Posted by Jacob Wright in GeneralAug 21st, 2009 | 4 Comments
I don’t presume to place myself at the status of GoF or Martin Fowler, but I came up with a concept that was then improved upon by my twin brother, Tyler, which I feel could stand to be called a pattern. I may not be the first one to do this, but if I am, then it really shouldn’t be called a pattern since design patterns are observable patterns found in a lot of code that can be documented and generalized. I apologize in advance if it should not hold “pattern” status, but I think it is worth discussing, so please be kind. It’s pretty simple in concept, and has turned...
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...
Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexJul 17th, 2009 | 24 Comments
Ever need a thumbnail of an image in Flash? I do, and honestly speaking, the resampling that Flash does is less than ideal. Unless you only need to resize by half or bigger. But my thumbnails usually need to be smaller.
I searched for a solution and found on voq.com a promising library with some algorithms that worked quite nicely and a demo. The quality was nice, but the speed was slow. It also fiddled with the color a little bit. If I put the "easyScaling" parameter down from .5 to .25 I ended up with a nicer thumbnail but was slower to make and had more color disfiguration. You could tell what...
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 | 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...
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 out how to do it.
IViewport...
