Flashgamer

I had to reinstall my CS3 package today and got a surprise when I logged in to retrieve my serial number. On the page listing your registrations it says "We’re making improvements to support the newly combined Macromedia and Adobe community". Wow? What can I say? Two years in the making and you still can't view the serial numbers of your licensed products.

I sure hope this only temporarily, or the Adobe customers will have to pay the bill in the form of foolish costs to call centers that just tell people what their serial numbers are. There's also a link to your Adobe registered products that is "Temporarily Unavailable". Good thing I'm not in a hurry then, after all I just make a living from Adobe tools... Luckily there's warez sites with serial numbers around, so you at least have a chance to run your software ;-P

Oh - and did I mention why I had to reinstall the entire CS3 package? Since I was part of the Dreamweaver Beta and I forgot to uninstall the software before it expired, I had to delete it manually by searching for files (The uninstaller would not start since it was expired too...). This in turn prevented it to be installed when I got my CS3 package. Not having Dreamweaver isn't such a big deal any more. I much prefer FireBug and TextMate, but Dreamweaver wasn't the only bit that didn't install.

The Dreamweaver Beta also installed Device Central and Bridge and the CS3 installer was unable to remove these as well. Another problem I've had recently is that my Photoshop CS3 crashed upon every Open or Save attempt. The last drop was that I needed Device Central yesterday and it claimed my product was expired, so I bit the sour apple and spent an hour deactivating, uninstalling and reinstalling it all. Amazing how much stuff the uninstallers actually leave behind.

Update: Photoshop and Dreamweaver now works, but Device Central just says "License Expired". It appears to be impossible to reinstall just this one bit. Any suggestions welcome!

Update 2: The CS3 cleanup script did the trick when used on level 2. Blahhh... what a day to spend a day :(

Here's something to cheer up anyone with similar problems: Elijah Wood gets mortified.

Posted by Jensa at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Chances are that you've seen this error message before. This is my number one wish for ALL the Adobe compilers - better error messages! I've always wondered why Flash / Flex can't throw proper error messages and this is a brilliant example. In this case, Flash obviously knows exactly what is wrong so why not just just tell it? How about something like this:

 
TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access the property "someprop" since it is a null object reference.
	at no.netron.tusenfryd::Map/onLoadSingle()
	at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction()
	at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()
	at flash.net::URLLoader/onComplete() 
 

If I just knew the name of the object, I didn't have to search all over for it...

Posted by Jensa at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

How can the same timeline export to two different lengths? This is for sure a bug in the Quicktime export in Flash CS3. A little background - I'm working on a project where we'll let the user rotate a huge 3D model left or right by clicking some arrows. If you have ever tried to play Flash video backwards, you've noticed that this won't play smoothly since Flash have to calculate any missing keyframes. The best solution is to use two FLVs embedded in each their movieclip and do some smart toggeling of the two movieclips so you only play one video at a time, but always in the forward direction.

For this to work, you'll need two videos. One containing the normal sequence and one containing the reverse. These videos have to have exactly the same length, or you won't be able to jump between them. Ive done this a bunch of times in former versions of Flash, but in CS3 this is totally broken. Have a look at the timeline below (click for full size version). it has three layers. The first layer (right) contains a series of PNG images showing the rotation of the model towards right. The second layer (left) contains the same images in reversed order.

I export the "rotateRight" quicktime movie and then turn the "right" layer into a guide and export the "left" rotation. The resulting Quicktime movies will now be of different lengths!?!? Not only that - if I re-export the lengths change at random??? Seriously - somebody did not do their homework here! This also reminds me of a problem Andre Michelle is experiencing where the sound object is now less precise than if was before.

Come on - time is only relative in movies. In real life a frame is a frame and a second is a second! I've now spent way too many hours researching this. I'll now dig up my old PC version of Flash 8 and fix this.

UPDATE: Using Flash 8 worked like a charm. This is definelty a CS3 bug...

