Posts
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XAML.net misses the boat on SWF
I was doing some research on some different types of layout managers, and in checking out XAML, I came across www.xaml.net. As of this writing, they feature the following comparison matrix on their home page:
I think you’ll all be shocked to see that the SWF format does not support video, as well as many other things you assumed it did. In reality, I think if you add Flex into the picture, we’ve got everything on that grid covered except native 3D.
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I won at Cannes!
Cannes Lions 2005 International Advertising Festival that is.
The Puma Starck kinematic guy I did last year for Beam won a bronze award in the Cyber Lions category. Very nice.
Link: https://www.canneslions.com/winners/cyber/win_4_1.htm
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PrimalScript 4.0 Info
I’ve been given unofficial permission to share some stuff from the next version of PrimalScript, due out in August I believe. So, over the next few weeks or months, I’ll be dropping little tidbits here and there.
The first feature I wanted to give you a quick peak at is code folding. This is the one thing I sorely missed in PrimalScript. Here you can see that classes and functions are automatically foldable:
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Brilliant Interface!
No, not a web site, or an application or a component. I’m talking about a dental tool!
I was at the dentist today, and while he took a break to find a bigger drill or something, I was looking over the tools on the tray beside my head. There was this one that’s kind of like a probe for measuring the depth of cavities or gum pockets or something. It’s almost needle-like and has notches in it to measure from 0 to 10 millimeters.
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Ant and PrimalScript, Part I
One great thing that my excursion into Eclipse gave me was experience with Ant. I wanted to see if I could bring it back home to PrimalScript with me. And I was successful! So here is an Ant Primer (from a relative Ant newbie).
What is this Ant of which you speak?
Ant is basically a java program that reads an xml file and does stuff that the xml file says to do. Simple. The xml has to be formatted in a particular way of course. There are a lot of built in commands you can use in Ant, all kinds of things like creating and moving and deleting directories and files, zipping and unzipping things, on and on. You can also use it to run just about any executable file on your computer, along with parameters.
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To FAMES or not to FAMES
I?ve been using FAMES for a couple of weeks now, and here’s where I decide to continue or go back to PrimalScript.
I’m not particularly a latest-acronym-bandwagon-jumper-onner (LABJO?), and I’m not a big open source junkie. So whichever setup actually works best for me in the real world is the one I’m going to use.
I thought I?d make an in-depth analysis of FAMES, point by point. I?ll go over each part of the FAMES set up, say what it is and some of its pros and cons. Note, a lot of this is simply personal opinion. And if I have any technical details wrong, I?m sure I?ll hear about it.
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Updated Eclipse AsUnit Templates
Thanks to some advice from Christophe Herreman, I’ve updated these templates to use the built in variables Eclipse provides. Now, almost everything is filled in for you.
AllTests:
import com.asunit.framework.*; class AllTests extends TestSuite { private var className:String = "AllTests"; public function AllTests() { super(); addTest(new ${enclosing_package}.${package}.AllTests()); // and/or add specific tests here } }TestCase:
import ${enclosing_package}.*; import com.asunit.framework.*; class ${enclosing_package_and_type} extends TestCase { private var className:String = "${enclosing_package_and_type}"; private var instance:${enclosing_type}; public function setUp():Void { instance = new ${enclosing_type}(); } public function tearDown():Void { delete instance; } public function testInstantiated():Void { assertTrue("${enclosing_type} instantiated", instance instanceof ${enclosing_type}); } }Read more... -
ASUnit Templates for Eclipse
OK, so I’ve been using Eclipse more and more. One thing I missed about it while using ASUnit is the missing Create Classes command that you can run from the Flash IDE. This recursively creates AllTests classes in each directory of your package, down to the class you are writing a test for, and creates a TestCase class for the specificy class. Using FAME, you have to write all of these yourself. I did this once, and that was enough. Then I created templates to do it for me after this:
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West Coast Flash Application Developer Needed
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve recently (well, a month ago) started a new job at https://www.flashcomposer.com as Senior Flash Architect. The company is located in Scotts Valley, CA, yet I am still in Boston, at least for the forseeable future, working remotely. I’m really enjoying the initial few weeks architecting out a very large app, and the opportunity to apply so many standard development processes, and work with such an organized group.
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O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf
This has been out for quite a while, but I finally decided to give it a look.
The deal is pretty simple. Twenty bucks a month, you can read any book in the catalog, on line. Not just the usual O’Reilly titles with the strange animals on the cover either. Books by Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, SAMS, Que, Alpha, etc. When I click on “Browse all titles”, I see “Books 1 to 10 of 3006”. That’s a pretty good selection.
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