Lazy Programmer's Shortcut

This flash image gallery is for rownm001.

Now, something completely different. Lazy programmer's shortcut. When working with AIR SDK, if you don't use Ant or anything, but just plain old console you can create batch file for starting ADL. But also, and this is what I did, right-click on your application.xml description file, choose open with and then Choose Program.. Dialog box appears where you click on Browse and than find and select ADL.exe file which is in your air/bin SDK directory and check Always use the selected program to open this type of file checkbox. Now I only have to double click on my application.xml in order to start my AIR application.

Hidden Air Apps

Some directories like ApolloHunter are trying to gather as many as possible air applications in one place, but this is very hard to do now and it will be much harder to do it in the future. But effort counts. However, here are some AIR applications that I couldn't find in directories.

- MXNAQube is a way to view posts aggregated by mxna (Macromedia XML News Aggregator). It currently provides access to the newest posts, most popular posts and the ability to search posts. On top of that, it auto-archives all posts that are consumed by the widget.

- Runtime Design Accelerator is a successor of RealTime CSS Updater.

- MICON is a application that allows you to extract system icons used for a file/folder, and save them as a transparent png.

- Air909 is rhythm composer.

Enjoy!

Twitter Out Blogrush In

After reading some reviews about BlogRush widget I decided to try it for a while and see if it is any good. But sidebar started to look packed with twitter badge and box widget, so I decided to exclude twitter widget since in the last few weeks it became obligation for me to twitt, I just lost interest.

BlogRush is just 2 days old and 99% of bloggers doesn't know about it yet. But those famous meta bloggers are using it already, so if it is good for why not for the rest of us. Let's just wait for a week or two and see how it will work. I tried this little experiment with it however.

Since blogs that appear inside widget should all have installed widget on blog and they all should be in same category, since you have to choose only one category I wanted to see how many jumps I can take with it. So, I clicked on random link on widget and it took me to another interesting blog in my category. However, I made only few jumps and last blog didn't have widget installed! I repeated this few times and result is the same. So some blogs that appear don't have widget installed. How this is possible? You tell me.

So, what's the deal with DealDotCom?

There is a lot of buzz around about DealDotCom. One of the reasons is that they are not yet public! They are in silent mode for TWO MORE DAYS. Yet, everyone is talking about how this is great opportunity to join because you will be two days ahead of others.

But how to join? You got to have invitation from someone to do this, and I have made it! So, since every minute is important, no more delays, grab it while you can: www.dealdotcom.com/invite/5911/.

Those who find out about this from you will be thankful one day. Spread the word.

Best Flex Examples Blog

As I put more and more pressure on myself to finally start with Flex, my useful bookmarks collection of blogs is getting bigger. There isn't better way of learning things than learning from the source, and in this case that source+ is Peter deHaan's Flex Examples blog, who works for Adobe on the Flex SDK QA team.

Blog is updated more than daily and every post is new Flex lesson with source code. I will mention just few recent post titles:

- Styling the HSlider control using CSS (12. sept)
- Customing the Flex HSlider and VSlider controls (11. sept)
- Changing the cursor in a flex application using cursormanager class (10. sept)
- Styling the titlewindow container (10. sept)

and many, many more...

Code for scale menu

Previous scale flash menu has just few lines of code in first frame of Timeline.

Menu items instances are named from "item1" ... "item5". They change xscale and yscale property as a function of distance from xmouse position. That is all.

If you need to add more menu items, code is the same, you only have to change line 2. If you have 10 menu items, you will write in line 2: i<11. Everything else is unchanged.

Flash Scale Menu

Here is one file that pop out of my archive. It is Flash scale menu done with some simple math in as1.

Flash Image Gallery Improved

This version of Flash image gallery widget is little better. Everything is the same except for new stop / play button. I have added 20 new lines of code for that ugly green button. Text field is dynamic and button has alpha. Actually, functionality was pretty easy to do. Only thing I did is set new global variable onLoad root function animation_ctrl to true. On button release, this variable changes to false while text field inside button changes to "Play".

Code is clean onEnterFrame it has just 3 functions. Now, everything I did is wrote this line

if (animation_ctrl) {
function1();
function2();
function3();
}

That's all! When animation_ctrl is false, functions are not execute, images are in full stop. Simple logical solution. My favorite.

Favorite ActionScript Version - Part III

Kirupa Chinnathambi have posted a comment on my discussion about Favorite AS version. I think his opinion is valuable and I will extract it here. I used Kirupa's forum in my research and he felt like he has something to say about it.

comment:

Hi Flanture!
Interesting analysis, though I think you are narrowing your sample by focusing exclusively on the forums of kirupa.com and AS.org. With regards to the kirupa.com forums and their coverage of AS3 topics, it is a chicken/egg situation.

The kirupa.com content, which draws most of the users to the forums, is still largely focused on ActionScript 2. Unless there really is more AS3 content, there is a good chance there will not be more AS3-related questions.

Content on the site, though, is largely fed from questions posted on the forums. Without sufficient AS3-related questions, it is tough for me to focus on writing AS3 content when AS2 questions dominate and require further elaboration in article form.

But, I also feel that AS3 adoption is slow is because it left a lot of designers behind. Developers jumped at AS3, for many of them liked its familiarity with more modern programming languages.

Designers rarely wrote application-level code, so AS1/AS2 with all of their faults was good enough for them. Unlike the transition from AS1->AS2 where where applications could be written using a mix of both AS1 and AS2, AS3 is all or nothing. You have to use the AS3 style/naming/syntax for all code if you want to use the new virtual machine and all of its goodies.

Cheers!
Kirupa :)

Interesting thoughts about difference between designers and developers and their use of ActionScript versions. Does this mean that most of designers will stay with Flash8 for some time or they already have their hands on CS3? Maybe this is the question for another research...

Traffic Report

I have doubled traffic on Flanture in August. First, July was holiday month. Other than that, posts are more interesting I suppose.

My Simple Event Mechanism Flash Tutorial has just been accepted on Pixel2Life, where I am known as "neutron". This is my first tutorial there, but I hope more will come very soon.