creacog

Looks like the initial chance to play with Apollo is coming soon, and according to this post by Mike Chambers it will be an alpha rather than beta.

Personally I can’t wait to see how it stacks up against MDM Zinc, which I’m using today. And to see what MDM do, if anything to compete in a post-Apollo world.

I think my adoptive tune for Apollo is “Some Thing’s Coming” : I Monster

As you will know from my earlier post, I generally consider using SWFObject to be best practice for embedding Flash in a web page. It has recently been updated to version 1.5: Release note.

It is probably also worth noting that while the present is SWFObject, the future will be SWFFix. Lead by Geoff Stearns (SWFObject) and Bobby van der Sluis (UFO).

Update (14/03/2008) : SWFObject 2 released.

Looks again like two good presentations tonight at the LFPUG in London…

• Smoke, Fire and Water – Creating Realistic Procedural Bitmap Effects (19:00 – 20:00) – Alias Cummins
•  Apollo: The unofficial WTF ( 20:15 – 21:15 ) – Dan Thomas

Unfortunately work commitments are going to keep me away, but I’ll have my fingers crossed that the live feed will be in operation, and I will be snooping in.

Don’t get me wrong, ActionScript 3.0 CookBook is damn good, and one of the few AS3 books published to-date. However it is a first edition and does contain errata – probably due to having been written against an alpha or early beta version of Flex2 / AS3. I reported those I had found to O’Reilly some weeks ago, but at time of writing this article they have yet to be published to the errata page.

In future any significant errata I beleive I have found in any book (where the publisher has yet to make them available) I will report on this blog under the tag errata so anyone wondering why certain things don’t work, stands a chance of finding them with a Google.

1. Incorrect description of graphics.lineStyle()

This error is present throughout chapter 7. On page 182 the thickness parameter is described as having a default value of 1. Throughout chapter 7 code samples use the line:
sampleSprite.graphics.lineStyle()

I believe this line should read:
sampleSprite.graphics.lineStyle( 1 )

As from the Adobe documentation:

thickness:Number — An integer that indicates the thickness of the line in points; valid values are 0 to 255. If a number is not specified, or if the parameter is undefined, a line is not drawn.

Therefore using lineStyle as presented in as3cb will result in no line being drawn where a line of 1px thickness was intended.

2. doubleClick description

Not really errata, but the following would have benefited from one crucial extra piece of information:

Page 169, the description of doubleClick.

Generated when the user presses and releases the mouse button twice in rapid succession over the interactive display object

The above quote is true, as long as the developer has previously set the doubleClickEnabled property of the interactive display object to true. If not, no doubleClick event is fired. Considering the target audience of this book – quite an important point to mention.

3. ColorTransform

Pages 76 and 77

With regards to the ColorTransform instances, the code samples make reference to an ‘rgb’ property. No such property exists. The property the author is intending is ‘color’ which returns an rgb value represented in type uint.

If you are interested in Flash/Flex development and you are in London on the 25th, why not drag yourself along to hear about Flex components and Papervision3d?

Past experience tells me we will have good presentations and a good crowd.

• More information on LFPUG 

Added ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook to my reading list. Not strictly anything to do with flex but it’s saved me loads of time while learning Flex and I highly recommend it.

I have a webservice running from asp.net. Sample method interface…

[WebMethod( Description = "Returns the About content" )]
public XmlDocument getAbout()
{
  xmlDoc.LoadXml( "<about></about>" );
  rootElement = xmlDoc.DocumentElement;
/*
* add some child nodes... etc
*/
...
  return xmlDoc;
}

As you can see the return type is of XmlDocument.

In ActionScript I am using code within a class similar to…

  private var myPCO :mx.services.PendingCall;
  private var myWSO :mx.services.WebService;

// myWSO is intialised once in a constructor or some other suitable location
  myWSO = new WebService( "/TheService.asmx?WSDL" );

//inside some function we initiate the data load
  myPCO = myWSO.getAbout();
  myPCO.onResult = mx.utils.Delegate.create( this, pcoResult )

// we handle a dataresult...
  private function pcoResult( result:XML ):Void
  {
    trace( result.firstChild.nodeName );
  }

The trace returns ‘undefined’. Spotted the mistake?

Because my service is returning an XML object, I assumed the ‘result’ would be the XML object. It isn’t. It is simply an object which contains the XML object, the root node of which you can access directly by name. In this case…

private function pcoResult( result:Object ):Void
{
  trace( result.about.nodeName );
}

This now correctly traces ‘about’.

Very cool, very neat service contining great code samples for Flash and Flex : IFBIN. A must for any ActionScript developer.

Commenced creation of my reading list of books and online references I have found useful. Initially concentrating on the Flash and ActionScript books I used to get involved in this technology.

I recently had the need to be able to switch player versions on the mac, and was very grateful to have found Mike Chambers‘ “Flash Player Switching on Mac” entry. Following the instructions in that entry may well be all you need. Be sure to read comments IV and V – they are important!

In my own set up I made a couple minor alterations to ease things in my own mind (to be read in conjunction with Mike’s article)…

1. With respect to setting up the ‘soft-link’ or alias to “Internet Plug-Ins” I find an alias name of “InternetPlug-Ins” less likely to cause confusion than the more generic “plugins”. (Norton utils for example creates a “Plug-ins” folder within /Library)
2. Similarly to avoid any confusion within the InternetPlug-Ins folder which in my case contains loads of files, I created a sub-folder “flashplayers” into which I placed the version folders.

So my resulting folder/file structure is as follows…

/Library/InternetPlug-Ins/
  Flash Player Enabler.plugin
  Flash Player.plugin
  flashplayer.xpt
/Library/InternetPlug-Ins/flashplayers/7
  Flash Player Enabler.plugin
  Flash Player.plugin
  flashplayer.xpt
/Library/InternetPlug-Ins/flashplayers/8
  Flash Player Enabler.plugin
  Flash Player.plugin
  flashplayer.xpt
/Library/InternetPlug-Ins/flashplayers/9
  Flash Player Enabler.plugin
  Flash Player.plugin
  flashplayer.xpt

The idea being that the three files currently in /Library/InternetPlug-Ins represent the currently active version of the player.

As my folder structure is different to that of Mike’s, my script is slightly modified…

#!/bin/bash
#
# Script to change the flash player
#
if [ $# != 1 ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 name-of-player-version-dir"
  exit
else
  plugin_dir='/Library/InternetPlug-Ins'
  np_dir="$plugin_dir/flashplayers/$1"
  if [ ! -d $np_dir ]; then
    echo "$np_dir does not exist."
    exit
  fi
  cp -rv $np_dir/* $plugin_dir/
fi

Finally if you are not familiar with writing and running scripts via the terminal, two things to bear in mind…

1. Placing your script file in a folder picked up by the path, will ensure it is available to you whatever is your current working directory. In my case I use the default tcsh shell and cfp is placed in my /Users/username/bin directory. This is added to the path in my via my .tcshrc file with the line

   setenv PATH "$PATH":bin

2. Make sure you set the executable flag on the script file:

   chmod +x cfp