After previously reading Web Standards Solutions and adoring it, I’ve been keen to read another book published by Friends of ED. All the buzz about AJAX and the comeback of JavaScript made me pick up DOM Scripting Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, February 1st, 2006
Google released an interesting study about the content of over a billion webpages in their database. It’s nicely seperated into categories of markup, and identifies the most used HTML tags and attributes. I found the comments on the most frequent mistakes very interesting. Obviously many tags are used incorrectly for presentational (instead of semantic) purposes, and many pages are brimming with deprecated elements. A surprising number of pages had specialized tags, and in some cases, there’s no known online documentation that tells which program generated them or for what purpose. It’s a fun read.
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
If you didn’t see it, Tink posted a nice little overview of a couple things you can do with function parameters in AS3. I knew about default params from my experience with other languages, but I find the “…” keyword very intriguing. It lets a function receive any number of optional parameters. The function accesses these parameters through a special Array. Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever use this functionality, but it’ll definitely stay in my toolbox in case I do.
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
While I’ve had problems with Flash’s Inspectable tag in the past, I still actively use it in my daily component development. With highly complex components, Inspectable let’s me finish property definition quicker, and I can spend less time messing with details in the FLA. Just today, I discovered something that speeds things up even more, so I thought I’d share. Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, January 19th, 2006
A lot of established companies have undertaken major identity changes recently. Changing a logo, especially for a company or brand recognized around the world, is no small decision. This small symbol acts as the core of any sort of recognition, and once it’s firmly in the public’s mind, changing it changes everything.
Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
After I received some feedback in the FlashDevelop forums, I made some changes and took some time to further optimize the search speed and quality of the results from my HelpPanel plugin.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the default search location points to the Actionscript Language Reference section of the complete help files. A majority of users of FD are probably advanced users that just need a refesher on a particular class or parameter, so this is the obvious default. I also added the Component Reference to the location list, since it contains a good deal of important classes, such as EventDispatcher.
Second, when you actually do a search, you’ll see nearly instant results. I benchmarked an average search of the ASLR to about 1.2 seconds on my machine. Previous versions of the plugin searched the complete help files, and could take over ten seconds. This option is still available, and should finish in half the previous time.
Finally, pressing the Enter key after typing in your search query will start the search, so you don’t have to use your mouse to click a button. I don’t know how I missed including that one. Get HelpPanel 1.2!
Friday, January 6th, 2006
Chris Velevitch made an insightful comment yesterday on the Flashcoders mailing list. Mainly, he talks about the finally keyword, and gives an excellent explanation of how it is used. However, he goes above and beyond the call of duty and points out how use finally to achieve a couple of best practices described in The Pragmatic Programmer, Finish What You Started and Don’t Repeat Yourself . It’s not very often that you find such a good explanation and accompanying example of a programming concept, so I had to pass it on to others.
Thursday, January 5th, 2006
I came across a cool web app called Retrievr today, and honestly, I’m having trouble introducing it in any way other than by saying that it’s pretty damn cool. There’s a little Flash interface that lets you draw a sketch. Retrievr analyzes it and searches Flickr for the closest matching picture. You have to try it to really understand. It’s almost eerie that you can tell why every result was chosen.
Now, it’s still obvious that image recognition technology needs more time to mature, but this is the first time I’ve thought to myself, “wow….” I’ve never seen image analysis continously give recognizable results. It’s like the first time I played a fully 3D video game like Super Mario 64. It was just different than anything I had ever played before.
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Thursday, January 5th, 2006
Hot on the heels of my first release, I’m giving you another. As you may notice, I changed the name of the plugin from FlashHelp to HelpPanel. Mainly, that’s because I’ve expanded the plugin to include sources other than the main help files and LiveDocs. Additionally, it matches the naming scheme of the other FD plugins, which I think is a good practice to follow.
What’s new? Well, now you can add (and remove) custom search locations. Local folders work just like the regular help search, and online locations will do a Google search just like I set up with the LiveDocs. I also gave the interface a slight makeover, and I added better support for non-English systems. Head on over to the FlashDevelop plugins page and pick it up.
Saturday, December 31st, 2005
I just finished up the first release of a help plugin for FlashDevelop. I started things out by focusing entirely on searching for content. Once I’m sure search is stable, I’ll look into adding more functionality. The plugin automatically detects if the Flash help files are on the system. If they don’t exist, it will open a browser and search the LiveDocs. Of course, you can choose to search either location if you wish. Help file detection works for both Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8.
Behind the local help search is a nice little HTML searching class that uses weights to determine the top result. For every time a search word appears in the document, the weight increases. Words appearing inside certain tags, like <title> or headers, will receive larger weights. The algorithm runs pretty quickly on my system–usually only taking a few seconds to return the results, which is comparable to the help search in the main Flash IDE.
The included DLL is compiled against PluginCore from FlashDevelop 2.0 Beta 7, so it may not work correctly with a different version. The source is included if you want to recompile for a different version, or you’re looking to play around. You can download the plugin and source.
Monday, December 26th, 2005
