Best Show I’ve Seen

Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralJul 31st, 2009 | 1 Comment Just wanted to let you know about a show I’ve fallen in love with. I’ve seen the commercials and thought it might be interesting to watch, but never got around to it. Once I saw a few episodes I was totally hooked. A couple of weeks ago I watched two seasons of NBC’s Chuck within 48 hours. I has become my favorite TV series followed by The Office and Lost, and I can’t wait for season 3 to air next March. You can watch all 13 episodes from season 1 starting with the pilot on Warner Bros website. The second season has only about half of its 22 episodes online at nbc.com or...

Flight Framework at 360|Flex!

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!

Sweet Gumbo/Spark interfaces

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...

MyStickies: still alive and kicking

Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralApr 21st, 2009 | 3 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...

Serializing display objects

Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralApr 20th, 2009 | 10 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...

Overriding Flash’s Transform and Matrix

Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralApr 20th, 2009 | 2 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,...