Click to view large image

Just to make it worse - the last update for CS3 that I whined about has broken Photoshop. It crashes every time I try to open an image using the Open File dialogue or try to Save. Just brilliant when you want to make pictures illustrating another bug in Adobe software... And - this is not my machine acting up either. My wife has the exact same behavior on her video editing Mac at work and the export issue has also been confirmed by others. It's the same. 100% repeatable randomness.

Posted by Jensa at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, the Adobe Updater started whining about another update. It does this so often that it's a real annoyance since the core component it keeps updating are stuff I never use or care about such as Bridge and Version Cue. Today, the darn updater has interrupted my work flow more than 5 times over the course of two hours. I sit there working happily and that annoying updater keeps juming in the dock...

Anyone have some good advice on how to control this better? I do want updates to the applications I use, but I really don't want to be bothered when it comes to all that other crap...

Update: JD got me some good advice. Comments are now working.

Posted by Jensa at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just brilliant!

Posted by Jensa at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What's Aral up to?

Posted by Jensa at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sweet - finally a visit from "the mothership" to little Norway :-)
January 31st 2008, Mike and several other Adobe evangelists (Stephanie Sullivan Greg Ewis and Jason Levine) will head to Oslo, Norway for a free full day conference. There will be sessions on Flex, AIR and AS3 with Mike as well as Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and AJAX. These free one-day things are usually pure marketing, but this looks like it could be quite interesting.

Mike has his sabbatical right now - one of the nice things with working at a big company like Adobe. If I remember correctly, Adobe offers six weeks and Macromedia used to offer eight weeks after working a certain time. Probably very well deserved as he's been doing nothing but traveling for a really long time now... If it wasn't for this, I'd invite him to visit the norwegian Flash User Group FUGN. I'll shot him an email when he's back in January :)

PS: If you're in Norway and didn't know about FUGN - tell all your friends and colleagues and join us the first monday every month. The meetings are informal and hosted at bars (like the London FPUG). The informal atmosphere makes easier to ask questions and present stuff you're working on. We don't mind the beers either :)

UPDATE: Turns out there is some kind of special event the day before and the FUGN members present at last weeks meet got invites for this :)

Posted by Jensa at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're making Components for use in CS3, you'll no doubt stumble upon the Inspectable metadata tags looking like this:

[Inspectable(defaultValue="auto",enumeration="on,off,auto")]

I had a hard time finding more information about this until I downloaded and read through this PDF from Jeff Kamerer at Adobe. Only the first part of his tutorial on creating components in CS3 is up on the ADC site right now, but at the very end of the page he has some PDFs that is a veritable goldmine for component developers. I have not read through it all, but it looks as if he's skipping the very last, important part that details the packaging of components. Spender at the Flash Brighton blog has a good writeup that I think will solve that for now.

(Too bad Adobe didn't take the time to ship this as part of the docs. They obviously had all the knowledge in-house, but I guess they did not have the time for this just before launch? Experience has learned me that the sooner you document stuff like this the fewer mistakes the devs will do, so I do find it odd that this is the only documentation we have...)

Posted by Jensa at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Working on a fun AS3 project now, where I'll make some UI components. The components has several events that they want to notify the world about, but I'd love some help on a design decision: should the events dispatched from a component bubble per default?

Posted by Jensa at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I loved Scott Barnes entries at MossyBlog. About a year ago, Scott started with Microsoft and now he has a brand new blog titled "Life of an evangelist" with video, photos and even his own comic strip! Go check it out!

Posted by Jensa at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Working on a kids game now that we'll deliver as a projector for both Mac and PC and thought I'd share a few Gotcha's I've gotten in the process. These relate to unloading movieclips, FLV playback, Events, AS3 vs designers and Shared Objects. The game is a classic kids game with an animated story that ties together some 30 mini-games.

