Big Room

Using TextFields and Bitmaps in a programmatic skin

richard — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:21:33 +0000

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...

The parentheses operator

richard — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:10:57 +0000

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?...

After a couple of days relaxing

richard — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:38:46 +0000

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...

If I had more time

richard — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:28:28 +0000

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...

Flint Particle System version 1.0.3 released

richard — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:40:57 +0000

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.

Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 6 - Conclusion

richard — Thu, 22 May 2008 06:39:50 +0000

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...

Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 5 - The singleton factory

richard — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:10:58 +0000

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.

Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 4 - The monostate

richard — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:07:53 +0000

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...

Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 3 - Hiding the singleton II

richard — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:34:53 +0000

In the previous post in this series, I showed how we can use a second class to access the ModelLocator singleton. This enables instances of this second class to be created, modified, bound to and disposed of as often as one wishes while maintaining the integrity of the data in the core singleton. Each instance of the second class mirrors the data in the singleton, modifying the data in an instance modifies the singleton, and modifications to the singleton are immediately reflected back out to every instance of the second class...

Improving Cairngorm’s ModelLocator Part 2 - Hiding the singleton

richard — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:01:05 +0000

Following on from yesterday's post about Cairngorm's ModelLocator, I've devised some improvements to the code. This doesn't alter the technique, but it does remove most of the repetition in the code.