Posts
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Ariaware RIA Platform
I’ve recently started checking out the Ariaware RIA Platform. If you are building RIAs, do yourself a favor and download, install, and learn this framework.
The biggest thing that kept me away from learning more about this was the misconception that it was tied to MX 2004 screens/forms, which are tied to UIComponent and UIObject which I avoid like the plague. But this is not the case. You can use the framework with your own custom classes and components and not touch UIObject in any way.
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I've said it before, but JSFL rocks
So I am developing an app which loads some xml and parses it. Based on what’s in the xml, it loads another swf, and passes part of the xml over to the loaded swf. So right now I’m trying to develop the loaded movie. But I can’t just test it on its own. It really needs to be loaded by the other movie to make sure it’s integrating all just right. So this was my workflow:
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BitComponents are available!
BeamJive has just released the set of 30 components. Go get’em!
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BitComponents
A while back I mentioned that I was working on a new set of components. Well, it’s taken longer than I thought, but they are on the verge of being released, for real!
Actually, what happened is that right after that post, I was contacted by BeamJive, a company that already makes and sells a number of components. To make a long story short, the components will now be licensed, marketed, sold and supported by BeamJive.
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Jungle Code
Every once in a while you inherit some project to fix up something that “some guy who did some Flash work for us a few years back” did. Sometimes you luck out and it’s not that bad. My coworker, Sam was not so lucky today. He got one of those ones with code on movie clips nested x levels deep. We call it “Jungle Code”, because it’s like hacking your way through vines and underbrush, watching out for snakes and alligators.
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Spam the Spammers with your Screensaver
Ran across this link today: https://makelovenotspam.com/intl/index.html.
It’s a screensaver that targets known spammers, slowly eating up their bandwidth. The visual is a map of the world with almost missle-command-like arcs showing weapons of spam destruction raining down on the evildoers. Each target site also has a little bar graph showing how much bandwidth they have left.
The screensaver will only use 3.4 megs of your own bandwidth in a 24 hour period. But the cumulative effect should do some damage if enough people use it. Not sure how effective it is, but it’s kind of satisfying to watch.
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C# and DirectX
I’ve been delving in to C# and DirectX 9. Throwing in some math formulas like Strange Attractors and rendering thousands of 3D particles in real time. Wow! Very cool stuff!
I’m looking for two or three people who could test some stuff out. It works great on my two development machines, but I have a hard time deploying it to anyone elses. You’d have to have a decent pc, Windows 2000 or XP, .net framework installed, and be willing to download and install the DirectX 9.0c for Managed Code runtime from Microsoft, which I think is something like 34 megs. (My app is only about 40k.)
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Flash in the Can – Date Change
I was just informed that Flash in the Can will now be held from Saturday, April 9, 2005 to Monday, April 11, 2005. This at least avoids a direct overlap with Flash Forward, and makes it possible to attend both in full. I’ve pretty much decided on attending Flash in the Can at this point. I’ve been to three Flash Forwards, but never a FiTC. Gotta check it out. I’ll be submitting a proposal to speak and have been all but guaranteed that it will be accepted. If you’re attending and have anything in particular you’d like me to babble on about, let me know.
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Oxygen, XPath and Flash. My life is easier
A while back I discovered XPath and XFactor Studio’s implementation.
This saved me huge amounts of time. We use a lot of IMS based XML for educational activities – multiple choice, fill in the blank, quizzes, etc. The stuff gets incredibly complex and bloated, but it’s a “standard” so we are stuck with it.
Earlier this week my coworker, Sam Robbins, turned me on to Oxygen, a Java based XML editor. I was doing all my editing in PrimalScript, which does basic validation and formatting. But Oxygen rocks. My favorite feature is the built in XPath parser. Just enter an XPath expression and the results open in a new panel. Click on a result and that node is highlighted in your XML document. If that’s what you want, copy and paste the expression into your selectNodes call in the AS file. Wow!
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Hacked. (Sorry if you got a strange message from me.)
My PHPBB forum was hacked tonite. Banned the entire user list and sent out an obscene email to several thousand friends. How nice. I’ve done some damage control, but anyone know how to fix this stuff? I don’t have the time or energy to learn about repairing hacked PHPBB forums.
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