Continue reading "Projector issues in CS3" »

Posted by Jensa at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On many occasions I've wished I wasn't that curious, but I must say that Adobe has messed my machine up with AIR and the Flash Player. As a developer, I'm always keen to check out new tech so I "had to" install the beta version of the Flash Player supporting MPEG4 video and check this out. That caused my debug player to disappear, and also royally screwed up installing AIR apps. In an attempt to rectify this and check out Digimix - an excellent AIR app (according to Paulo) I uninstalled and reinstalled the latest distribution version of the player. Now I'm stuck with a setup that boots my Parallels installation every time I click an AIR install badge. Great...

I assume this is just a setting in Parallels that I can fix myself, but still - the player selection feels a little screwed at the moment. What I really want is a version that has both debug for Flex, installs AIR files AND shows me the latest and greatest. That way I didn't have to go through all these instalIs/uninstalls, but I guess this is impossible due to the development process? I guess I'll have to install the FireFox Flash Plugin Swithcher.

Update: Figured it out. Parallels 3 makes shortcuts to all your windows apps, included the AIR installer on Windows... Just had to delete that from my Windows Applications folder under OSX.

Posted by Jensa at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Papervision keeps amazing me. Today I saw this nice depth of field effect by Ricardo Cabello aka Mr.doob (Check his experiments section for more 3D Flash fun). One of the contributors to the Papervision project, John Grden, needs a new machine. If you use Papervision or have use for it in the future, I recommend chipping in. In addition to contributing on Papervision, John has also made the XRay debugger, Red 5 streaming server. He is spending an awful lot of his time helping other Flash users so he really deserves help on getting a Mac.

Posted by Jensa at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a great read for anyone curious about where Adobe may be heading with Flash - An AIR of Invisibility: Adobe has Microsoft in its sights. The article points out that Flash (and PDF) is now everywhere and to such an extent that it's just one of those things you expect from a decent device. If it can't do Flash, then it IS a watered down version of the internet.

There's just one point that the author fully misses on as he says "... and there are just as many Flash developers as Java developers". This is just plain wrong. Every university teaches Java, but very few teach Flash. This is certainly something Adobe should focus more on, as the demand for Flash talent is extreme now.

Posted by Jensa at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Check this Youtube vid - multitouch app done using Flash and AS3!

(via Andre Michelle)

Posted by Jensa at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CS3 is pretty stable, but when importing a MovieClip from an AS2/Flash 8 file today, I got this sort of fun message when trying to set the class name:

"This feature is not supported by Flash Player 9, Actionscript 3.0. To use this feature, you must target Flash Player 9, Actionscript 3.0."

Ehrrmm.... This is exactly what I am doing? My file is indeed targeting "Flash Player 9, Actionscript 3.0"... Got around this by just copying the frame contents into a new MovieClip, but this gotta be a bug?

Posted by Jensa at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This will change how you think about screens or even t-shirts! Just after Sony's announcement of ultra-thin OLED screens, Philips takes this a step further. Why print the logo on t-shirts when you can have it animate? Any kind of cloth can now be turned into a screen - how's that for a canvas for your next Flash animation?

Posted by Jensa at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever since I switched to Mac about a year ago, I've been sure that the Intel Macs and OSX would become serious competition for Microsoft. According to thecounter.com, Mac users now account for almost 4,3% of all their visitors (72.993.015 person user sample thus far this month).

I'm not saying that the figures from thecounter.com are 100% representative. They are based on info from a small JS that is loaded on all of internet.com's sites, so it's a tech-based audience, but still it's very interesting to see how steadily the number of Mac users grow. Two years ago, mac users were only 2%. I seem to remember that Gartner Research predicted late 2006 that Mac's wouldn't get above 2.9% in 2007? Fun to see how analysts fail to really research the market. Just imagine the rush that will come now that Adobe finally has delivered CS3 on the Intel Mac platform. I bet they forgot to think about how that will affect Mac growth?

Another fun fact - the project I've been working on the last year has seen insane Mac growth. Initially, only two of the coders had Macs in the building. Now it's about 20 of us doing Flash, HTML and Java on shiny new Intel Macs. I'm pretty sure that OSX will have near 6% market share by the end of this year, driven by iPod and iPhone sales.

