LONESTAR!

From my e-mail-box:

So Bob,

Earlier this summer I made this picture for some sort of prank or funnin’, or perhaps some joshing, but nothing came of it, so here it is. Keep it in memory of lost dreams.

Tony Hillerson
Software Architect – effectiveUI

Flash: More on FDT

Right after FDT came out, I wrote a whitepaper for its author, PowerFlasher.com, describing how to set up a super-cool development environment for Flash with Eclipse, FDT, and Subclipse. The paper was called The Ultimate Flash Development Environment.

It came out when Flash MX 2004 was the current Flash release and consequently, some of the information is not applicable to using it with Flash 8. Still, because I noticed that many people reaching this blog are looking for FDT setup information, I’d recommend giving it a read.

I’d also be happy to help anyone who’s having trouble setting up this environment. I’ll use the experience to update the whitepaper. Just shoot me an email or leave a comment.

Flash: FDT rocks my world!

So, I’m done with my project in Detroit and I’m back at home in Denver.

Since my work in Detroit was so FLA-centric and definitely not object oriented, I decided to skip using my usual actionscript editor, FDT, and use SEPY instead. I picked SEPY because it installs and works right out of the box, with no additional configuration. The downside is that SEPY is not very powerful at all. It’s decent as a text editor, but there’s no (decent) outline option, no version control integration, and nearly worthless code hinting.

I would have preferred FDT, but since it has error checking that is far more strict than Flash’s own compiler, I was worried that I’d spend all of my time making the convoluted code base FDT-kosher, just to add a few features here and there. There was also way to much code on the project’s FLAs, so making FDT understand the project may have been functionally impossible, anyway.

Now that I’m home, I get to work with FDT again, after not having worked with it for almost six months. It made me remember that FDT is the greatest invention ever, ever. The code hinting is fantastic, it checks errors without compiling, and it can automatically fix common errors — like missing imports and missing semicolons — automatically. It runs on Eclipse, so you can mix in version control and any other useful plugins in your arsenal.

It costs 199 Euro, which is equal to $10,000 or $35 or something. But oh my God, is it worth it. I couldn’t believe how much easier it is to work and how much easier my code is to understand when I am working with FDT. I cannot give a higher recommendation.

Flash: Mixing Run-time elements with author time-masks

Like I mentioned in my earlier post, I’ve been working on a large project that has a lot of AS2 mixed with densely layered FLAs, full of author-time elements.

I ran across an interesting nuance in masking, while trying to mask a run-time MovieClip, with a mask that was created in author-time.

Here it is:

Making an object in run-time and then calling its setMask and passing in an author-time movieClip will unmask whatever the author-time movieclip was previously masking.

There are a couple of ways around this problem:

1. Create an empty “holder” MovieClip, in author-time (you know, on the stage) and make sure it is being masked. Then, attach your run-time MovieClip to that holder instance. Problem solved.

2. You can also duplicate the mask using duplicateMovieClip and call setMask on your run-time MovieClip and pass in your new mask as the argument.

Still with me? Check out this example, it’s way less confusing.

Neither approach is terribly elegant, but if you’re mixing author-time and run-time elements, there’s bound to be some non-elegant-ness anyway.

You might be thinking, “Hey, I’m a coder. Why would I bother with an author-time mask, anyway? I’d rather make one in code and then use it how I please.” I hear ya.

When I was presented with this problem, I had a mask, created in the Flash IDE that was masking dozens of layers, with a complex animation and functioning perfectly. All it needed was one or two run-time elements to be behind the mask. At that point, it’s not worth the trouble to recreate the mask, with its crazy animation, in code, just to pull one or two things under it.

When developing in Flash, especially when designers and developers of varying skill levels are contributing code, these situations will come up. Sometimes, you just gotta hack.

Flash: yourMom.getTextFormat(); //is the key to letterSpacing

I’ve spent the past month working on a Flash project for a large ad agency. In the agency, the designers hand me FLAs that have all of the assets, some code, and some interactivity. Rather than recreating what is on the FLA in nice, clean, object-oriented AS 2, it is my job to automate the existing assets and keep them in the FLA. In a way, the coding practice is something you might call AS 1.5. There are AS 2 classes, components, frame code, and author-time movie clips — and they all have to make friends.

They don’t make friends very well.

I’ve learned several important, poorly documented lessons from this. Here’s one of them:

Letter spacing breaks easily on author-time text fields. If there is a text field on the stage and you try to set the text via: myTextField.text = "blah blah";, it ignores the letter spacing!

