New for 2009
Posted by admin | Filed under Ramblings
It’s now 3 months in to 2009 so this post isn’t quite as timely as I’d like it to be but I got my shiny new MacBook Pro 2 weeks ago and it inspired me to write about some of the new technologies I’m hoping to play around with this year.
Explore the Gaia Framework
I’ve never used a Flash framework, in fact this is the first one I’ve heard of. When I build a Flash site my least favorite part is always sitting down and planning out the loading structure. Where the data is coming from, when its going to load etc etc. It’s dull, repetitive and takes away from all the fun creative interface creation I enjoy so much BUT it’s very important to consider unless you want to have a crummy sluggish site. In the past I’ve written my own loading classes and used existing classes (ie: BulkLoader) but after reading about Gaia I’m excited to see how they handle loading and other typical Flash site needs ie:transitions. Oh, and bonus points because it plays nice with SWFAddress and TweenLite! Two Flash classes I can’t live without. 
Take Flash IK for a Test Run
One of the main reasons I upgraded my computer was so that I could run the new CS4 suite. My old TIBook just couldn’t handle Adobe anymore. Now that I have CS4 I’m looking forward to running through a few tutorials on IK and rigging a few objects/characters.
Make a Layout Using CSS Tables
Now this probably won’t happen on any professional work just yet but I’ve put off working with CSS tables for awhile now. In my 9-5 good old IE6+7 make up over 70% of our users in most cases so using CSS tables for <30% of users doesn’t quite justify it for me just yet.
Well there’s three of many new techniques/skills/tools I’m hoping to get familiar with this year. I just hope I can find enough hours in the day for everything!
Tags: CS4, CSS Tables, Flash, Gaia, IK
Relative Classpaths in AS3
Posted by admin | Filed under Flash
I’ve been working in AS3 for about a year now and everyone in awhile I slip and use an AS2 property reference, for example ._alpha vs .alpha. The other place I find myself slipping is with classpaths. I work in a SVN development environment so it is important that all classpaths are defined relatively so they work across machines.
For simplicity’s sake here’s a sample of a very basic small Flash project.
In AS2 I would set the classpath as “classes/” to have access to the MyClass.as file in my project.fla.
In AS3 that doesn’t fly and the classpath must be set as ”../myProject/classes” or “./classes”. I’m not 100% clear on why “classes/” no longer works as all three paths seem the same to me, but suffice to say this caused a fair share of headaches when I first made the jump to AS3.
Flash 40 AJAX 3.2?
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Dev
The numbers in the title refer to the percent of web sites on the internet that make use of Adobe Flash and the percent of websites that utilize the XMLHttpRequest to calculate the AJAX figure. I came across these in an article over at Flash Magazine which referenced a survey done by the people over at Opera.
These numbers took me by surprise, maybe its the sites that I visit but I had the impression that AJAX was taking the web by storm. It’s this perception that prompted me to cut my time in the AS3 world and spend some time getting more familiar with AJAX techniques and my favorite Javascript Library, JQuery. I will continue utilizing both technologies but I just found it ironic to say the least that during a time where I’ve been very AJAX-centric that a report comes out showing such a strong flash prevalence. Then again it could simply be inflated by all those horrid “punch the monkey” banner ads.