Just putting in a last minute pitch for a good thing:
There’s a FREE Web conference going on this weekend in Raleigh, NC that covers Flex, ColdFusion, AIR, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, and other web goodness. The schedule looks good, there’s a networking party Saturday evening, and the hotel rate is decent. So go.
And bring your business cards… the next time I’m asked if I know any web gurus looking for work I need some names and numbers.
My Mac Pro is starting to get kind of dated and I've been lusting after some of the newer/faster systems out there. I'm ambO/Sdextrous and spend my day working back and forth between a pc and a mac and had started to get tired of the minor issues I have working between the two systems so I had considered a tricked out pc with Windows 7. I wasn't too happy with Apple when they decided to change their licensing agreement and shaft Flash developers... that wasn't very cool of them.. Then I saw that
Keith Peters went back to the dark side... and now.. well.. let's just say
Steve's little rant sealed the deal for me.
So I'm enjoying some of the comments on his "pot calling the kettle black" tirade
like this one, and
this from icrontic. ha. And it's good to see some of the
comments like the ones on this article... lolz.. some people do understand that while HTML5 is a great improvement,
it's a very different tool from Flash.
I figure it might be Christmas before I slow down enough to go through the hassle of switching files and everything over to a new system, but when I do get that time I'll probably be getting a nice high end gaming system. One that can play Crysis.
I'm on Seabrook Island and went for a walk on the beach just after sunset last night. It's a very secluded beach, so there were only a handful of people in the mile or so that I could see up and down the beach. On the return there was a nice surprise in seeing lots of little baby turtles running across the beach to the ocean.
I'd seen this on TV before, but seeing it in person was a real treat.. and damn they move fast. All the ones I saw made it safely to the ocean, but after that?? Who knows.
I'm converting some things over from AS2 to AS3 and hitting some walls. One of the things I'm having trouble with is implementing a runtime shared library in AS3. According to everything I've looked at I have everything set up right, but it jsut doesn't work. I've used shared libraries for many years so it's not a new concept to me, and I've always been able to get the right voodoo mix going to make them work well, but this time it's just not happening.
Here's what I'm doing and what's not working... I've got everything set up as in the old AS2 days with a "library" SWF with all the clips that I want to reuse in there set to export for runtime sharing. I've got SWFs that contain those clips and have them set to import from the shared library. So far so good. All works just fine as long as they're movieclips.
Now..... if I make a component and put it into the shared library and set it to export for runtime sharing things get interesting. If my other SWFs don't have that component set to import from the shared library then the class code for the component in the shared library will replace what is used in the other SWFs and the components will show up. BUT... if the other SWFs have that component set to import from the shared library then the component doesn't show up AT ALL. It's in the shared library but it isn't loaded or displayed by the other SWFs.
I've tried having a "main" SWF that first loads the shared library SWF and then loads each of the other SWFs and have it set the ApplicationDomain.currentDomain for all of them to the same. No help there.
Back in the AS2 days the point of a shared library was to reduce the file size of all the SWFs that use the library. If you had a few dozen or few hundred SWFs that all used the same components and those components were all in the shared library then you were saving the user from downloading those components hundreds of times.. a side benefit was that you could change the code in the component in the shared library and it would be a global change across all of the hundreds of SWFs that used that shared library. It seems that with AS3 I can get the components to use the class code from the shared library (so I can make global code changes), but only if they're fully exported in each of the SWFs (so there's no reduction in file size).
The turtles run fast to the sea, but they don't know what they face.
(update below...)
I should have been more specific with the post above (hey, I was on vacation at the beach.. cut me some slack.. ). The wall I hit was with CS3, and I still haven't gotten beyond it. This might sound odd to some, but not everybody has CS4.. so you sometimes have to develop for the least common denominator.
Now, if you're hitting this issue and have access to CS4.. you have some hope. You can specify an "External Library Path" to a SWC file either in the global Preferences, or in the Publish Settings for each FLA.
Jesse has some info on setting up that SWC. After doing that the components show up just fine.
Maybe the least common denominator needs to upgrade to CS4..
Oh, and using "Automatically declare stage instances" really mucks things up.
The US space shuttle program is winding down, and being a great procrastinator I’ve waited until the last remaining launches to finally go see one. So I picked STS-127 to try to view a launch. The first scheduled launch was just before dawn (so little chance of weather mucking things up), and all that good stuff. Well, a hydrogen leak ended the first two launch attempts. This past weekend we made the long trek (about 8hr drive) to Cape Canaveral again to watch it launch. (it didn’t.. after two more attempts).
I had a lot of work to do so I spent Friday afternoon working away on Flash coding in the back of a big Yukon. Since the shuttle didn’t launch Saturday and it didn’t scrub until the last minutes of the countdown on Sunday I also spent much of Sunday night and Monday morning pecking away on my laptop as we hurtled along I-95. My laptop is decent for doing coding work.. but not when it’s shaking all over the place.
When I got back today and transferred what I was working on over to my “workstation” and opened it up in Flex I laughed. The code was just sitting there so still and I could see so much of it. I have a 24” monitor turned vertically and set to 1200x1920, and a 19” monitor on either side of it, so I see over 100 lines of code at once. I was SO happy to be home, especially since this afternoon the fifth launch attempt was scrubbed too. If it doesn’t launch this Wednesday it’ll break a record for the number of scrubbed launch attempts.
it’s all about persistence