On a similar note - Back in 2005, mozilla based browsers was at about 5%. Now, these account for more than 24%. Who said the browser wars were over? ;-)

Posted by Jensa at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Great example of how simple one can make an advanced multiplayer game. Sort of a Worms-ripoff but great friday fun! Just click "Quick Play" and you're started.

Posted by Jensa at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just found an issue with cached SWF files in IE7 - Stage.width will sometimes be reported incorrectly. We had a Movieclip that used Stage.width for positioning and whenever the SWF was cached, that movieclip would be positioned off stage. Hardcoding a variable instead of using the property solved the problem.

I seem to remember that there were some issues with Stage.width some years ago as well? Anyway - great to finally be doing some Flash work after editing JSP and portlets the last couple months...

Posted by Jensa at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Some weeks ago, Paulo discovered that the debug player that ships with the MacTel Beta of Flex is terribly old and there is no new version up on Adobe.com. Just as Paulo, I need to have the debug player installed, but today I found a really annoying thing with this version: it cannot install the Breeze / Connect plugin as the normal Flash Player can. Due to this, I'll have to use Acrobat Connect with Parallels and XP. Would be great if Adobe could keep all versions up to date...

Anyway: the new Acrobat Connect service (formerly called Breeze) totally rocks! Saved my ass yesterday as I could sit and watch M4 while he implemented some changes to a script. Since I saw what he typed, I could instantly catch any errors that occurred. Brilliant! Saved me a load of time!

Posted by Jensa at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Came back from MAX last week where I had a blast of a time hangin' out with with David and Jeremy. I missed out on a couple sessions that I really wanted to attend (those by Jesse Warden and Chafic Kazoun), but I also got to meet a lot of folks I've only emailed with such as Ryan Stewart, Ted patrick, Alex Uhlmann, Christophe Coenraets, Kevin Hoyt, Nick Welloff and Jeremy Geelan from Sys-con Media. Looks like you'll find one or two of my articles in upcoming issues of Sys-con's WDDJ and maybe even an interview on sys-con.tv some time? Fun, but a little odd since I don't speak english natively and I don't like being in front of a camera :)

One of the articles you'll find in WDDJ (formerly called MXDJ) is about the upcoming fight over developers and how the Dreamweaver team has been sleeping in class. One great example of this is that since I cannot transfer my licenses for Adobe software to my MacBook, I'll experiment with other software such as this neat CSS editor (via Paulo). Adobe should really watch out, or Dreamweaver could start lagging far behind. They now have so much legacy code to maintain, that others can quickly become better at core features such as CSS editing and debugging. This is after all what we developers spend our time doing.

Posted by Jensa at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Really looking forward to this event. The event itself will be huge (3000+ attendees) but seriously - The Venetian Hotel is insanely big. In just a few months time they'll have more than 7500 rooms and every room is a suite? The room I got is the size of a nice studio apartment with two beds, big bath, two TVs and a lounge area with both a sofa area, a round table area and a desk with fax and whatever is needed... Definetly the biggest hotel room I've ever stayed in so this starts out nicely. Now all I have to do is find David :)

Posted by Jensa at 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now we're getting somewhere! Check out this demo of a 3D Rhino, exported from 3DS Max and rendered complete with textures in Flash. This demo was made by Carlos Ulloa Matesanz (Make sure you check out his spiffy 3D portfolio as well) using a 3D engine he's been working on for some time. You may have seen this engine in real life already at the Robbie Williams site RudeBox. It's been heavily optimized since then and Carlos also just announced that this engine will be Open Source, so I really look forward to test it!

Posted by Jensa at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, I did a preso for my local Adobe User Group as part of the Norwegian Flash 10 year celebration. Before the session I made a small Keynote presentation that just cycled through screenshots from FutureSplash Animator/Flash 1 to Flash 8. I'm posting it here in case others need something similar and want to save the time installing all the trial versions. I found the first four over at Joen Amussen's blog and added the last 4 myself (Download Keynote file here). The main preso highlighted the different versions, the related software and important events (as seen by me). This presentation was in Norwegian so it's probably not that interesting for english speakers. I'll use bits of it for an article on Flashmagazine.com at some point.

