I have to admit, it took me awhile to understand why anyone would want to open source their software. I understood perfectly well why I would want to use it, but as a developer who makes money from writing software I assumed you don’t make money writing open source software, thus, you starve. I understand now how it works and will explain simply for both developers and business why open source software makes sense.
Don’t use Number to iterate over for-loops
A while back I read a couple of blog posts about the slowness of using uint and int to iterate through for-loops. I needed to do some testing for a little project today and found this is false.
When using the “i” variable in for(var i = 0; i < length; i++) as an input into mathematical operation, especially when doing fractions, Number is faster for obvious reasons. This was established in the posts of the previously mentioned blogs. But when simply iterating over an array which is a very common use-case for for-loops uint is faster. Here is my test setup:
var value:Object;
var arr:Array = new Array(1000000);
var length:uint = arr.length;
var startTime:Number = getTimer();
var arr:Array = new Array(1000000);
var length:uint = arr.length;
var startTime:Number = getTimer();
for (var i:uint = 0; i < length; i++)
value = arr[i];
var endTime:Number = getTimer();
trace(”Total Time:”, endTime - startTime);
I was getting around 210 for uints and around 230 for Number. Not a big difference, but I feel dumb for always using Number for this sort of thing without even thinking about how it works.
Using Your Own Custom Metadata in AS3
Flex 3 gives us a great new feature, custom metadata tags. Now, I know you could actually use custom metadata in Flex 2, but you would have to add "-keep-as3-metadata MyTag" to every single project that utilized these custom tags. In Flex 3, if you add "-keep-as3-metadata MyTag" to a library (using compc to compile a SWC or a Flex Builder Library project), then EVERY project that uses that SWC will automatically keep the "MyTag" metadata tags. This allows custom libraries that utilize these tags for development.
Would be cool to create a library to hook up listeners so you can create listeners like this:
[Listen(obj="this.closeButton", event="click")]
public function closeClickHandler(event:MouseEvent) {...}
public function closeClickHandler(event:MouseEvent) {...}
You'd use -keep-as3-metadata Listen in the libraries compiler options. Maybe if you want I could post a tutorial on doing something like this. Drop me note and let me know if there is interest.
Why is WordPress so easy to install, so painful to update?
I don't think there is a better open-source blog engine on the market than WordPress, but why is it so painful to update it? You have to back up the database, download the files, copy over the config file, themes, uploads, and any other stuff you need to the new installation, and then rename the folders quickly so the new one fills the space of the old one.
Why can't we just get the files that have changed downloaded and the database updated by pressing a big blue "Update" button?
How to Roll Back Changes using Subversion
A question I've often gotten is "How do I roll back some changes I made in Subversion?" I'm the company expert in Subversion here at mediaRAIN (another one of my hats) so I thought I'd answer the question one more time.
Subversion is great as it allows you to track every change you've made and go back to a previous version if needed. Sometimes you only need to go back to an earlier revision temporarily (for example to tag the project at that point). But other times you (or that lousy co-worker who left on vacation yesterday!) have introduced bugs or committed something you shouldn't have. Now you need to roll back the broken revision(s). Looking at TortoiseSVN's menu or going through the list of command-line options you'll see ... gasp! ... subversion forgot a roll-back feature! How could they do that?! Isn't that one of the main reasons for using a versioning system like Subversion?
How to listen to Flash events that don’t bubble
I learned a little trick the other week and thought I'd share. Sometimes you might need to listen to a non-bubbling event "up the chain" somewhere, but of course, since it is not bubbling, that can be hard. The trick is that event events that don't have bubbling still have the capture phase, so if you flip that capture flag to true in the event listener then you can now listen to any events dispatched by any child views whether they are bubbling or not.
Example:
// listen for some event (this one is even custom) that does not bubble
// make sure to set true on capture
stage.addEventListener("customNonBubbling", myListener, true);
// make sure to set true on capture
stage.addEventListener("customNonBubbling", myListener, true);
...
<mx:Button id="myButton" click="dispatchEvent(new Event('customNonBubbling'))"/>
Note: this only works on display objects as far as I know. Capture and bubbling don't apply to objects that are not on the display list.