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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.
Robotlegs is an AS3 dependency injection micro-framework.
Signals is a new approach for AS3 events, inspired by C# events and signals/slots in Qt.
Put them together and you’ve got an elegant, simple & completely decoupled solution to the problem of Flex & AIR development.
I’ve thrown together a really quick example (which you can download below) based upon a couple of things I’ve seen recently; firstly Richard Lord’s framework comparison talk at FlashBrighton a couple of weeks ago, and secondly, Owen Bennett’s blend of RobotLegs and Signals he showed me last week. Seeing what Owen had put together inspired me to have a go myself. I wondered whether it was possible to create a RobotLegs/Signals hybrid that was even more decoupled than the system Owen was working on. So I created a short (less then 100 lines) class called ‘SignalBox’, named after a similarly named class in Owen’s system.
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:
I’ve been doing a bit of extra-curricular work these last few days. A local design company which has a great little team of illustrators has decided to branch out a little and teach its employees a little bit of Flash and I agreed to go over to their office a couple of evenings a week to show them some Flash basics. Nothing complex; a bit of timeline animation, some simple ActionScript, importing video, some drawing techniques, that sort of thing. But it was amazing how so little went down so well and how much the guys really got out of the session.
I guess like any field, when one is up to the eyeballs in it one can lose sight of just how much one knows and how much of it one takes for granted. I’m doing this little spell of teaching for the money really but I’ve been really happily surprised by just how rewarding passing on this simple knowledge is too.
We are better at our jobs than we give ourselves credit for. This is just another reminder that we should take as little for granted as possible.
I’m reading a lot of books about play and games at the moment. I’m interested in what Alexander Galloway has to say about what he calls ‘countergaming’ in his book ‘Gaming - Essays on algorhymthic culture‘. he has a look at many of the well-known examples of counter-gaming such as jodi, velvet strike and the work of Cory Arcangel and, whilst appreciative of their work, finds that their emphasis and the emphasis of the majority of those involved in countergaming is on hacking existing games software into aesthetic experiences as opposed to attempting to create games that redefine the unwritten rules of gaming itself.