We had huge cake with the Flash logo on, so there was more than enough to eat for the twentysomething that showed up. Socially, this was one of the better NAUG meetings as more than half the crowd joined us for beers and chat afterwards at "Den Gamle Majors Lab".

Posted by Jensa at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I've always loved MP3 visualizers. I really like the beautiful patterns that race across the screen in tune with the music and so does my kids. Sometimes they even say "dad can we watch some music" :)

A couple months ago, there was a competition over at GotoAndLearn.com where Lee Brimelow asked for cool use of the computeSpectrum() method. I didn't have time to participate, but this eve I finally got to play with the BitmapData classes in Flash 8. (Note to self: make less webapps and more fun stuff!). It's nothing fancy, but I'm pleased with the looks and how simple it was to do it.

Looks pretty good for something less than one Kb (if the FPS counter is removed)? Guess I'll make an AS3 version next to see how that affects speed (+ add computeSpectrum support). Download FLA

Posted by Jensa at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My phone took the plunge this morning - literally. It fell to the floor as it tried to wake my up... Can anyone recommend me a good phone to play wiith Flash Lite applications on?

Posted by Jensa at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I remember seeing this site by VectorKid about 6 years ago. Awesome skills and he explains it all in tutorials on the site. The illustrations are still amazing and he's now published a tutorial book. Probably a great place to start if you want to learn illustration using Flash.

Posted by Jensa at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday was sort of the official birthday of Flash, so what better way to celebrate my own birthday (today) than checking out this excellent Breeze presentation wrapping up the last ten years of Flash with Kevin Lynch, Mike Downey, Mike Chambers and Eric Wittman? Interesting to hear how video in Flash came about as well. Makes me think back to Flash 3 - the time I decided to quit using Director and do Flash fulltime.

Flash is an important part of my life as it is both my job and my hobby. My greet on Flash's Birthday goes out to the man who made Flash initially and is still very much is the driving force: Jonathan Gay. Thank you so much for inventing Flash and making it what it is today! I couldn't do without it :)

Video from the 10 Year Party (by Mike Chambers):

Wish I was there...

Posted by Jensa at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Great stuff! Andre Michelle (with others) has almost finished a MOD-player called 8bitboy. Now you can really start to think about implementing full-length audio in your Flash games without adding too much to the file size :)

While I was off on holiday, a lot of new info on manipulating sounds in Flash has come up. Just check out Andre's Scratch My Back. If sound can be manipulated as just numbers in an Array, I have a hard time seeing what would NOT be possible? A Flash based Sound Editor with effects such as delay and reverb? Keep at it guys! Now all I need is a couple days without client work...

PS: 3D in Flash is really moving forward these days! (I can't wait to see real 3D in Flash 10...)

Posted by Jensa at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So, I've had my MacBook Pro for a little more than two weeks and I thought I'd share my experiences using it for Flash development. The release of the BootCamp beta was my primary reason for switching and funny enough, I've only used it three times. The first time was for installing XP, CVS, Flash and FlashDevelop on it and the two other times was for playing C&C Generals. The second time, the whole machine froze and I had to reboot. A little discuraging, but BootCamp is after all in Beta so I guess I'll blame it on that. Paralells proved to be the solution for Flash development.

Continue reading "MacBook experiences" »

Posted by Jensa at 08:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The test results are in. I've tested my new 17" MacBook Pro (2,16Ghz CPU,2Gb RAM) using both BootCamp and Parallels against my Toshiba P20 (3Ghz P4 CPU, 1Gb RAM). The results are stunning.

I've tested three different projects, one of them was tested in both Flash 8 and FlashDevelop on all platforms for better comparison. The "Slideshow" app (tested in both FD and Flash) is a Slideshow Builder application made for a large Norwegian cultural institution. It's made up of 12 classes and 4 components. The CMS project is a full CMS done in Flash (22 classes, 17 components) and the 3D Graph is a small FD project based on the code in this tutorial (great read!). Here are the compile times:(All numbers are seconds)

The main difference in the test machines apart from RAM and CPU is that the MacBook has a newer and much faster memory arcitechture. Much of the speed is probably related to this since it can move data to and from the processor much faster.

