Randomize Everything

As we all know, Flash has these crazy bugs nobody ever understands. One of those is the fact that the last character of a dynamic textfield (which has been set to “AutoSize”) gets cut off when you’re using an embedded font. Up till now I still don’t understand what kind of situation leads to this exceptional behavior. The only thing I can say is that Flash Player fails to determine the correct text length which screws up the textfield width to be shorter than it has to be.

Example:

Blurred/Cut Off Characters

I’ve been with my new love for three weeks now and it feels like it’s going to be a healthy marriage for a long time. We both respect each other’s opinion about web related stuff and have good make up sex when things go off the right track.

Ok, a bit more serious now: I felt the need to change jobs because I needed to do more creative work and concentrate on the things that really matter to me: good atmosphere, cool people and challenging projects in a loose and respected environment. Since my previous employer didn’t really offer high levels of these essential potions, I had to find a company that actually did.

Without looking too far, I accidentally stumbled upon a company called Amphion, located on a ten minutes walk from my new apartment in Antwerp. It’s one of those companies that sniffs around here and there, keeping an eye out for creative and brain twisted people and allowing them to do what they’re good at: being crazy in any possible way! Since this is a motive I can but only encourage, Amphion seemed to be the right pick for me.

So I began working at their office in december 2009 as a lead developer on the new Coca Cola (Belgium) campaign website for the first quarter of 2010. I certainly hope that these kind of projects keep coming their (and my) way, not only to keep me busy for some time but also to fill this blog with cool shizzle and programming problems I encounter and have to find a solution for.
Summarized: I.learn() == you.learn().

Say no more? Ok, you’re right: www.amphion.be should convince (opens in a new browser window/tab).

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.

Continue reading…

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!

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…

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:

Continue reading…

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’.

Continue reading…