Archive for the 'ActionScript' Category

I was recently hired to take care of things at a medium sized web production company while the regular staff was away. I reported my findings in a series called Flash programming confidential (monday, wednesday, weekend). This is a summary of the state of the Flash programming trade, and resolutions to what I see as the major problems and shortcommings.

Being a Flash developer today is a bit different from how it has been, with Flash being used more and more for complex websites which require more programming skills. Based on those two weeks I’ve put together a short guide for Flash developers on how to use the Flash plattform in a structured manner in order to create complex websites.

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I write this, the friday’s entry to the series, on monday morning because the weekend has been all work. It began on thursday when a customer decided that a campaign site that had been ok’ed before now suddenly was not ok. It had to have the client’s header and footer, something the ok’ed design documents didn’t have, and definitely not something the ok’ed Flash site had. But the clients word is law, so we had no choice.

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My week att the to-remain-unnamed web production company continues. Today I was asked to help with a website that stopped working when the developer updated it last night. This morning he went to holidays and was completely unavailable, there was panic in the project manager’s eyes, but the problem turned out to be quite easy to fix. However, a closer look revealed some other fascinating, or perhaps horrifying details.

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This week I’m working for a web production company with a little bit of everything. Today I was asked to help in a project where the Flash developer was on paternity leave. The project was overdue and there were things that didn’t work, no huge problems, but things that needed to be fixed. I sat down with the .fla in order to find the relevant part of the project and see how hard it would be to fix. One hour later I gave up.

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Adobe has clarified the Flex 3 pricing and the good news is that The Flex SDK will remain free (not very surprising as it’s going open source). However, it won’t be much of an update from Flex 2, because the only real new feature will not be included.

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The Adobe AIR beta 1 runtime installer leaves a lot to be desired. Adobe continues the blantant disregard for standard folders and proceedures on the Mac that Macromedia had, and this leads to problems. I had to do quite a lot of tinkering to be able to install it at all.

For me, the installer just failed with “Installation Error: 2038″. No more information. I was stumped.

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There are lots of examples of how to access Amazon’s WebServices (AWS), and their own documentation is extensive. However a quick google on “Flex Amazon WebServices” doesn’t turn up many results. Amazon’s own examples are all for other platforms.

Let’s put together some code that searches Amazon for CD cover art.

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Google Analytics is a really good web site statistics tool, but there are some things that haven’t worked so well for me. The Flash version names include revision numbers, which makes it hard to get the whole picture, and when having multiple subdomains in the same profile it’s not easy to see which domain an page belongs to. Both these can be fixed with filters, and in this post I show you how.

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I finally got around to writing up the FlexUnit Automation kit, the FlexUnit/Ant integration I blogged about a month ago. Read on for a description and download link.

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Namespaces in ActionScript is a concept which I’m not aware of existing in any other language*. I’ve tried to find an example of why they are needed and how they can solve problems that cannot be solved without them, or at least less elegantly without them. Reading Colin Moock‘s Essential ActionScript 3.0 I came accross an example that showed just that. In two paragraphs Moock has convinced me of the beauty of namespaces.

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