Links to keep from RIA Radio @ Flashbelt

Game platforms:

http://flixel.org/

http://pushbuttonengine.com/

AS3 IDE:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

http://www.insideria.com/2010/02/intellij-idea9-actionscript-3f.html

Lazy man’s AS3 way of parsing URL variables.

Quick and easy:

I only needed what was at the ‘?’ and after so a bit of string manipulation and ding, it was done.

I’m sure there are better way’s of doing this, but this works for now.

Flash’s compiler error messages are such smart alecs

In an application with a ton of lines of code I get this compiler message:

TypeError: Error #1010: A term is undefined and has no properties.

Thanks, I guess.

Adobe, you wanna throw me a bone and fix that to actually say what the problem really is?

I did end up finding the problem, but that message from the compiler merited a blog post. Now get back to work.

Steve jobs hates Flash. Straight from the horses mouth.

*Update – after reading quite a few blog posts, from folk in the industry, on this, I’ve come to side in with what Big Spaceship has posted regarding the subject, I also enjoyed what Lee Brimelow had to say as well as. As for Jeffrey Zeldman, I don’t think he and I would ever see eye-to-eye as what the web standards should be, what they need to be or where we would like to see them go, especially anything regarding Flash or other plugins, but props for stating his opinion.

From dailytech.com:

“Apple’s Jobs says flash crashes macs; no flash for ipad, iphone planned.”

Full article at dailytech.com.

One quote from the story, “At the WSJ meeting, he reportedly called Flash a “CPU hog” and a source of “security holes.”  And he smartly jabbed, “We don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology.”"

Seriously? Flash is just a product by itself, you would have no content without designers or developers, no video players, etc. If something is a CPU hog, it’s more then likely coded badly, that’s not Flash’s fault. The same goes for security holes, well for most of them.

That being said, I have used Flash as an authoring tool as well as just experiencing it browsing the web on a Mac, extensively. Which forces me to agree, that Flash on a Mac runs slow, faster these days then before. But, I don’t even like using Flash as an authoring tool on the Mac, it’s just so dang fast on the PC it feels like when I move over to the Mac, even one of the newer ones, my last job had me on a quad core Intel Mac, decked out, (I know there are eight core Macs now), but Flash still ran faster on the PC in both experience and authoring tool. I’m not sure of the reasoning behind that, I wish it weren’t so.

I know a lot of die hard Mac folk won’t even read this but C’est la vie.

Flash Data Visualization from FlowingData

Some great keeper info here on AS based data vis.

I’ve looked into the Flare kit before but have yet to have a reason to use it on any project, maybe sometime soon.

http://flowingdata.com/2008/04/21/how-to-learn-actionscript-flash-for-data-visualization/
http://flare.prefuse.org/
http://modestmaps.com/

Remember alpha in AS3 is only 0 to 1. Lesson learned.

I know that seems like a very elementary concept. But for whatever reason I just didn’t remember that for about four hours, not the best of times.

No more 0 to 100 in AS3, it’s all 0 to 1, if anyone was wandering. Let this be your AS3 tip of the day!