I've been doing a lot of research into the AMF protocol recently. I've had the pleasure of reading the AMF0, and AMF3 standards cover-to-cover several times, with a view to understanding them well enough to write my own debugging tools. More about those projects another time.
Not only are the standards fairly brief, but they contain errors. I've not managed to find an official errata, so here's my starter for 10. (more…)
I'm a great believer that if you're going to be good at something you should understand it a the lowest level possible. Every ActionScript developer I talk to at the moment is migrating to AS3 and mostly we talk about all the high level differences it has with AS2; the API, the event mechanism and so forth. But let's not forget the little things. It's often complacency toward the smallest components that cause the most trouble. It seems like an odd situation to know how to flip a cube around in 3D space, but not really know the difference between null and undefined. This is a real situation though, and it means bugs deep down in complex code just waiting to ruin our lives. (more…)
The mini project I picked as my first dip into AS3 was a short example that I had been planning for this blog, so here it is in AS3, instead of AS2 as I had originally planned.
The South Park Chin balls Flash app required that the user drag and zoom a loaded photo. Anyone who's ever done this will know that you can't just scale the picture around it's registration point when you zoom. Why? because the centre point changes as you pan the image around. So the requirement in a nutshell is - to be able to scale a MovieClip around an arbitrary centre.
Sure, you could take the Russian doll approach with multiple clips inside clips, but that just ain't cool! I thought I'd share the way I did it as it's pretty concise. (more…)
Much later than planned I finally got around to checking out AS3.
I was quick to upgrade to AS2 when it came out in Flash MX 2004, and never looked back, so why so late? Well, as usual, because I'm busy. Busy on a PHP project at that, so I haven't really had the chance. Plus, if I do have to write some AS on the job it's too big a risk to start learning something new. Pressures demand that I get on with it as I know how. That's why this Facebook application has it's main Flash app (Chin Balls) written in AS2. Also, I view the upgrading of a programming language as a one-way process. I didn't upgrade to PHP5 until I was confident I would never have to write PHP4 again. And with AS3 this is an even bigger deal. (more…)
The designer/developer boundary has always been a little blurry when it comes to Flash. Flash has been celebrated for this since 1999, and has established a pretty unique position. But with each release of Flash those who sit on the fence feel an increasing pressure to choose a camp and stay in it. Some do, some don't and some just carry on doing things as they always did, but one thing's for sure; that the drive toward Flash being a more robust, more powerful, more serious platform is not showing any signs of slowing down. AS3 is another leap forward. In fact a much bigger leap than AS2 was. (more…)
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