So I’m a big fan of singletons; SUE ME. They’re the most rad thing ever and if you think otherwise you are a wrong person.
One of the things that have bothered me about them though is the necessity for adding boring boilerplate code, such as the ubiquitous getInstance() or its younger brother, the static instance [...]
Posts under ‘Flash’
Instance mapping singletons
AIR HTMLLoaders and mouse events
Just a quick tip.
If you’re wanting to listen to MOUSE_DOWN events from an AIR HTMLLoader, and want any and all mousedowns, not just HTML link clicks and the like, simply use the event’s capture phase:
htmlLoaderContainer.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN,myHandler,true)
Bam, problem solved. I read some posts online about this issue and no good solutions, so here you have it [...]
Dangerous code geeks
I recently read through Peter Seibel’s excellent Coders at work, and if you’re a developer of any sort, I reckon you should too. Three interviews in the book stood out to me, though they are all excellent; Jamie Zawinski, Douglas Crockford and Brendan Eich.
Jamie’s interview cements the notion of a duct tape programmer; A developer [...]
What’s going on with Doomsday Console?
Considering this is my elevator pitch topic at Flash on the Beach this year; Seen this thing before?
If any of you have been following our googlecode repository, you have probably noticed a lack of significant updates . There is a simple reason for this; We are giving it a pretty serious overhaul, so much so [...]
Elevator pitchin’ at FOTB10
I’ll be doing a terrifying 3-minute elevator pitch at this year’s Flash On The Beach. I applied just for the heck of it, didn’t assume I’d get accepted, but weyheyhey. Tension rising!
My session will be about my ongoing Doomsday Console project, or more specifically the next iteration of it (which is under super secret development [...]
Audiotool suggestions
I’ve been following the Audiotool project with great interest since it began, both because I’m a Flash developer and a musician. Now that Audiotool 1.0 has been released, with a very broad and interesting suite of devices, I’m both amazed and put off.
As a developer, I’m utterly blown away that this thing is running [...]
Writing tools for designers
Now this is fun. A while back, a Flash kiosk app I wrote had a screensaver that was basically just a bunch of particles spinning on the Y axis. The designer wondered if we couldn’t animate the particles to form the icons used elsewhere in the app, and it got me thinking; Sure, they CAN [...]
Synesthesia experiment 1
I always want to play more with generative art, but I always find it’s more fun to play around with synesthesia; senses combining to create something more. So I might start out wanting to make a paint tool to make art, but it always ends up being a toy instead. But maybe that’s art enough?
Here’s [...]
Painting with time
Something I always enjoyed conceptually was painting with a video frame buffer. It doesn’t actually WORK for anything particularly useful, but here’s an experiment anyway. Beware, video autoplays and has awesome Italo disco music. Unless you have a webcam. In which case you’re the star of the show.
Another 3D Particle Thing
An older thing this, but I still think it’s kinda neat. Click-drag to rotate the camera, WSAD keys to move around. When you move, particles are moved from the pool to the point the camera is currently at (offset a little), so you can draw lines and curves by moving around. Always wanted to do [...]
Video pixels to particles
Another ongoing experiment. Performance ranges from decent to abysmal depending on your hardware, but I reckon it’s fun partytimes anyway. Sampling pixel values from a video and mapping them to 3D particles. ZOOOoooooOom!
A 3D tunnel effect or something
Hey check this thing out. It’s part of a prototype for a game project, but I thought it came out pretty neat on its own! WHoooOsh!
Simple AIR Directory->XML utility
This is no biggy, and I’m sure most of y’all have tools for this already, but I figured I’d share mine anyway. It’s just a quick-and-dirty Flex/AIR app for taking a directory listing and generating an XML document of file paths.
Not pretty, but here’s how it works:
Choose the node name of your root node (“data” [...]
Stop trying to make the Internet boring!
Preface. There’s a weird energy to this planet right now. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t shake the feeling that the current zeitgeist is one of living under the hammer. The post apocalypse has returned to the media in a big way, with a thematic resurgence in films, video games and literature. There’s climate [...]
A quick Doomsday Console example
Today I sat down to do a few performance tests of copyPixels with a variety of configurations of an alpha bitmap and the mergeAlpha flag, all in Release mode. This is a very typical situation where the Doomsday Console is useful, and I thought I’d share the source and swf. It’s modest, but a classic [...]
