Flash Coder

It seems that recently people, good people, are coming out of the woodwork to point out that they might not always like to deliver their Flash Platform solutions as OO solutions. I hear the collective gasp of horror and revilement from the community of Actionscript developers who have spent years refining their coding and OO methodologies to a point where they can code in Java with little effort. I myself am one of those coders. However, I am forever using the term ‘Pragmatic’ when I speak to staff and peers alike. Look at the big picture. Not everyone wants a solution that takes 2 months to deliver because you have to develop redundant, reusable, unit tested OO code. Many clients want throw away solutions and have no likelihood of code reuse. The problem is that we’ve become enamored with the idea of perfecting and using only code. Anyone who speaks of the timeline does so with contempt and some even call for it’s removal altogether, suggesting that it is the province of antiquated, knuckle dragging wanna-be coders. Not like us ‘real’ coders. Read the rest of this entry »

Roll up, roll up. No not you sir. The excellent Flash and Flex Developer magazine that I semi regularly bang on about is now releasing back issues free on line. Their content is truly great, covering less for the beginner and instead catering for the more experienced developers amongst us. Take a look at the content synopsis on the cover or any issue and you’ll definitely find something more advanced that you wanted to learn.

June issue Free for Download now
http://www.ffdmag.com/prt/view/back-issues/issue/1015.html

The publishers have just let me know that Flash and Flex Developer magazine (available as hard copy of for download) is nearly half price for a year’s subscription but only until tomorrow (Feb 14th). So if you’d like to get this excellent magazine at one-year USD 49.00 (Euro 39.00) / two-year USD 79.00 (Euro 69.00) then get to the site and sign up quick.

I suppose that it’s appropriate that as I have strong views on the subject myself and that the book is aimed at Flash AND Flex developers, the first question should be about Flex vs Flash.

Tell me which is better and why: Flex or Flash? Always contentious I know, but fuck it, it’s my book

I’ve explored this question myself over the years since Flex was first proposed to me at an Adobe presentation, and in real terms, I know what the ‘real’ answer is. However, what I really want is opinion backed by reason.

Post your answer here and check back on Friday to see if you’ve won (I’ll get contact details then).

My first book was officially published by Friends of Ed on 17th Dec 2007: Foundation Actionscript 3.0 for Flash CS3 and Flex. However, it didn’t hit the UK book shelves until just this week. I co-authored it with Steve Webster and Todd Yard, who are both well known in the community and world class developers in their own right, and I was very lucky to work along side them. Their knowledge and experience is obvious in this book and I can only hope my first authoring efforts were worthy to be along side theirs. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Christian Giordano has made some of his very nice work source files available to us all - try and reply. CGWS Downloads

BBC SMX Components were demoed to us last night at the MMUG by Rob Bateman. They are a massive improvement on the standard AS 2.0 components. Little things like the component properties panel’s labels reflect the actual component variable names. They can be EASILY reskinned with the simple templates included. Tehy’re lovely and I want to eat them all up.

Regular Expressions - they frighten the hell out of me, but do we need them or are they antiquated? Well MM seem to think they’re here to stay.

UML key concepts applied to Flash development. I have been using UML modelling now for about 6 months and quite apart from it being a great modeling tool for your classes and a great way of creating your base AS 2 stub code, it is a great way of making your code maintainable at a glance. No more trying to work out the relationships between many obscure classes. It’s all here. Then I’d recomment trying Grant Skinners GModeler to execute it.