Using TextFields and Bitmaps in a programmatic skin
There's not a lot written about using text fields (or any other display object) in a programmatic skin. What there is often suggests you have to add the text field as a child of the skin's parent. But it's actually a lot simpler than that...
Posted on 17 July 2008 | 2 comments | continue reading
The parentheses operator
It's not uncommon for less experienced Actionscript developers, particularly self-taught developers, to be a little confused about the purpose of the parentheses you put after a function name when calling the function. The most common question is why aren't the parentheses used when assigning a function as an event handler?...
Posted on 16 July 2008 | no comments | continue reading
After a couple of days relaxing
I’ve been working on a number of big projects for a client - working in-house planning and architecting the projects, writing code, and managing their Actionscript developers - which has meant I haven’t had much time over the last few months to work on the Flint particle system or any other of my own projects, to do research, or even to post very much on this blog…
Posted on 15 July 2008 | no comments | continue reading
If I had more time
One of the frustrations of being busy with client work is the lack of time to investigate, experiment and play with interesting stuff. One day I’ll have time to try all this stuff but until then, here’s a simple list of the flash/flex tools I’d like to play with. Maybe you’ll find something interesting here…
Posted on 13 June 2008 | no comments | continue reading
Flint Particle System version 1.0.3 released
I released version 1.0.3 of the Flint Particle System today. This is a minor change to add some additional features including some keyboard control of the particle systems, applying palette maps to renderers and actions that only affect particles in certain areas of the screen. More info on the Flint Website.
Posted on 5 June 2008 | 6 comments | continue reading
Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 6 - Conclusion
In the previous articles I’ve outlined some alternatives to the standard practice of using a Singleton as the ModelLocator in Cairngorm. I’ve tried all three of the alternatives I outlined in a real project so here’s a summary of my opinions about them and the standard singleton…
Posted on 22 May 2008 | 12 comments | continue reading
Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 5 - The singleton factory
So far, I’ve looked at two possible replacements for Cairngorm’s use of the Singleton pattern in its ModelLocator. I want to briefly introduce a third alternative before concluding this long string of posts.
Posted on 8 May 2008 | no comments | continue reading
Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 4 - The monostate
In the first article in this ad-hoc series I expressed my desire to replace the Cairngorm developers expressed preference for implementing the ModelLocator as a singleton with an alternative implementation as a monostate. … The monostate pattern describes a class that can be instantiated as often as one likes and where each instance uses the same set of data - there is only one state shared by all instances, hence the name…
Posted on 6 May 2008 | no comments | continue reading
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