Flash Coder

The London Flash Developers and Designers user group meets at 7pm on the 26th this month (that’s this Thursday) at the South Bank University. It’s just round the corner from the Elephant and Castle tube station.

This month I will be giving a talk on Moving to OOP. So if you’re a beginner or intermediate developer, or a Designer with an interest in the code that controls and enhances much of your designs and you want to know how to move to Object Oriented Development and Design then come along.

You need to register to come along so get to the site and click on the big red “Join us” button. or go direct to the membership page. You can connect with over 350 fellow developers and designers.

It’s in the Keyworth Center on the 1st floor. On the map, that’s building no. 10. (Keyworth Street, SE1)

It doesn’t normally meet so late in the month but unfortunately there were extenuating circumstances. See you all there

I was writing some control classes in AS 3 the other day and I realised I needed to create a custom event. I hadn’t done this in quite a while as my new duties don’t give me as much time to code as I’d like . I had forgoten just how different it is from AS2. So, for my own sake (as the old memory isn’t what it used to be) and for those of you who don’t already know, here’s how to create and dispatch a custom event in ActionScript 3.0. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems more and more over the last year everyone is saying how great frameworks are. There are many types of frameworks and I’m specifically talking about development frameworks as they represent the majority. I’ve listened patiently. I’ve researched various development frameworks (Cairngorm in particular). I’ve questioned their use and I’ve discovered some legitimate use in various circumstances. On the whole they are most popular with managers as they top the buzzword list at the moment right next to ‘Web 2.0′ (despite the fact that coding frameworks are implicitly at the core of any decent pattern based OO Flash development whether you choose to acknowledge them or not). Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people have been asking me recently about Singletons so I thought I’d post on it. A number of developers have written on the Singleton class/pattern. Recently Grant Skinner wrote on the problems of using them in AS3, but I’ll get to that. I personally learnt my Singleton implementation methods from old skool Java developers and so far it’s been bullit proof, easily repeated, quick and reliable. But I thought I’d touch on not just what it is and how to make a Singleton work, but also some of the logic behind why a Singleton is built the way it is (so let’s hope I do a good job). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big fan of OO in Flash and whilst patterns are not the holy grail of all OO, they are very useful in developing an understanding of and an implementation methodology for OO. A set of simple and downloadable tutorials on Design Patterns in Flash is available here. This site was already mentioned by BeeDigital but I really feel it’s worth mentioning these really nice tuts as we’re all going to be OOing by the time AS 3 arrives and you should all be OOing now. There are only a few examples here at the moment.

Moving to OO programing is often confusing for Flash developers who are new to it, because it’s a big subject and you need to have reasonable proficiency in much of it to actually achieve anything. There’s a lot of groundwork involved and it can be confusing or just down right intimidating. Many of the Flash developers I have come across who are trying to get their heads round OOP in AS 2.0 struggle with the principals, so an overview would be helpful. Well here’s just such a thing.

I am a strong believer in the use of UML. Not only because it genuinely makes an OO site easy to develop, maintain and understand but also because AS 2 is a professional development tool and Flash is now a ‘platform’ and we need to be seen to conform to recognised development standards if we’re going to be taken more seriously as OOP developers and if Flash is going to be taken more seriously as a legitimate RIA alternative (the useful upshot of this is that our rates go up to - muahaahaahaa). This article by Carlos Rovira has been around for a while but it’s a great intro to using UML and more of us need to be using it. If that get’s you horny baby then try Grant Skinners excellent Gmodeler.