gBlog
Sun May 9 22:33:20 EDT 2010
Home: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/
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Quick Way to Set Props on a New Instance - A quick way to set multiple properties on new instances, and a related AS3 feature request.

BitmapSlice9: Scale9 for Bitmaps in Flash Pro - BitmapSlice9 is a command for Flash Pro that preps bitmaps for use with Scale9. Among other things, this makes it easy to use bitmap skins for controls, which is quite common for games and mobile apps.

Return of the Blue Lego - Apple eliminated the blue lego icon that indicates a missing plugin on the iPad. I believe that this is a not so subtle way of shifting user's belief that the iPad browser is lacking something, to believing that the site they are viewing is broken. In response to this, I've created the blueLego edition of SWFObject 2.2.

Colorgasm Music Visualizer - Colorgasm Music Visualizer

The flash.sampler.* API and the Sample object - The flash.sampler.* package gives you access to the same profiling data via AS3 that FlashBuilder uses for it's profiler. It's a very useful API for performance and memory profiling, offering enhanced introspection tools, more granular timing, method invocation counts, and of course invocation sampling. I thought I'd write up a quick post about the API to help people get started with using it.

Building Framework Independent Code Libraries - I've recently encountered a couple of libraries that despite being 99% pure AS3 had minor dependencies on the Flex framework that prevented their use in Actionscript projects or in Flash without modification. This limits the immediate usefulness of the libraries, and fragments the community's access to them. Here are some tips to help you build framework independent libraries...

Silverlight, MIX & gskinner.com - As some people have noticed, I will be speaking at Microsoft MIX this year. I'm sure a few people are curious what I'm doing there...

ASDocr Update for AIR 2 Beta 2 - ASDocr 1.1 is available. This update provides compatibility with AIR 2 beta 2, fixes a bug that prevented multiple exclude-namespaces values from working, fixes a problem with locating the default output directory on OSX, and correctly opens the last used configuration when you restart the application.

Create New Files & Projects In OSX Finder Easily - QuickFiles is a free OSX 10.6 AppleScript service plugin that lets you create new files of any kind in the Finder with a keystroke. Install QuickFiles then place files or folders that you'd like to use as templates into the "QuickFiles Templates" folder. When you run QuickFiles, simply select a template from the list, and it will be copied into your current folder. Best of all, everything can be controlled via the keyboard...

My Thoughts on the Future of Flash - People have asked me to share my thoughts, and I've decided that for the sake of people just getting started with Flash I'd talk about it a little.

PerformanceTest v2 Beta: Benchmark AS3 / Graphics - PerformanceTest v2 lets you benchmark execution time and memory usage in your AS3 code. It can be used with a single line of code, or you can develop robust test suites and integrate them with unit tests. Trace text outputs, or log robust XML reports to track and analyze the performance characteristics of your projects.

A Complete Guide to Using Namespaces In AS3 - A complete guide to using namespaces in AS3: What are they? Why use them? How do you define them? How do you access them?

Comment Blocks That Are Easy to Toggle On/Off - Sometimes when you're coding, you find yourself toggling a block of code on or off by commenting it... it can be handy to know that there's a way to achieve the same thing by setting up your block comments in such a way that they can be enabled or disabled by adding or removing a single "/".

ASDocr: Simple ASDoc UI, AS3 Documentation Tool - I'm a big fan of ASDoc! It allows you to write simple comments in your AS3 classes, then generate HTML documentation from them. This is great in that it allows developers to maintain source code and documentation simultaneously, and it reduces the overall burden in writing documentation by reading the core API information from the code directly. Unfortunately, the ASDoc tool is command line based, and can be a bit of a pain to work with. That's where ASDocr comes in...

GTween v2.01 Released - GTween V2.01 is a minor update that adds support for AS3 events, allows multiple callbacks at the same position on a timeline, introduces a version property, and fixes a number of bugs reported by users...