Express Installer Utility
May 15th, 2008
When doing the home page for Heavy.com we came across a “special” bug with our Flash detection script. Apparently some people who were running FireFox and Flash Player 9.0.xx+ were not able to make it through the detection script. The issue seemed to be that the browser would throw the wrong player version to JS and JS would fail to load the site (like it should do by prompting you to upgrade) but this was happening to people who had the correct version of the player. We caught this bug in QA before launching the site but here is the class I used to get around this problem.
Flash Player 10 - beta?
May 15th, 2008
Came across this post today from flashguru.com that talks about Flash Player 10. Aparently an early release of the Flash 10 Player is available from Adobe today. Here are some really cool features I wanted to highlight from Adobe’s Site.
Helper Class
May 13th, 2008
Sometime you need a little class to act as a Utility but still allow for for instance specific configuration. In one class your util may need to do X and in another Y but the functions and methods need to be the same for both classes. In the past I use to develop Singleton or Static utility classes but this situation breaks my design pattern. How do I handle these one off customizable utilities? I create helpers.
Nice Flex Site
May 11th, 2008
I have not been a big fan of Flex sites. For the most part they all look alike and the component framework lets developers get away with creating something and not needed to have a single design bone in their body. My opinion changed after I found this site grooveshark.com. This link goes to the lite player but the main site is worth a look over too.
Letter Particle Generator
May 10th, 2008
A little while back a friend of mine asked me to help him put the finishing touches on a jewelry site he was having built. They wanted to take the existing AS 2 site and connect it to my FlashBaker Admin panel and clean up a few things as well. Since I detest AS 2 at this point I felt it would be better to just port the entire site over to AS 3. While I did that, I overhauled this Letter Particle Effect that was being used on the site. I thought I would release the source code to the particle system and hopefully drum up some traffic to his site TypeOfLove.com.
flashlog.txt for trace();
May 3rd, 2008
In this post I talked about how I see trace comments in my console (on Mac OS X) and a few people were interested in how I set that up. Here is some info to help you out.
Random Coolness
May 1st, 2008
I use the Flash Debug Player and have set it up to output all traces out to the console on the mac to help with all my debugging. This is great to see traces outside of the Flash IDE without the need of any extra software or custom built solution. I tend to leave it open a lot and when I visit other Flash sites I wind up seeing any traces that had not been removed. Well this morning while I was just surfing the web I went back to my console and saw this:
Useless Getters/Setters
April 26th, 2008
Part of building my new Framework revolves around optimization (Code, Size, and Speed). One of the quickest optimizations I have done is removing all the useless getters and setters and instead replace them with public vars.
Google Analytics Bug?
April 24th, 2008
There has got to be something wrong with this, how can 74% of traffic be coming from the 9.0 player? There is no such thing as a flat 9.0 Player, take a look:
FlexBuilder 3 vs FDT 3
April 24th, 2008
After 3 years I have finally given up on FDT.
