FDT and FlexUnit 4.1 Beta

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

FlexUnit 4 was a massive leap forward for Test Driven ActionScript 3 Development allowing us to make use of metadata annotations, hamcrest and easier asynchronous testing and I was delighted to discover that the flexunit.org team are still busy working away preparing for the next milestone release of FlexUnit 4.1 ...

Reducing the size of SWF Files

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Over at Moshi HQ, we've spent a fair bit of time looking at how to reduce the size of the SWFs we publish; here's a quick checklist to rattle through to get the most bang for your buck (or in this case, Kb) 1. Joa Ebert's Apparat. Joa is an ActionScript hero ...

My Development Environment.

Friday, November 21st, 2008

I spend most of my development time sat in Eclipse, I find it funny (or maybe slightly alarming) that only four moths ago I had never ventured near an Integrated Development Environment and spent a lot of time toiling away with a Crimson Editor.  All I can say is that ...

The State of Logging in ActionScript 3

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

I've been looking at Logging Frameworks in ActionScript 3 over the past few days and I'm afraid that I'm slightly at a loss as for which approach is the best to take. There are a few Logging Frameworks out there, but Adobe has kindly supplied an intrinic Logging Framework, ...

Typesafe Enums in ActionScript 2

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Typesafe Enums are perfect when you want to get the message across loud and clear, with no room for error. The classic use for an Enum is handling events, to give some context I'll demonstrate how you could handle events without using an Enum: /** * This example method will ...

Actionscript – Loading Acute and UTF-8 Characters from XML into Dynamic Text with Flash

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Writing flexible applications in Flash is easy, (/me points in the direction of my XML Configuration Class) and there's few reasons why all your text strings should not be read in at run time to allow for easy internationalization. However, one pitfall to be aware of is trying to use Acutes ...

ActionScript 2.0 Configuration Class

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

This is an update to my original Actionscript 2.0 Configuration Class which I wrote back in February. It features a new access method for reading and writing values and allows you to load in external XML configuration documents with an easy to understand Schema. All comments welcome.

Accurate Timing in ActionScript

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

@Update: 23rd May 2008. Small refactoring of the code without changing the interface, the .zip archive now includes a working example. There are many things that require timing when programming, for me the challenge is accurately timing how long a user has been viewing a video for. There are ...