Renowned Flash Instructor and author of the “Essential Actionscript 3.0″ Colin Moock is doing an intensive full day of AS3 Training in 10 cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, London, and more..
Don’t miss it and go sign up now! http://www.adobeas3tour.com/
Back in the summer of 2006, Dreamscape Films approached us (the1stMovement) with a very unique idea: A drama-series broadcast exclusively online and furthermore, let the Internet users choose the casts. As Geert Heetebrij and Helmut Schleppi, founders of DreamScape Films, put it:
“Don’t scale the gates of Hollywood. Walk around them”
We were immediately hooked with the idea and after about a month of consultations, design and development, we launched the Interior Phase I in October 2006.
Along with that, we launched the world’s first completely open, online talent casting call for a drama series. For the next two months, hundreds of actors/actresses flocked to upload their audition videos online to The Interior YouTube group. And out of the hundreds of submissions, the top five were chosen by YouTube users and in December 2006, the 4 main actors/actresses for the drama series were casted online and off to shooting in the rainforests of Central America.
While they were in productions in rainforests, we launched Phase II of the Interior for the cast and crew to post blogs and behind the scene videos to share. And finally, after six months of preparations and productions, the first episode is available through invitation only on the Interior (http://www.theinterior.tv).
The new Flash player Update 3 Beta 1 (build 9.0.60.120) has some of the biggest improvements I have seen. Download here.
Most notably, it has the new mipmaps support which will significantly improve the quality and rendering of bitmaps for Papervision 3D content. Another one that I am really excited about is multi-threaded video decoding, which means 1080p video is now possible and also full-screen mode with hardware scaling which leverages DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on OSX.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
Previously codenamed Apollo, Adobe launched AIR (Adobe Integrated Airtime). This version added HTML and AJAX support so you can create an .air application without Flash. The final version is expected to be released by end of the year.
Adobe is also taking a nationwide bus tour for developers all around the nation. The1stMovement will be attending the July 16th Los Angeles one. You can register here for free. Leave us a comment if you want to meet up during the event!
I came across this article (six ways to write more comprehensible code) while reading the BigSpaceShip Blog. It is definitely a good read for Flash developers as I have seen my fair share of Flash designers claim to be “developers” and write absolutely unmaintainable code.
So I thought I would take the IBM article and apply it specifically for Flash actionscript coding:
1. Comments
Taken from point #1 from the IBM article:
Comment your code. Obviously. If you write a procedure, fail to comment it, and return to it a few months later to rework it (and you will), not having comments will cost you time. And time is your most valuable resource. Lost time can’t ever be replaced.
But commenting, like anything else, is a skill. You get better with practice. There is good commenting, and there is bad commenting.
You don’t want to write too much. Suppose you write comments for a function that, in the future, saves you ten minutes of time understanding your code. Great. But suppose your comments are so verbose that it takes five minutes to write them and then, later, five minutes to read them. Then you’ve saved yourself zero time. Not so good.
You don’t want to write too little, either. If code goes on for a page or two without something breaking down what’s going on, well, I hope that code is clear as crystal, because otherwise you’re wasting future time.
The only thing I would add to it is you can minimize the use of comments by making the code self-documenting by appropriate name choices and an explicit logical structure. i.e. a Function named “getCurrentDate” needs no comment whereas “doDate” would probably need some explanation on what the function actually does
2. Constants and Variables
Similar to point #2 in the article, I highly recommend clearly defining and differentiating variables and constants. Our naming convention has always been if it’s a constant, use all caps, i.e. nSCORE (a constant named score which is a number), whereas if it’s a public variable, nScore. To take it further, declare all the constants in one place, don’t do it within the functions, but in the Class Variable Definition. i.e.
class SomeClass {
public var nSCORE:Number= 100
….
}