Poll: Sound integration in Flash
Something that always seems to end up last in mind when budgeting and designing Flash projects is sound and sound integration. This appears by far to be the least discussed topic of Flash development, and I can’t help but wonder why, when projects like AudioTool still garner such a loving response. The notion appears to [...]
Quick and dirty Flash dialogs
Something I’ve had to do a few times now is implement dialog windows in an application. You know, the kind that shows you a text prompt and a few user response options – Typically OK and Cancel, but sometimes text input fields, dropdowns or other GUI widgets. After a few goes at it, I reckon [...]
Reuse: Writing tools for Flash
Previously I’ve written about how object-oriented programming allows you to effectively personalize the programming language. Now, I want to talk about further customizing your development experience by compartmentalizing and reusing solutions for generic problems.
If any aspect of development has really resonated with me it’s making tools. This can mean large high level projects like the [...]
New open source project: Sound control
Another quick holler to let you know I’ve gone and published a working library to the DSoundSystem Googlecode repository.
It’s a library wrapping the native Flash sound API allowing much tighter control of sound playback, giving you a proper cue/track/mixer setup and a real birds-eye view of sound in your application.
A core feature is the management [...]
Dirty math is good enough
Just want to get this down real quick.
A math “truth” that helped me get over my fear of numbers early on was realizing that especially in trigonometry, absolute precision is not needed or, in some cases, not even possible. For instance, PI, traced in Flash, returns 3.141592653589793. I have yet to encounter a situation where [...]
Fighting off futility
I read a lot of Lovecraft. If you’re not familiar with his work, his core concept of “cosmic horror” revolves around mankind’s innate ability to blissfully ignore the obvious fact that on a cosmic scale nothing man can do will matter. We are a speck of dust enjoying a lull of quiet in a swirling, [...]
My programming philosophy
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while, but every time i started it felt like i was trying to teach a crowd that already knows better than me, and that’s a level of arrogance beyond even me.
But i can’t help but feel there is something to how i do things that must [...]
HTML5 will save us all from the evils of Flash!
To quote the good sir Keith Peters: ”I like how they think flash = bad, but html5 will do everything flash does, but html5 will be good. Huh?”
Spline normal facepalm
I’ll be first in line to say I’m a slow learner, particularly in terms of math. I’m the sort of guy that will need facts banged home with a sledgehammer for at least half a year before they finally stick, and then 6 months more before they start mingling with the other facts and i [...]
To double-tab or not to double-tab…
A feature request for the Doomsday Console was a UNIX-style double-tab search. When typing a word, hitting tab twice in quick succession would take the word currently under the caret and do a search of all available commands and list them for you. Definitely handy if you have a command or method name on the [...]
Screencastmania!
I published a 41(!) minute screencast of me just blabbing and showing off features of my AS3 console project. If you want to hear a sick norwegian talk about shit and show off sort of buggy code, go for it! Yeah!
AS3 Delaunay triangulation and voronoi library
Relatively unsung hero Alan Shaw has published a version of his Delaunay triangulation and voronoi AS3 library. This is good news for everyone! There’s been a heap of talk about voronoi libraries and triangulation in the community recently, but for me at least the stuff has been at arm’s length simply because, well, that stuff [...]
Awkwardly publishing some code..
You may have noticed the “code” page link at the top there. I don’t exactly have a long, proud history of sharing my code and libraries, but i do have a fairly long, proud history of writing code and libraries. This is mostly because i’m terrified of what better coders will think.
First awkward attempt is [...]
Key polling, part deux
Keith Peters put up a comprehensive blog post on why he disagrees with generic keyboard managers. It’s well worth reading. I have to admit, i couldn’t even conceive of input events directly altering the model without first passing through an input testing step in the game loop. It’s practically game dev heresy!
It apparently boils down [...]
Flash on the beach ‘09
Got back from Brighton a couple days ago, bringing fresh diseases. Let me start out by cursing the dude that chose to sneeze me square in the back of the head during the last talk. I’m real grateful to you, you rude prick. Hello influenza.
I much enjoyed FOTB this year, even more so than last [...]
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