The past few weeks I’ve been programming a scheduling component in Flash which has to be extremely performant. Every small adaption in my code that could help with limiting the processing needs is a good adaption. Today I stumbled upon a post of Grant Skinner in which he explains that using a uint is slower than a normal int. The uint’s can get five times slower than using a normal int.
Yep, that’s true! You can make my day by filling out a short survey with 9 questions for me.
Why? The past days I have been thinking about creating a new Flash website for my alter ego: Arcko Drazen. I use this name for my dj and music hobby and like to know more about the visiting behavior of the people that are interested in such things as music and dj’ing.
So, if you are such a person or you just love filling in surveys, continue to the following url: http://www.arckodrazen.com/survey !
Many thanks for all your support!
Posted by Bart Claessens
on May 01, 2009
ActionScript 3, Adobe, Air, Project Management, Tools / No Comments
ActionScript 3, Adobe, Air, Project Management, Tools / No Comments
Today I made a small Adobe Air application to track time on different kind of tasks while developing.
Time tracker can come in handy when you want to know the exact time you were working on a specific task. I felt in need of application like this to compare my project estimates with the real time I spent on that particular project. As you know sometimes a developer has to go to the bathroom, take a small nap or refill his coke coffee level. Time tracker allows you to pause development time and resume it when you are back and ready to rock your keyboards buttons off!
Today I had the chance to create my first real Internet-widget in Flash. Since this was (and still is) a new topic to me, I asked a few colleagues how they develop and share widgets. One thing popped up quite immediately: use ClearSpring!
ClearSpring is a platform you can use to manage, distribute and analyze your widgets. The cool thing about it: it’s not Flash only, you can even use it for normal html-widgets.
Some of you will probably know the ‘as’-keyword. If not, a short explanation:
The ‘as’-keyword is used to cast an object to another one. (Well it’s not exactly ‘casting’, if someone feels like explaining the difference between casting with the ‘as’-keyword or by using the class constructor, please go ahead in the comment below!).
To make it more concrete, here is an example: Continue reading…
In times of crisis there is little few work than other busy-o-noo-we-have-to-reach-our-deadline-developer-days.
So, there are a few useful things we can do: invest our time into new technologies or play with things (with the technology we daily use) we didn’t play with before. Mostly because we didn’t have enough time back then. The second most useful thing we can do is getting a certificate for the technologies we use every day.
Today I stumbled upon the following problem while parsing an xml: I tried to parse an attribute of an XML node which contained ‘\n’-characters and tried to put this parsed text into a dynamic text field on the stage.
Guess what, instead of parsing ‘\n’ to a newline, AS3 showed me the ‘\n’ in my text. This is not as I had hoped.
You can fix this very easily by Continue reading…
If you feel like your built-in iSight Macbook Cam is not working correctly when you are visiting a Flash website or viewing a Flash application, you are pretty much wrong my friend.
Ok, I have to admit, it’s a kind of hidden but you’ll have to change a small option to get it working.
Here’s a little walkthrough:
Did you know that casting a String to a Number using the ‘as’ operator returns 0 instead of the correct number? Use the Number() constructor to cast it correctly. The same applies for ‘int’ and ‘uint’.
From time to time some of us still have to code in oldskool ActionScript 2. A few days ago a colleague asked me for a function for trimming ‘new line’ (\n), ‘carriage return’ (\r) characters, spaces, …
So I ended up searching my archives for a code snippet to archive this functionality and look what I found: