Would it be bad to leave behind our Flash roots?

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Flash, FlexMay 14th, 2009 | 3 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...

Flight Framework Highlights

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, Flex, PHPFeb 12th, 2009 | 4 Comments The Flight Framework is basically a collection of great utilities and independent tidbits that are organized to help us build our application. So I thought I’d make a call out to all the great standalone features in Flight, tell what they are, and leave it to another day to go more in depth on them. Fix for abstract classes The tiny static classes in the flight.error package allow you to ensure an abstract class is not instantiated and that abstract methods are overriden. Registry A global registry to store objects or data that anything in an application can have access too. Reflection The...

Undo/Redo for all your TextFields

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexFeb 4th, 2009 | 49 Comments I made the TextField undo component. Add this component to any Flash or Flex application and all your text components will have undo and redo. This has been open sourced and is on http://code.google.com/p/undo-textfields/. Instead of making different Flex and Flash components to use in place of the available components, I made one that adds undo to existing text components. It should work in Flash and in Flex, though I just have a Flex example to show you today. You can see that it can be container specific, though you would probably just put it on the root of your application or the stage. Type...

Undo in TextFields

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexJan 22nd, 2009 | 4 Comments I presented on creating your own undo/redo at 360 MAX unconference and a uFlash meeting. People seemed interested in knowing how to do it, but were more interested in having the code. It really should be part of Flex TextAreas and TextInputs. So I was going to code up a couple custom components that extended TextArea and TextInput (e.g. UndoableTextArea) and release them for use. However, as Tyler reminded me, that wouldn’t work in Flash apps, only Flex. So I have a proposal and would like to get your feedback. If I created a component that you put on the root of your application (or any...

Flight Framework coming soon?

Posted by Jacob Wright in FlashSep 12th, 2008 | 1 Comment I’ve been involved with the Flight framework since its inception at mediaRAIN. I’ve helped Tyler with it via brainstorming, feedback, etc. But he’s been the one mostly to code it up. It’s been great from the beginning for a lot of our projects because it has built-in undo/redo and allows for some quite custom things along those lines. Well, Tyler went in another direction with it for awhile, wanting to please everyone, taking out Singletons and such for example, and mediaRAIN forked it into a project called Nimbus. I will probably be helping out with both as I can. Flight...

Flash Project Timer

Posted by Jacob Wright in Applications, Flash, GeneralNov 29th, 2005 | 29 Comments A project timer is something I have been needing. I have trouble keeping track of hours for projects I have. I usually don’t worry about time traking for my personal projects, which is good because if I thought about all the time I’ve spent (wasted), I might take up a new hobby. But for contract work and for projects at mediaRAIN, I need to keep track of time I spend on each project. I always forget to write something down at the end of the day, and usually can’t remember how long I’ve spent anyway. So, I made a project timer. It actually is built in Macromedia Flash,...