It's facinating to see that even using Parallels for emulation, the MacBook is much faster than the PC. I didn't expect that. The compile times for FlashDevelop speak for themselves. They are the reason I hardly use the Flash IDE anymore (5-10 times the speed of compiling in the Flash IDE). I'm sure Flex will get me back in, but there's no Mac version of Flex on Adobe Labs at the moment. I guess I'll use BootCamp or Parallels for that as well.

Update: I've added figures for the non-universal version of Flash 8 running on OSX since several wanted that. The numbers for that looks good for the Slideshow, but for some reason it slows down when compiling all the components in the CMS app? The reason I didn't test this initially is that all my licenses are on PC, so I won't be able to switch them over until next upgrade. Hopefully, that's when the Universal Binaries arrive.

The Toshiba was well spec'ed when I got it and it's still a good PC. The reason I'm getting a new machine is that I've worn it out. The mousepad is dead, the screen goes partially black and the battery time is less than 10 minutes so it's now more of a stationary than a portable.

How I tested

Some observations

Paralells is great! You can even install Windows 95, 98 and Linux there for testing. I'm definetly paying $40 for that possibility. It's also available for PC (without OSX support) so non-switchers can enjoy this treat as well. Only thing I have against it is the response time on the mouse. It's really laggy - enough to irritate you since it's not precise. I guess I'll just develop a habit of using the keyboard more often, but it would be great if the fixed this in the final version.

Posted by Jensa at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

I've had a little too much to do lately. Despite having a brand new MacBook Pro next to me on the table I've had to do client work. All work - no play, but today is a public holiday so I finally have some time on my hands! Installin BootCamp and Paralells was a breeze. Installing XP on these took it's time as usual, bt it worked perfectly. The driver disk made by the BootCamp software worked perfectly and all devices was up and running at first reboot. Perfect!

The first thing I did in Boot Camp was installing C&C Generals: Zero Hour since that's one of the games I play a lot. Worked like a charm and I´ve never had that good framerates on my gaming-PC (2Ghz Pentium M with 1 gig ram and ATI XT800 GPU). It was however odd to play a RTS game with only one mouse button :)

Next step: testing compile times with FlashDevelop on Paralells.

(This is also my first post from the MacBook. Something up with the apostrophes? hmmm)

Posted by Jensa at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

My old Toshiba P20 has been great, but it weighs a full 5,5 kilos. It's also 2,5 years old and I've worn it out. The mousepad is dead and the screen has started failing so I needed a new machine. I had already decided on an Acer Travelmate 8100. Then came Apple's announcment of the new 17" MacBook Pro's. I was sold at once. It weighs about the same as the Acer, but has better hardware AND I can dual boot to play all the PC games I want :)

I'll start setting it up this evening and I'll post here about how it works for Flash development using Parallells (for emulation) and BootCamp. Can't wait for the Universal versions of all my Adobe software! Here is a pic of it on top of my Tosh. It's half the height, 3 cm smaller and it even looks smaller than Paulo's 15" Dell!

Just picked up a XP disc as well, so I'm all set to try this out...

Posted by Jensa at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

We just encountered an odd issue: if you try to set a variable in the class definition to a color value from a static class, Classes will fail to initialize as they should thus causing havok in our apps. Has anybody else encountered this or have an explanation?

Details: This bug has bugged the project I'm on for several occasions and Paulo just figured it out. The projects that had unexplainable problems all had one thing in common - they defined variables in the class definition and filled them from a Static Class where we stash all the colors used in the project. Since these technically are of the Number datatype, it should be safe to set them directly in the class definition, but for some reason this will cause odd and unexplainable behavior. Filling these variables in the constructor instead rectified the problem.

