Rob’s geeky discoveries Blog

Firstly it would appear that Lord Carter’s vision for Digital Britain involves speed reducing, litigation fuelling ISP snooping DRM nonsense á la China, Syria and Australia read more here & behold the zeitgeist in action:

www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/10/cory-doctorow-digital-britain

Absolutely not. We will march through the streets of Shoreditch!

And also IE8 actually introduces 2 new browsers to test in because IE7 ‘Compatibility Mode’ does not render sites in the same was as IE7 ????? See news here from IE’s marketing department and a pretty damning analysis from someone with more sense

Please don’t use IE ever! Chrome is blisteringly fast and doesn’t crash because if one tab hangs you can kill that process without losing the whole application and having to kill your session (though god knows what private data is collected while you use it) but I’m split between that and Firefox 3 as it’s got so many amazing tools and I love Mozilla. If Google would only add FFox plugin support though…

Sometimes the simplest things in life are the greatest

This little beauty does exactly what it says on the tin. Thanks to Airtight Interactive for the spot and the consistently excellent blog

After having a fresh evaluation of all my workflows, tools and processes recently and after quite a bit of time analysing Flex Builder 3 and Flash Develop; I’ve finally settled happily on FDT3 in Eclipse and the Flash IDE as my compiler (Including the AIR & AS_CORE goodies you get for free in Flex & all my favourite 3rd party AS3 Libraries via Eclipse shared Libs). During the experience I discovered loads of useful bits and thought I’d catalogue and share:

FDT can be set up to work with the Flash IDE (no slow workflow of editing SWC’s externally like with Flex) so I can live edit on stage assets as well as code as all mongrel dev/designers like me like to do. It’s also easy to set up Ctrl+Enter straight from the Eclipse IDE (Thanks to Wezside for the handy tip) like I used to with Se|Py. If you’re going to go and install this you might find this useful when you’re locating your ASO & S.O folders & various installation folders you need.

There’s only one annoying thing in that I have to add the classpaths for my external Libs to the FLA document as well as in the FDT Project (see pic) although I think this issue may be fixed or at least easier to fix with Flash CS4 (which I’ve started using on other machines and is awesome) as the settings are XML based in that rather than locked in the binary FLA.

Minor bug bear though, everything else about it I’m really pleased with. Onward to more details of cool features; for example FDT ‘Templating’. As a quick example of when to use this; I like trace – she’s done me proud over the years but I wanted to set up an FDT Template to use trace as as a keyword to enter the following line of code instead to work with ThunderBolt Logger:

[code lang="actionscript"]Logger.info("Flash is calling: A simple string", myString);[/code]

Usually you want to trace the value of a variable that is right in front of you so rather than typing it you can highlight that word in Eclipse & the FDT template will populate it’s generated code snippet with the highlighted value and plonk it straight into your code.  E.G to trace out facade in the code below:

Highlight the word facade and press CTRL+SPACE then when you start typing the first few letters of the Template Command Name ‘tra…’ the list of suggestions populates including your custom Template:

You just click that and it inserts your snippet with it’s dynamic contents like so, et voila!

You create these rules via Eclipse -> Window -> Preferences -> FDT -> Editor -> Templates. Pic below shows syntax:

So thats cool. I also mentioned our linked Library set that Rob and I are working with, there’s loads of amazing Libraries out at the moment, here’s our list (still more to go e.g PaperVision and Flint but this is a good set of great libraries)…

As ever a big thanks to the creators of all of them. Tip of the hat to you all Sir’s

Eclipse is comfortable and solid and gives you access to an existing plug in network which I’ve already found really useful. LogWatcher http://graysky.sourceforge.net/ is a tool that lets you watch any text file on your system. I just pointed mine at the FlashLog.txt created by the FP10 debugplayer and it works just like FlashTracer for Firefox but within Eclipse. I love the ability to check projects directly out of SVN ino FDT via Subclipse and the fact that it’s so easy to work between Mac & PC platforms as Java is platform independent and I guess it’s also cool being familiar with a Java dev environment in case you want to port any existing cool stuff like Saqoosha did with FLARToolkit and some of the stuff Mario Klingemann’s BitMap manipulation stuff he mentioned porting in his lecture at FOTB08.

Flash Develop is wicked and I love to support Open Source but it hasn’t got close to the features FDT can (SWC Browsing, Refactoring, Eclipse base benefits & general subjective tool use pleasure) and V3Beta9 wouldnt save my settings properly

Flex for me is nasty as the split between design and dev is skewed away from the fine traditions of Flash. CSS? No thanks. I won’t miss the bloat and the framework (MXML, yuck) but the thing that I will really miss is the incredible Flex Builder 3 View Source creation wizard which I love. http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=build_7.html

I first spotted this on one of Tink’s tutorials and he’s done some cool patches for it too but if anybody knows a way of getting the com.adobe.viewsource.ViewSource classes and zip/framework building scripts working with FDT (On either Windows or Mac), please leave a comment! Hope that was useful to somebody. Cheers

The Thunderbolt tool is absolutely amazing for runtime debugging of AS2 and AS3 from Flash or Flex and the memory snapshot thing is too cool for school. I love that uses Firebug too as I’ve been using that for DHTML stuff for ages.

There is an AIR app version too, although it doesn’t sound very Windows friendly… for more info check this out

http://www.websector.de/blog/2008/06/15/10-tips-and-tricks-using-thunderbolt-as3/

So I just managed to finally install Flex Builder 3 which is quite exciting and may even deserve a whoop

It’s been a while since I did a good ‘Hello World’ app so all good. I spent ages meddling about with my Flash Players (I already had the debug versions so I could have FlashTracer installed with Firefox 3) but when I went to run my app I got this error:

“Flex builder cannot locate the required version of Flash Player. You might need to install Flash Player 9 or reinstall Flex Builder” when I tried to run a perfectly acceptable bit of Hello World action:

[code lang="actionscript"]

[/code]

It turns out this is because Firefox 3 is not suported by the Flex debugger. This is all documentewd nicely by the nice chaps over at Adobe who are working on it…

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-13064

There’s a lot of guys on there saying the plugins are at fualt but I removed all of mine (Charles, ColorZilla, Firebug, the lot) restarted and rebooted & it still didn’t work). Only fix I could find is to use IE as the default browser for debugging. To set this up in the Flex GUI go:

Flex>Window>Preferences>General>Web Browser – Use Internal Web browser (Select IE7 )

Obviously using Ie7  is not great but it’s an acceptable workaround for now so thought I’d share. Hope tis useful

Annoyed by the Firefox loading bar message “Transferring data from www.somesite.com” appearing in your flash sites when you know you’re not in the process of transferring data?

Me too – Make sure you are not using null references to clear Levels/MovieClips like this…

[code lang="actionscript"]

loadMovie(null);

[/code]

and instead use a swf you’ve published with nothing in so that the HTTP request returns a 200 like so…

[code lang="actionscript"]

var assetNULL = "http://www.robmccardle.com/glue/bman/v6/null.swf";
loadMovie(_global.assetNULL);

[/code]

as it’s HTTP requests from within the Flash plug in that do not resolve which cause this to happen