This component is coming along. Chafic Kazoun and I have been passing the code back and forth all afternoon and evening. He has contributed so much to it, I can hardly take full credit for it at this point. There’s some more work I’d like to do with it, but it’s definitely ready for use now. Amazing how much work goes into a relatively simple component like this. Check it out here.
Read more...I’ve made quite a few v2 components at my job. This is my first public, open source one. The BIT-101 Slider Component. This is something I find myself needing all the time to quickly adjust values in experiments and stuff. Much easier than a text box or numeric stepper. I really impressed myself by making it bindable!
Any of you component pros who want to pick it apart and comment on any ways it could be more standardized or improved, please do.
Also, if anyone could give me some tips to get started in implementing styles or themes in creating components, that’d be great.
A few people asked me why I would do something like IDE Asteroids (see previous entry). What possible use could something like that be?
Well, first of all, I did it to see if I could. But then I was forced to justify its existence with something at least somewhat productive. Well, I’m always up to the challenge, so here you go: The Grid 3D Extension.
Again, this is a zipped mxp file, and you’ll need Flash MX 2004 and the latest version of the Extension Manager. It opens up as a custom panel and draws a fully customizable 3D grid on stage. A virtual trackball lets you rotate the grid in real time in 3D. When you have it how you want it, hit “Make it so” and the grid is drawn permanantly to the stage.
These last two extensions make use of the drawingLayer for temporary drawing functions. This drawingLayer was only intended for use in tools, so this is a pretty unorthadox use of it. As such, you can run into problems if you start swapping windows, choosing different tools or taking other actions while in the midst of previewing a grid. Mostly these consist of the grid disappearing, and occasionally some drawing artifacts. The reset button in the panel seems to take care of most of these anyway.
Another neat discovery is just how fast JSFL is, compared to AS, probably due to the fact that is being run by the IDE itself, rather than just the player. In the first version I did, I was doing all the 3D calculation in AS and just passing the drawing commands in to JSFL with MMExecute. In this version, entire functions are created as AS strings and passed to JSFL, and then the functions are called from AS, or sometimes from JSFL. The performance increase is incredible. A bit tedious formatting all those code strings, and of course it would have been easier to make an external JSFL file and call that from MMExecute, but I like the idea of packaging the whole thing up in one swf.
For a taste of some of the crazy stuff you can do with the new extensibility layer in Flash MX 2004, check out IDE Asteroids. You’ll need Flash MX 2004 and the latest version of the Extension Manager available on Macromedia’s site.
The game installs as a Window SWF and lets you play the game right in the authoring environment. Obviously not the most practival example of using extensibility, but a pretty powerful example of just how much you can do with it.
For those of you who don’t know, much of my time over the last few months has been spent working on my new book, Extending Flash MX 2004, Complete Guide and Reference to JSFL. I’ve worked with Friends of ED on chapters for about six other books before this, but this is the first experience with them since they were bought out by Apress. I have to say that the attention to detail in editing is outstanding. Earlier I would write a chapter, it would be reviewed by a tech editor and I’d fix anything up based on that review. Next time I saw it was when I got my copies of the book in the mail, usually with some pretty serious typos.
Right now we’re working on the third round of edits, working right off the pdfs, all layed out with graphics. If there are any typos left after this, I only have myself to blame.
…and started my own blog. What the hell, all the other kids are doing it. Yahoo! something else to fall behind on! Took a couple of hours of Moveable Type configuration, but really not that painful. Let’s see where it goes.
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