What To Deliver A Flash Developer
Flash developers are usually the last line of defense (meaning that we are the last ones to touch the project before the client sees it) and there is a lot of pressure put on us to deliver a polished product. At the point we start, chances are the deadline has already been stretched due to hang ups in the process before we ever see what we’re about to get ourselves into and being organized and receiving well-organized assets/direction is the key to success. Ideally, you should really bring the developer in during the kick-off meetings as it will ease the process down the line and make everyone’s lives easier. Even with the list below, it’s always good to explain to the developer during the early stages your vision and concept for the site, the animation style, demographic, and similar items that will aid during the process of development. Sadly, this usually never happens and we’ve got to buckle down and micro-manage everything to make sure all systems are go.
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Tip: Output Trace Statements Through Terminal
Recently I’ve been using the technique found here for outputting trace statements to the terminal when viewing your sites in a browser and it has worked flawlessly for me. I’ve been doing a lot of projects lately that include database integration so they have to be run in a staging environment and tracing in the Flash IDE is not an option.
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Server Issues Resolved
My HUGE apologies for not realizing the site was down. I was mostly connected to the internet through VPN for the past few weeks as I was finishing a large project remotely for Razorfish and I just figured the issue was with the VPN connection until I tried to go to the site one day when I wasn’t on VPN. I spoke with MediaTemple about the issues and they pointed me to my .htaccess file. It turned out that was not the issue and the issue was what is outlined here. Thanks a ton to that article and now the site should be up and running correctly. PLEASE if you see anything wrong with the site e-mail me and let me know. Thanks and my apologies.
AS3: Collection, ValueObject, & Iterator
View Collection Documentation
View Iterator Documentation
View Value Object Documentation
Download Classes & Example Files
A while ago I blogged about converting Collection and Iterator classes to AS3 since storing data in ValueObjects has become a regular practice in my coding. I really like how VOs are strongly typed and how you use a Collection to hold all the data together nicely. I am working on a project right now that allowed me to see even better uses for these things so I added a couple of simple (but helpful) methods to my Collection class (most notably the ability to add an item at a specified index as well as output the data currently existing in the collection easily) and created a base ValueObject class that allows you to easily output the data in that VO.
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Tip: Convert An Object To A Class By Name
Have you ever had to convert an object into a class based on its name? If you’ve got a string representation of the object (like its class identifier from the library) you can convert it to the data type that you’d like. All you have to do is use the handy little method called getDefinitionByName().
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Tip: Tools To Document Your Code
I got an e-mail the other day from someone asking about what tools he can use to document his code. I had written a reply to him but I was using webmail and it froze up on me. I was able to, just in time, copy the reply over and saved it for later where I can reply when I got home using my regular e-mail program. Unfortunately I deleted the e-mail on accident and apparently it was from someone named Carlos.
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Inspiration: UFC 100
I’m a bit late on this but the UFC 100 site by Red Interactive is very nicely done. Great use of PV3D.
Wowza!
It’s hard to believe I haven’t posted anything in almost two months. I’ve been super busy lately trying to wrap up some stuff and just have had no time. On the other end of the spectrum, the weather outside has been beautiful and I just haven’t been spending as much time in front of the computer during the “after hours”. Not gonna make any promises on when regular posting will resume, but I’ll try to fit some stuff in this week here or there.
Inspiration: Big & Small
I saw this on John Lindquist’s blog about Big & Small, a cartoon in the UK for which Plug-in Media made the site. The site is fantastic and all done in Papervision3D. There is tons of things to explore and its just very well done. You can see a bit about the project on Seb Lee-Delisle’s blog.
Tip: Calculating Correct FullScreen Values
So the project I’m currently working on includes all types of video players and one of the options (as is normal these days) is going to fullScreen mode. Normally you would use the Capabilities class to grab the screenResolutionX and screenResolutionY values in your code and react to it with whatever code you needed to (at least that was what I have historically done). I run a 24″ Dell widescreen monitor connected to my 15″ Macbook Pro. The Dell is my primary monitor and I use the MBP monitor as a secondary monitor for panels and such. When I go into fullScreen mode on my Dell (primary monitor), everything works fine. However, if I then go into fullScreen mode on my MBP by moving my browser over and testing that, the screen enlarges to the size it once was on my 24″ Dell. As you can see, this poses a big problem because you can’t see anything under a certain amount of pixels (in my case, half the video and my controls). But there is a very simple solution to this madness.
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