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.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Playing with Parameters
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.
Inspectable and Inheritance
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.
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New Logo Madness
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.
FlashDevelop HelpPanel Plugin 1.2
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!
Finally keeps you DRY
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.
Retrievr: Search Flickr via a Sketch
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.