UPDATE: Nicolas Cannasse (author of MTASC) responded to this with a good answer when I posted it on FlashCoders.

Posted by Jensa at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cool use of Flash video and pretty funny on this site. I'm sort of curious if this humor valid in the US as well or is this a subject one really doesn't discuss publicly? There's quite a difference in what one can show on TV here in Europe versus the US. Is this ad campaign too private for most americans? (via Paulo)

Posted by Jensa at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As a coder, I'm not too artistic but I have a small trick to make my apps look good. It's called IconBuffet and I have two of their commercial Icon sets. Stylish and Professional are probably the words describing them the best. Considering what you get, they're really cheap but they also have a free service that will get you a bunch of icons that you'll probably never use, but they're "nice to have" and you just "might" need them one day. Following up on this entry, here's my list of what icons I have and what I can offer in return.

I've collected the free icons for some time but I'm still missing these:
Durango Research
Manhattan Night Life
Modena Alfanumerico Cold
Shanghai Tech Vector
Taipei Buddies 1
Taipei Buddies 2
Tower Grove Wedding

If you have one of these, send it to "nospam (at) netron.no" along with an email of wich you want me to send you back.

These are the 15 icon sets I can swap back:
Blinksale (5)
Dresden Tournament (1)
Farewell Snow (5)
Helsinki Hi-Fi (5)
Mallow Buzz 1 (4)
Mallow Buzz 2 (5)
Manhattan Metroplex (5)
Manhattan Finance (5)
Manhattan Veggie (4)
Marseilles Cafe (3)
Modena Simbolo(4)
Oslo Atmosphere (5)
Oslo Easter (5)
Oslo Finance (5)
Shanghai Tech (0)
Shanghai Tech Smilies (5)
Taipei Monkey (5)
Taipei Night Market (5)
Taipei Plastic Primates (4)
Tower Grove Melee (2)
Tower Grove Promenade (5)

(x) = deliveries remaining

Posted by Jensa at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I keep fighting to make my DataGrid look just like my Ad agency desires and todays biggest problem was a bug in the DataGrid component that renders the "backgroundColor" style for it useless. No matter what color I set, it turns up as the same shade of red... How to get around that then? I could start digging around the class files again, but it didn't feel too tempting. What other solutions are there then?

After some searching around, what looked the best was the $5 DataGrid extensions by Tufat (and Darren Gates?). At $5, it's almost too cheap? Anyway - it's a great extension that offers sorting numerically (how could MM omit that?), HTML display, editing, text wrapping, turning off the gridlines and much more. It even gives you proper coloring of rows that allow you to combine alternating rowcolors and custom column colors. The $5 gives you not only a SWC, but the full Source Code as classes so you can modify them as you like. Very neat!

Only problem is that when I extend it, my checkbox cellrenderer fails to render properly. Oh well. Working on it... :)

Posted by Jensa at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Lesson learned: When extending the V2 components, it is not enough just to construct the new class using the "extends" keyword like this:

class my.Components.MyDataGrid extends DataGrid
{
  function MyDataGrid()
  {
    trace("MyDataGrid instance created with scope "+this);
  }
}

To successfully extend the components you will need two things. One is a set of static variables that the component structure requires. The other is some exported symbols that will be referenced in the variables.

class my.Components.MyDataGrid extends DataGrid
{
  static var symbolOwner : Object = MyDataGrid;
  static var symbolName : String = "MyDataGrid";
  function MyDataGrid()
  {
    trace("MyDataGrid instance created with scope "+this);
  }
}

"symbolName" must be the same as the export ID in your library.
"symbolOwner" should be the base name of your class.

Next, create a FLA containing the component we're extending (DataGrid) and an empty movieClip with the identifier (Export ID) specified in "symbolName". The symbol should also link to the AS2 class using full path: my.Components.MyDataGrid. If you're using FlashDevelop, just add the exported SWF and select "Add to Library".

Now your extended class is ready to do it's job. Just add any methods you want to over-ride or any additional functionality required.

Posted by Jensa at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)