dispatchEvent()™

Here’s an IGN article on PlayStation 3’s answer to Microsoft Live called Home. Announced at the Game Developer’s Conference in SF a few weeks ago, Home is like a cross between Second Life and Battle.net and it’s so totally white inside. Everyone gets a PSP, dress slacks, and a house furnished by Crate and Barrel where you can invite your friends over to watch porn on your new virtual Sony VVega TV. Pretty soon, kids across the world will know what it means to live like a millionaire in Redmond, WA.

Beta here apparently you have to hit refresh until the page changes to “register an interest”.

Also mentioned at GDC for PS3 was Little Big Planet where you can collaborate with your friends to create a platform-based level and then run around in it. It looks fun as hell not to mention totally cute! Eat your heart out XNA!

Quick AS3 hint for today. Keep learning from my mistakes! Did you know that the order of the ! operator is higher than the order of the is operator? That means that in the example:

if (!strategy is AwesomeStrategy) {...

in which I am trying to run some code if the strategy is not an instance of AwesomeStrategy, actually evaluates:

if (null is AwesomeStrategy) {...
if (false) {...

In other words, the not binds higher and applies to strategy instead of strategy is AwesomeStrategy, the condition evaluates to false 100% of the time, and you end up puzzled as to why the block in the if statement didn’t run. Don’t make my mistake! Include parentheses when negating comparisons! Use this instead:

if (!(strategy is AwesomeStrategy)) {...

That’s right, you heard it here first. Unless you aren’t as tired as me right now and already knew that. Actually, as I look at my incorrect code now, it seems pretty obviously incorrect. OH WELL!

See the whole order of operations in AS3 here.

I’m at the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Launch Event in NYC. Click below for the live blogcast. Hit refresh cause i’m uploading every 5 mins or so.

(more…)

Here’s a really simple trick you can use to prevent the Flex loader from showing when you start up your application. All you have to do is hide the window, and show it when the Application is ready.

In MyApplication-app.xml:
<rootContent systemChrome="standard" transparent="false" visible="false">[SWF reference is generated]</rootContent>

This sets your application manifest to make the root window invisible. Then, you just make it visible when everything’s ready:

In MyApplication.mxml:
<mx:MyApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" creationComplete="window.visible = true"> …

Easy peasy!

One of the best things about AS3 so far, for me, is the decision to make it much noisier about failing. If there was one thing that was frustrating before, it was trying to track down what failed silently and where, only seeing the effects far downstream, with a barely workable debugger. Things are sooo much better now.

Nonetheless! There are always going to be little things that trip up every new programmer until you learn them, or maybe that trip you up over and over because it’s just so hard to remember. Certainly there will be less of these in AS3, but new is exciting, right? Ok, so enough intro. I post stupid mistakes. You learn from my mistakes. Somewhere, an old woman makes waffles. Read on.

(more…)

As you may know, Roger and I are working on the next version of the ActionScript Bible published by Wiley (the Amazon page is full of errors, don’t worry, it’s not even out yet). I wanted to share a few tips that I use as notes to myself for when I’m stuck with writing.

• Write headlines and use the outline view to order the big picture
• Simplify
• Base information around a task that the reader might want to do
• Write or flow without being concerned about the form then go back and edit it later
• Ask “Do I really need this?”
• Read other similar books
• Say it out loud then write down what you say
• Work on something that you know you can finish then go back to where you were stuck
• Forget about style and focus on the facts
• Take breaks and do something different like drawing a diagram or writing a code sample

I just wanted to pull out a few quick newsworthy items overheard during ApolloCamp.

• Apollo will be public on labs next week just now!
• Flex Moxie (Flex 3) on labs this half of the year! so will CS3
• Apollo 1.0, Flex 3, Philo 1.0 (video application) and Flex Data Services will all come out in the second half of 07.

Obviously, we’re excited about Flex 3, but we’re also a little bit overwhelmed at this point since we’ve just barely got our little brains wrapped around Flex 2. The good news is, Flex 3 is intended to work on the Flash 9 player so it will be more of a component upgrade rather than a full on player/industry/mentality upgrade. I didn’t make it on the Moxie beta so would anyone with hands on experience like to comment?

One of my big peeves with Flash developers is when little shops spend loads of time reinventing the wheel (custom tweening engine anyone?) only to have their very own proprietary code library that the other little shops aren’t allowed to see. In the end, everyone loses because they’re stuck with an amateurish old code base that gets hacked and reworked for every project. It’s the exact opposite of everyone’s favorite buzzword for 2006, Design Patterns. The point is not to create the perfect secret code snippet, everything’s already been done or it’ll soon be knocked-off. The point is to create good work and inspire others.

At my current job, I’m pushing for us to use an open source code library that we can become major contributors to. That way, we gain from everyone’s work and they gain from ours. As such, I’ve been on the lookout for any viable AS3/Flex open source libraries. One that seems to have a lot of promise is FlexLib started by Doug McCune &al. I met Doug and Patrick at ApolloCamp and they were both cool dudes.

Does anyone have any reviews to share of this library or know of others? I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to trying it out myself.

Maybe I’m just a crotchety, old-school, Jolt-drinking, amber-on-black, command-line code junkie, but for the last 2 years I’ve been so frustrated that I just can’t get my code font in Eclipse / Flex Builder on Mac OS X to be aliased! Those little smooth edges on my fixed-width bitmap fonts drove me to irrational madness. Well, I had given up and moved to PC, but I’ve had Mac laptops throughout, and I finally took some time to solve this little pet peeve. If you share my frustration, read on.

Arrrgh!

Ahhhh…

(more…)

We’d also like to thank Adobe for inviting us all out there, letting us trample all over their office, answering our inane questions, giving us early access to everything, and feeding us a continuous stream of uppers and downers all night. It was clearly a lot of effort and money to get us developers a chance to learn about Apollo, and we appreciate it! It was also great to meet some of the Adobe developers we’ve had relationships with in some projects we’ve done. Cheers!