Express Installer Utility
May 15th, 2008
When doing the home page for Heavy.com we came across a “special” bug with our Flash detection script. Apparently some people who were running FireFox and Flash Player 9.0.xx+ were not able to make it through the detection script. The issue seemed to be that the browser would throw the wrong player version to JS and JS would fail to load the site (like it should do by prompting you to upgrade) but this was happening to people who had the correct version of the player. We caught this bug in QA before launching the site but here is the class I used to get around this problem.
Helper Class
May 13th, 2008
Sometime you need a little class to act as a Utility but still allow for for instance specific configuration. In one class your util may need to do X and in another Y but the functions and methods need to be the same for both classes. In the past I use to develop Singleton or Static utility classes but this situation breaks my design pattern. How do I handle these one off customizable utilities? I create helpers.
Letter Particle Generator
May 10th, 2008
A little while back a friend of mine asked me to help him put the finishing touches on a jewelry site he was having built. They wanted to take the existing AS 2 site and connect it to my FlashBaker Admin panel and clean up a few things as well. Since I detest AS 2 at this point I felt it would be better to just port the entire site over to AS 3. While I did that, I overhauled this Letter Particle Effect that was being used on the site. I thought I would release the source code to the particle system and hopefully drum up some traffic to his site TypeOfLove.com.
Useless Getters/Setters
April 26th, 2008
Part of building my new Framework revolves around optimization (Code, Size, and Speed). One of the quickest optimizations I have done is removing all the useless getters and setters and instead replace them with public vars.
Config Class part 2
April 23rd, 2008
So I have been building a new Framework at Heavy. This framework is more designed oriented then the MCVC framework I was using before. The entire UI (Display) tier is built on XML similar to MXML. With that in mind I needed a way to quickly convert xml nodes into config objects. This was the next logical step from my original Config Class.
AS 3 Config Class
April 2nd, 2008
As I move into more elaborate AS 3 development, I began looking for a way to templatize my config objects for each of my classes. This is my first attempt at an Abstract Config class.
Recognizing a good programer?
March 23rd, 2008
While on the topic of good coding practices I forgot to post a link to this great artical on recognizing a good programer. I have used this as a reference when interviewing new Flash Developers where I work.
Are Singletons Bad?
March 23rd, 2008
So for the better half of my Friday I did research on how to best implement a service controller1 for the new AS 3 Heavy Video Player I am building. Normally I would just slap together a few singleton utility classes and be on my way but, after having a conversations with Myles2 about a blog post he read that said using singletons were bad, I started thinking about if I was going down the wrong path.
AS 3 Singleton Template
March 18th, 2008
Awhile ago I read this article about best practices for creating singletons in AS 3 on gskinner’s blog. I thought I would share the template that I use for creating my utility classes.
MCVC Controller - Part 3
December 26th, 2007
The controller is the glue that holds your application together. It facilitates communication between views and Models as well as Models to other Models. This controller also over comes one of AS 2.0 fatal flaws; the event system.
