Richard Willis

Last night, sometime around 10pm, a tired and understandably ‘bit grumpy Niqui Merret pulled her little grey car up outside my house and dropped me off after a gruelling 12+hr road trip home from FITC Amsterdam. I took my bag and my wooden pink elephant inside and went di-rect-ly to bed. ‘Shouldn’t take that long to get from Amsterdam to Brighton but when SeaFrance Ferries get it into their head to have a strike it leaves a lot of people stranded, tired and hungry on the dockside for hours, whilst P&O struggle to help everybody out. I’m glad the union movement is still strong in France, I just don’t want to sit and stare at the suburbs of Calais for 3 hours.

But that aside, what a blast man! I’m not going to go into tedious detail but it was ENORMOUS fun. Shawn, you can have me back in Amsterdam anytime you want. Where do I sign? :)

Now, about that elephant…

So this:

trace(label_txt.maxscroll);

Produces this output:

1
1
1
1

Whereas this:

var tmp:Number = label_txt._height;
trace(label_txt.maxscroll);

Produces this:

1
1
1
3

I’m, like, wtf?! I think the moral of the story here is USE AS3 & NOT AS2!

That, in a nutshell is your three-step guide to instance class-creation happiness in AS3. Let me explain:

public function SomeClass ( name:String )
{
    _name = name;
    _init();
}
 
private function _init ():void
{
    // your initialisation code here...
    reset();
}
 
public function reset ():void
{
    // your reset code here...
}

This public - private - public approach to initialising your AS3 objects will make you life SO much easier. Let me tell you why:

(more…)

Seb, FlashBrighton’s “our-glorious-leader” has decided to restructure the group in order to get some help running things. One of the changes he wanted to make was to create a ‘content’ team for web copy, images, stuff like that. I like to think of myself as having a way with language - or with English at least -, and thus thought I had something worth sharing with any such team. So I told Seb so and he pleasantly surprised me by making me “Head of Content”, whatever that means.

I guess as the head, I’ll be finding out real soon… :)