dispatchEvent()™

UPDATE: We had our AUG meeting last night. I believe it went very well. Danny presented how to set up custom Proxies and I talked about the State pattern. We also had a general discussion about how visual elements work in AS3 and Flex.

Please click below to download the presentation notes and actionscript files.

• Basic Sate Pattern Demo (ZIP)
• Bi-polar Bear Demo (ZIP)
• Bi-polar Bear Demo (SWF)
• Basic State Pattern Diagram (PDF)
  
• Event Filter Diagram (PDF)
• Flex Store Demo
• View States in Flex
• My post on the DisplayList

See you next month!
The next Manhattan Adobe Users Group is coming up next Wednesday, 10/04. It’s going to be a design patterntastic time! Danny Patterson is a genius and fully dedicated Flash nerd who will most certainly be dropping mad design pattern knowledge on y’all. I’ll be covering the state pattern and some fun things you can do with it using Flash and Flex. Sign-up and see you there!

More info

I found an issue with the Flex Builder today when using the design perspective. (Please don’t write back telling me that design perspective is for wussies, it’s awesome.)

In short, things get screwed up if you use spaces in your MXML attributes. Say you write the following code:

<mx:Canvas id = "spaces" x = "75" y = "100" width = "500" height = "180" backgroundColor = "0xffeedd"">
     <mx:Text text = "HELLO WORLD" x = "100" y = "0" />
</mx:Canvas>

Notice the spaces between the attribute names and the values. I don’t know why anyone would want to add spaces there but I’ve seen people do it.

Now if you switch into design mode and change the values there, Flex adds another set of values shown in bold.

<mx:Canvas id = "spaces" x = "75" y = "100" width = "500" height = "180" backgroundColor = "0xffeedd" width="300" x="275" y="31" backgroundColor="#808040">
     <mx:Text text = "HELLO WORLD" x = "100" y = "0"  x="38" y="104" text="FOOBAR"/>
</mx:Canvas>

OMG! Flex doesn’t know what to do with the spaced out attributes and you get a big fat mess! So the moral of the story is, please DON’T put spaces between the attribute name and the values in Flex just in case some wussy wants to fiddle with the design.

Gospel Mimes* by Sharper FX!

Now that is what I call a Flash intro!

*not to be confused with Gospel Mims

My dear friends over at Metropolis Magazine have just announced a call for entries for this year’s Next Generation design competition. NextGen is a contest for ideas that improve our way of life through clever use of existing technology. The prize is seed money to get your idea rolling. It’s a really incredible opportunity that you should check out if you’ve ever felt that there is room for improvement in life. I had the unique pleasure of being present for the judging a few years back and there were some really amazing concepts. Please check it out!

By the way, that hard boiled egg logo is supposed to be a bunson burner flame.

As if I haven’t already peed myself over the Nintendo Wii, here’s one more reason why my pants aren’t wet enough.

There’s definitely evidence of a new WarioWare game in there. This makes me happy.

Here’s a simple trick for optimizing your closet. Each time you get clean laundry load it in on the left side pushing the clothes you haven’t worn to the right.

(click on the illustrations to enlarge)

The clothes you wear the most stay on the left. The ones you wear the least stay on the right. This allows you to do a few things :

• Your favourite shirt should always be one of the first you see on the left.
• If you want to wear clothes you haven’t worn in a while, take something from the right.
• After a few months, you can get rid of the clothes from the far right since you never wear them. Alternatively, when seasons change, you can just flip and start going right to left instead.

Laugh all you want, it works!

Check out Flash Filter Lab, a sort of playground for some of the neato visual effects that you can do with Flash  (ha ha, shoulda waited for AS3). The user interface is set up like the popular modular audio synthesizers Reaktor and Max / MSP / Jitter. Each block is a part of an effect with inputs and outputs. The letter on the input / output is the data type for the value that it passes in or out. The data type must be the same for you to link two modules together. You can link in values or double click the module to set a default value. By chaining together several modules you produce effects that are shown in realtime.
So what? Flash Filter Lab will even let you export your work as ActionScript 2.0 classes. Yeah, I know, I would probably never use this for anything either, but damn…

Thanks again to Roger for the link.