Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMay 15th, 2009 | No Comments
Another reason to attend 360|Flex is the Flight Framework will be there. We’ll be doing a workshop-style presentation Tuesday on getting started with Flight. Hope to see you there!
Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Flash, FlexMay 14th, 2009 | 2 Comments
I am working with Tyler on Stealth, our high-performance component framework. After reading this article on performance by Arno Gourdol of Adobe I began wondering if we should leave behind our Flash roots of motion and timeline design by defaulting framerate to 0 in our Stealth-based applications.
Framerate makes great sense when doing games or timeline based animations, but in applications do we need it? We can update the screen on mouse moves, roll overs, etc. with the MouseEvent.updateAfterEvent instance method. And for transitions and tweening the class could use a Timer for the duration of...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralMay 1st, 2009 | No Comments
Hooray for the Flex team! They’re coding to interfaces. I’ve been looking through the source of recent Flex 4 code and I have to say, I’m getting excited to use this stuff. Here are a few of the things I’ve found with just a few minutes of going through their code:
IDeferredContentOwner - The current version of Flex has something like this, but much more complex. This interface makes sense, and simply allows the deferred creation of its children when they are needed (such as a ViewStack in the current Flex). Just a couple of properties and it allows the component to figure...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralApr 21st, 2009 | No Comments
I created a service with a FireFox plugin a couple of years ago called MyStickies with Derek Andriesian. We got going on it and did quite a bit, but then we weren’t sure how to monetize it, so we left it alone. However, it still seems to be alive and kicking. I just got an email from Suzane Smith letting me know she included it in a list of 100 Firefox tips for research. You may notice that MyStickies is number 20, and the first one listed under the “Best Addons” section.
I’d like to move it over to Google App Engine and add note sharing sometime. Again, without monetization...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralApr 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments
Ha! I serialized a display object. Didn't think it could be done, but with a little work it can be. See my previous post about overriding Transform and Matrix objects for a little more context. I'm jumping right in to how I did it.
So the main problem before was the Transform class requiring a parameter in its constructor. So I subclassed Transform and made that parameter optional. Turns out if you pass in null to the superclass you get an error too, so if no displayObject is passed in I use a Shape. (I figured it was one of the cheaper display objects to make, though between that and Bitmap I'm...
Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralApr 20th, 2009 | No Comments
I'm building a a commercial library for scrap-book or other composition type applications and it would be useful to be able to override the flash.geom.Transform and flash.geom.Matrix classes with my own. So I played around with it for awhile and thought I'd share what I found.
First I tried setting my own matrix. I know that when you access displayObject.transform.matrix you get a clone of the object's transform matrix, so I create a test class called MyMatrix.
public class MyMatrix extends Matrix
{
public function MyMatrix(a:Number=1, b:Number=0, c:Number=0, d:Number=1,...
