Over the last few weeks I’ve taken a deep dive into JavaScript and Canvas. It’s been a blast, a real eye opener and paradigm shift. As with a lot of other Flash developers, whenever I’ve thought about “HTML5” I’ve thought something along the lines of “Ewww… JavaScript! I don’t want to go back to loose typing and prototype. I left all that behind with AS1!” I think part of the presumption is because JavaScript doesn’t have many of the more hardcore “developer-y” features like classes, inheritance, data types, etc. that it is somehow “less professional” than similar languages that do have these features, like ActionScript. Perhaps some Flash developers look back at the code they wrote when they were writing AS1 and assume that JS devs are doing the same thing. Not taking into account that the AS1 they were writing years ago was perhaps pretty early in their coding career. At least, that’s how I was viewing thing to some degree, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
Read more...[Edit] So, this might have been a great idea, but too little, too late, and would really need to make some kind of “click this button and record your message” application. And maybe someone bugging people go get it done. So consider this project cancelled. :)[/Edit]
Next Sunday, Feb 20, 2011, I’m running a half marathon – the Half at the Hamptons at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. During my run tonight, I started thinking about some of the minor details of the race, like… what am I going to listen to while I’m running? I’ve gone through phases of listening to music, listening to nothing, listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks during my runs. I know can’t listen to 2 solid hours of music while running – I get bored with it. And I know I can’t listen to anything that requires long term attention, like podcasts or audiobooks.
Read more...I tweeted today about this being my second full day on Ubuntu and it a bunch of responses from people wanting to know how I did this or that, what my experience was, etc. So here’s the story.
For a while, I’ve been wanting to set up a home server. For backups, file storage, and to learn a bit more about server administration and server side programming. It’s a big gap in my knowledge base. I also wanted to get back into Linux. I’d fist messed around with Linux back in the mid 90’s, downloading RedHat onto something like 18 floppy disks via a 14.4 modem in order to install it. Back in the good old days when you had to install your own window manager and configure it by editing config files. I know you can still do that, but back then it was the only way to do it. Finally, I wanted to get back into hardware. From my very first PC (after graduating from a Commodore 128 and Amiga 500) up until my first laptop, I had built all my own PCs from scratch. I’d start with some cheap or free used PC and upgrade it bit by bit until it was a nice machine. It would often wind up with some friend or family member and I’d start over.
Read more...Been wanting to play with this for a while now. It’s a lot of fun, in an old school, AS1 type of way. I have a lot to learn, but was able to whip this up in an hour or so. Once you figure out how to get at the canvas and the context, it’s all pretty straightforward. Just like AS3, without the data types. Or classes. Or display list.
Read more...A couple of things today.
First is on adding content to Windows and Panels. By default, if you added a child to one of these, it would just add it like any other child, positioning it from the top left of the parent’s position. In particular on the Window, this forced you to reposition your content so it wasn’t on top of the title bar. Also, in either case, if your content was larger than the parent, it would march on outside of the bounds of the parent.
Read more...As suggested by Vic C, I’ve set up a Google Group for MinimalComps. Discuss, request, share.
https://groups.google.com/group/minimalcomps
Read more...Just added a new feature, as suggested by Karim in the previous post. This saves a hash of all components that have id attributes, and then allows you to find any component by its id. Here’s an example:
[code lang=“as3″]package
{
import com.bit101.components.*;
import com.bit101.utils.MinimalConfigurator;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
public class Playground extends Sprite
{
private var config:MinimalConfigurator;
public function Playground()
{
Component.initStage(stage);
var xml:XML =
config = new MinimalConfigurator(this);
config.parseXML(xml);
}
A couple of updates to MinimalComps.
First, go over to soulwire and check out the great GUI tool created there. One thing that struck me about it was the dark colors on the components. I liked it and set out to create a similar theme by setting dark values on the Style class. Easy enough. But I didn’t want to go through that every time I wanted to create the same look, so I added a new method on Style, called Style.setStyle. This can be “light” or “dark” (Style.LIGHT or Style.DARK). If you don’t set it, or set it to light, you’ll get something like this:
Read more...Haven’t actually added anything in quite a while, but haven’t had any bug reports or problems with it, so I thought I’d make it official.
Read more...This is a concept I’ve had for a while, and last week started to implement it. It wound up being orders of magnitude simpler than I imagined. The core part of it was done days ago. I cleaned things up more recently and finally checked it in and made some examples. As easy as Minimal Comps are to instantiate and set up, once you start getting into more complex layouts with lots of components, you can still wind up with a messy bunch of code. Well now you can create your layouts in an external xml file and leave your classes to handle the logic, as it should be.
Read more...