dispatchEvent()™

One of the most important new features in Apollo is the ability to access the local file system directly. This provides developers with the ability to read and edit text or html files, save preferences locally, store application states as external files, serialize and de-serialize data and much more. This tutorial will cover the File API features in Apollo step-by-step and will serve as a supplement to the talk I recently gave at the New York Flex Users Group.

This tutorial will be presented in multiple sections. This first will cover the File and FileStream classes and the subsequent ones will cover the Flex components used for viewing and accessing the file system and serializing and de-serializing data.

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I’ve been using E4X in ActionScript 3.0 for a while now and the rumors of its simplicity have been greatly exaggerated. A lot of operations are easy and make sense, but others are less… obvious. E4X is essentially a whole new language which is part of the AS3 grammar, just as regular expressions have their own completely different language but exist within ActionScript 3.0. And being so new, there really isn’t a whole lot of documentation out there. This is further complicated by the fact that since E4X seems simple enough at first glance to explain in a few lines, a lot of documentation stops short.

Anyway. I’ve been infuriated by E4X more than a few times now, and I’d like to start a running post to demystify some of it. Please! use the comments to ask any questions you might have, and I’ll keep adding to this post. Hopefully this can turn into a decent resource for E4X lore. The fun begins after the cut.

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They say you shouldn’t count your eggs before they hatch, but I figure this is more like counting your fetuses in the third trimester. Either way, I’d like to announce that our new book, ActionScript 3.0 Bible (Wiley), is in the final stages of editing and will be out this Fall! Roger Braunstein, Joey Lott, Josh Noble, and myself, Mims Wright have been busily typing since August or so to make it happen. As this is our first book (except for Joey) we’re very excited to see it finally coming together.

The description on Amazon is gravely inaccurate and the cover design is atrocious, however, you are welcome to pre-purchase it with my guarantee that it is not bad.

The AS3 Bible is a comprehensive guide to learning ActionScript 3.0. It’s platform agnostic with regards to Flash CS3 and FlexBuilder - we focus on ActionScript only rather than frameworks. Every effort has been made to approach the language from a point of view where a beginner with little programming knowledge could pick up the book and learn AS3. At the same time the book addresses the needs of experienced Flash programmers by highlighting the new features in AS3 as they relate to previous versions of ActionScript. We think this book will be a great read for beginning to intermediate developers looking to learn ActionScript 3.0 and will make a great reference book for more advanced developers. Look for it in September or October of 2007

Hi. For you readers in NYC, I’ll be speaking at the next NY Flex Users Group on the Apollo Filesystem API. I hope you can make it! If not, watch this space for notes and code samples. Cheers!

NYFLEX.org

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
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Back in February, a hacker called Arnezami discovered a code which has something to do with hacking HD-DVDs. However, I, and many others, had no idea that this was going on until today when the MPAA (I guess they’re behind this) started killing off blogs and diggs and posts etc. that contain the number. How ironic.

Taking bets on how long till the kitty gets pulled.

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