ONE of the reasons this might happen is because of the following:
public static function compareStrings ( firstString:String, secondString:String ):String { firstString:String = tidySpace( firstString ); ... }
You see that firstString:String = etc there? That’s the fella. DON’T EVER strongly type your vars more than once, unless you wanna lose an hour of dev like I have this morning.
[click the image to see a larger version]
This diagram outlines an XML load procedure. Complicated, no? That’s because it’s for an AIR app, and therefore has to cope with situations other Flash & Flex apps don’t. I’m showing it to make the case for planning AIR apps in advance as much as possible.
I made an eCard for my friends and clients yesterday. With the exception of those who actually make half-decent ones - like my old client TripleTruth - eCards are usually pretty lousy so i just wanted to mess about for a laugh really and make a really amateur effort.
You can find my bad eCard here. The misspelling in it was a genuine mistake that I thought I’d keep. I hope it makes you smile and I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.
See you in 2009!
Over the summer of 2008 I decorated my bathroom. I knew from doing my kitchen the year before that the most painstaking and time-consuming part of the job would be tiling and I wondered if there was anyway it could be made less so?
I had just come back from BarCampBrighton, where I was inspired by Ollie Glass‘ workshop on writing genetic algorithms; something that turned out to be really simple. So I sat down, chucked some code together and produced this Tile Designer swf, built on a genetic algorithm:
Spurred on by this page on Kristen Akermans’s site and this blog post on Matt Pearson’s blog - which both list freelancers available in Brighton and which both link kindly to me - I decided I should return the favour. So what follows is a list of those people I recommend if you’re looking for a freelancer. Obviously I top my own list - I’ll be wanting the work first, thank you :) - but if I’m busy I thorougly recommend the other guys and gals (listed alphabetically) here:
Designers
Charis Mystakidou: wiredportfolio.com
Kristen Akerman: sting.co.uk
Luke Hornsby: flamingpixels.co.uk
Tim Frost: bullandgate.com
Developers
Richard Willis: richtextformat.co.uk
Matt Pearson: actionscripter.co.uk
Matt Sayers: soplausable.com
Neil Manuell: revisual.co.uk
Nikos Chagialas: devgallery.com
Owen Bennett: steamboy.co.uk
This turns out to be outrageously simple. If you wanna create a grayscale somewhere between pure black and pure white all you need is this could-not-be-simpler equation:
var num:int = 1; // any int from 0 to 255 var grayscale:int = num * 65793;
All you need to ensure is that the value of ‘num’ is an integer from 0 (for pure black) to 255 (for pure white) and that’s it!
Sitting at the back of Grant Skinner’s session at ‘Flash on the Beach’ a few weeks ago i got my cellular automata classes out and did another visualisation with them. It’s really nice that they’re so easy to use, I can bash something like this out with in just a couple of hours. Again, just click the wee arrow to get going:
OK, not the most astonishing work, it would really be nice to push the envelope a bit further with it. Putting autonomous objects in a controlled environment is obviously going to be a rich vein for software, visualisations, experiments and games for the foreseeable future and I’m currently wondering quite how we can use that stuff in interesting new ways.
One of the projects I worked upon over the summer was destined for the South-American market and therefore needed to display in both Spanish and Portuguese. It was a microsite built in Flex and needed the capacity to alternate between these two languages at any given time. From the user’s perspective, a single button click should be sufficient to translate the entire site’s text from one language to another instantly. Looking around the web I couldn’t find any answers so I sat down and worked out a solution myself.
Here’s a sample app using English and my second language Swedish:
There is a fantastic technique for getting graphics drawn in Flash into Flex by means of classes compiled into a swc. It’s a really nice little method and if you wanna learn about it Ultraviolet Design have a great post about it here. I’m pointing you towards their post as this post is not going to be about that. Instead it’s going to be about what happens when that technique - which usually works fine - goes unexpectedly and bafflingly wrong.
Having put the original cellular automata swf up a couple of days ago I found myself in a coding frame of mind, so I decided to devote the whole of yesterday to it. I abstracted the data sections of the previous version out so i could use their mechanisms to produce new generative visualisations and having done that got straight down to making a second. Here it is, just click the wee arrow to get going:
Works well with music, particularly ‘In the Musicals‘ from the soundtrack to ‘Dancer in the Dark‘, somewhat unexpectedly.