The fix is easy (and a little ridiculous). Somewhere in your code, make a new temporary TextFormat instance and set it with the author-time text field’s format like this:

var fmt:TextFormat = myTextField.getTextFormat().

Then call:

myTextField.setTextFormat(fmt);
myTextField.setNewTextFormat(fmt); .

This has got to be a bug in Flash. I can’t imagine a reason Adobe would want a text field that forgets some of its text format properties and remembers others. Still, reminding a text field what its format is, seems to work just fine.

Check out my example to see a working version of this.

Detroit in a (absorbent cotton) Nutshell

I’ve been working in Detroit for a month now and I’ve been trying to think of what to blog about it — how I would describe it to other people. This post might sum it up for me.

First a little background:

I work in the middle of downtown. For a downtown area, Detroit seems unusually, if not eerily empty during the middle of the day. But in front of my building, there are usually a fair amount of people hanging around and you get to see some nice “city action” every once in a while. Today took the cake, though.

In front of my building, there was a homeless guy hawking friggin’ maxi pads for a dollar. He had a bag of Kotex, enthusiastically yelling, “Maxi pads! One dollar!”

That’s all you need to know about Detroit.

Coming Soon!

I’ve been in Detroit for almost a month now and it’s hard for me to post on my blog from here, since there’s no free internet at my hotel and the last thing I want to do after sitting at a computer all day is sit at a computer all night. But I have lots of stuff to to talk about including:

• Myspace getting an interesting “award” from a major magazine
• The enigma that is Flash masking
• The enigma that is Flash letter spacing
• Mayhem in Motown

I promise I’ll write more soon.

A week without myspace

Last week, I decided to quit myspace. I deleted a large number of the friends in my account and posted a bulletin with a message saying I was quitting. This idea was partially inspired from a speech by Jello Biafra made at the recent HOPE conference in New York. He had some choice words for myspace.

From the speech…

Didn’t it use to be that living in a world of imaginary friends was classified as a mental illness…

I mean, you keep relying on smell phoning, and text messaging, and myspace-ing out, and constantly having to check your email, facebook worming in some spaz-induced fear that you might be missing something. And then, keeping up with every little detail, you wind up missing everything else — possibly things that are actually important and instead just end up living in your own virtual Las Vegas.

This resonated with me. It’s not that most of my friends on myspace weren’t really friends — a lot of them were — but the way I had interacted with them had changed, since I started myspace. I was leaving myspace comments at times when I would have just calling them up in the past.
When I’d meet somebody new, if I had their myspace account, I would just read about them on their myspace page, instead of asking them what they were into.

And myspace comments are so low bandwidth. Most of the time they’re one or two sentences. A typical one: “Hey man, how’ve you been. I went to the lake. It was cool.” Then the other person writes back: “I’m good. Just bought a new frisbee.” Whatever. Those kinds of comments would be dispensed with in the first five seconds of a phone call or a face-to-face conversation. Then, you could actually get details and feelings and meaning from the rest of the conversation. You don’t get much of that on myspace.

I’d rather have people call me, meet me, or even write me an email, than substitute an actual relationship for myspace chit-chat.

The first week has been noticeably better for me. I’ve called most of my friends up and had real conversations with them. I’ve gone out more and have gathered up a bunch of amazing and hilarious stories to tell. And I’ve spent waaay less time in front of the computer at home.

Highly recommended.

What I Live For (W.I.L.F.)

A while ago I had an idea for a magazine. The magazine would follow random people around, famous and not famous, to find out what they live for. What makes life worth it for them. It would also be filled with rad photos. Maybe someday I’ll make the magazine, but for now, here are five things that make my life worth living.

1. Air, Talkie Walkie
2. Yacht Rock
3. The theme from A Fistful of Dollars (not the song in the credits, but the main theme)
4. This fucking incredible graffiti stencil Pat and I designed:

5. Flex Builder 2

“Let Me Borrow That Top” is the new “I’m Rick James, Bitch!”

My new favorite internet radio show, Andrew Andrew’s Sound Sound, played this song in their mix a couple days ago.

It’s called “Let Me Borrow That Top.” The artist, “Kelly,” is obviously some dude doing his best San-Fernando-Valley-girl accent. He’s pleading with his girlfriend to borrow “that top,” which “she’s not even wearing.”

It’s infectious.

Last night, just about everybody at Feminist Craft Night was singing it. It’s becoming the new greeting among all of my friends, too.

It’s like the new “I’m Rick James, Bitch.”

Listen to it here.