when the user had selected a file. It took me half an hour to figure out what was happening, and once I did I cursed myself for not seeing it straight away. However, after having thought about it I think that the the Flash, Flex and AIR API:s are inconsistent and a bit unintuitve on this point.

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It’s been a while since I wrote about TextMate and Flex, but still my last post is one of the first five when I google for “textmate flex“, “textmate flex bundle” or “textmate flex tips“. This surprises me as I thought that by now there should have been more written about Flex and TextMate by now, after all it’s been almost ten months. It turns out that there actually has been things going on, but in the quiet.

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Three months ago I asked is the only thing new with Flex 3 the version number?, I was bit critical back then, but I take it all back.

Why?

OpenType font embeddning. Absolutely fantastic.

The enhanced constraints feature isn’t so bad either.

A while back I wrote about using Flex with Amazon WebServices and the problems I had using Flex’ WebService component. Now I’ve tried working with web services in Flex again and discovered new problems having to do with Flex’ serialization of the request when the data type of a parameter is <any/>.

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