Johnvh.com - home of Dallas, Texas based Flash Developer and web enthusiast John Van Horn

June 26, 2009

E4x and as3 gotcha

I love E4X in AS3. It's powerful and fairly simple. If you haven't worked with it yet, check out Roger Braunstein's excellent tutorial. But I was recently annoyed by this gotcha when doing some xml combining. Let's say you have this:
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XML:

<xml>

    <people>

        <person id="123">

            <name>John</name>

  [...]

April 27, 2009

Flash’s secret Javascript API

Is that a Yahoo! ad in a Youtube player? No. It's a Yahoo! logo in a Youtube player. How did it get there? Via Flash's secret javascript api!
Ok, so it's not really secret. More like old, surely deprecated, and forgotten. I've been working with flash for a good while now, and I had no idea [...]

March 30, 2009

Ignoring files in Flex Builder Navigator

I don't like seeing .svn or CVS files in my Flex Builder/Eclipse workspace. I'll never need to edit those files directly, and if I do, I won't use Flex Builder to do it. But if they're in your project, they'll show up in the Navigator panel. Everywhere.
Fortunately, Eclipse provides a way to filter files in [...]

March 16, 2009

Are your event handlers bad?

Event handlers can be bad. They're not intrinsically bad - that's how shit gets done in AS3. It's the way they often get written that can be bad. Consider the following example:
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Actionscript:

package

{

    import fl.motion.Color;

    import flash.display.DisplayObject;

    import flash.display.Sprite;

    import flash.events.Event;

    import flash.events.MouseEvent;

    public class Nothing [...]