Example:

Blurred/Cut Off Characters

var textFormat:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
textFormat.rightMargin = 1;	
 
textField.antiAliasType = AntiAliasType.ADVANCED;
textField.gridFitType = GridFitType.SUBPIXEL;
textField.embedFonts = true;			
textField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.CENTER;
textField.defaultTextFormat = textFormat;
textField.setTextFormat(textFormat);

Hope this helps!

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).

So, what about the Number type? Well, I thought the Number type was a very slow type compared to the new int and uint but that also didn’t seem to be right!

Sho just posted a really interested article on why he won’t be using the int data type very frequently in ActionScript 3. Up until reading it, I had believed that as in other languages, there were large performance benefits to using ints and uints appropriately in AS3. Turns out that isn’t the case.

I did some quick testing on this, which confirm Sho’s assertion that int is only slightly faster than Number in ideal circumstances, but the results from uint were much more surprising.

Read the complete post here: gskinner.com

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!

A little bit about the application itself: this is my first Adobe Air application, I made it in the Flash IDE and compiled it against the Adobe Air 1.5 runtime. Many thanks to Hans Van de Velde for his SteadyTimer class. The SteadyTimer class fixes the lagging problem of the AS3 Timer class.

I hope you guys enjoy it and if you have any cool ideas to make it even better, let me know.
Please mind that this is only the first version. It still needs some extra work because it doesn’t check for user input and stuff like that.

Download the .air installer: here (you’ll need Adobe Air 1.5 runtime)
Download the sources: here

Screenshot:

Time Tracker

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.

What it actually does: it creates a kind of wrapper around your Flash or HTML widget to add extra functionality. One of the most important features is that you can share your widget around the whole social landscape out there. A few other pro’s are:
- Search engine optimization
- Analytics
- Skinnable menu’s
- One-click-widget-distribution

So, if you are a widget developer, you definitely have to check out this platform!
Go ahead: http://www.clearspring.com

Want to see it in action? Here’s the widget I made today:

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:

bart as Person

Where ‘bart’ is the variable and ‘Person’ the class you want the variable to cast to.

Now, the trouble starts when you want to use this keyword in combination with other operators.
Why? I hear you asking. Well: the ‘as’-keyword has a lower priority than i.e. the concatenation operator (+) in ActionScript.

To show you in an example:

trace("Result: " + bart as Person);   // The output will look like: "null"

Hu? Yes. It actually concatinates “Result: ” and bart first and than casts the whole thing to a Person object.

The fix is easy:

trace("Result: " + (bart as Person));

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.

That’s why I got myself certified for Flash CS3. The exam was made up out of 57 questions. I have to admit that the exam wasn’t a peace of cake at all, I thought it would be but some of the questions I had to answer were very complicated and about things I seldom use, like ‘accessibility’ in Flash.
I think I underestimated the exam because I have been developing Flash ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 for about two to two and a half years. Now, this didn’t seem enough because there were a lot of questions about the Flash IDE, embedding video’s, exporting to correct formats, using the correct symbols and there specific use as Adobe intended them.

So, if you are considering getting a Flash CS3 certificate yourself: consider looking around for a good book with a detailed description of the complete Flash IDE and a few basics of the ActionScript Language (both ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0).

You can fix this very easily by changing the ‘\n’-characters in your XML to:




Original:

<book name="my \n book"></book>

Changed:

<book name="my &#10; book"></book>

You can find other codes to replace characters with on this reference: w3 schools

Here’s a little walkthrough:

• Right click on the Flash (website/app) you are visiting
• Click ’settings…’ in the right click dialog box
• Click the webcam tab
• Change your camera to ‘USB Video Class Video’

That’s it!

Flash settings dialog box to change certain settings like the webcam.