One of the unsung heroes of readable AS3 code is the native Dictionary class. A Dictionary is just a container for key/value pairs, much like Object. In fact, a lot of people don’t realize just how useful Dictionary is. The assumption, easy to make, is that it’s better to use Object because then you don’t [...]
Tagged AS3, Cache, Caching in Flash, Classes, Dictionary, flash, flash.utils.Dictionary, FlexJust a quick post to wrap up my year. Work 2010 was incredibly exciting for me. A year ago, I was working full-time at a digital advertising agency doing Flash production. It wasn’t a bad job, but I wasn’t thrilled about agency life and in April I decided to finally take the plunge and go [...]
Tagged 2010, 2011, consulting, programming, roboticsRight now, if you want to handle input and output between Arduino and Adobe Flash/AIR, the recommended best practice is to use a program like SerProxy to listen to your serial input, turn it into socket data and publish it to local host. Inside of Flash, then, you treat it as a socket server – [...]
Tagged AIR, arduino, flash, Flex, NativeProcess, pythonSeems like every time I get a new project that involves styling dynamically generated text in Flash, using custom fonts and with no access to Flex’s @embed trickery, I run into problems. I’m writing this blog entry not just to share a solution with you but also to have a single writeup for my own [...]
Tagged CSS, embedded fonts, embedding fonts, flash, flash.text.StyleSheet, fontsSo, this is something that’s really simple and I really wish I’d known about this years ago – would have saved me much time. Ever find yourself working on a project, and it’s 3am, and you’re exhausted but just want to kill this one bug, but WTF it’s a runtime error of some sort and [...]