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- August 24, 2005
Lessons Learned
August 24, 2005Read moreToday Jason got his Actionscript 2.0 class hierarchy working, which was very exciting for the both of us. It was interesting to see how he would approach the AS2.0 environment for the first time; I gave him very minimal guidance on how to architect it. He came up with some interesting ideas regarding his multi-screen application skeleton.
- August 23, 2005
Protecting your Actionscript
August 23, 2005Read moreJason forwarded me this article reviewing SWF Encrypt, a $99 Flash SWF encryption tool that, so far, is able to defeat those SWF decompilers that can be used to rip off your code by reverse-engineering the bytecode (the SWF file) into readable source code. This is also useful for trying to find interesting tidbits like database server passwords, if you’ve happened to hardcode it into your SWF.
- August 23, 2005
WYSIWYG WordPress
August 23, 2005Read moreI caught a mention of some WordPress 1.6 features, and one of them looks like a a fancy WYSIWYG Post Editor. That would be nice. I’ve seen cool implementations of them on other websites. I could do away with PHP-Markdown, the text formatting plugin I use, which is something of a resource hog on my server.
- August 23, 2005
Random Cambridge Pictures
August 23, 2005Read moreMy cousin Jason and I were bumming around Cambridge, visiting with good friend and former coworker Yuri. I’m not much of a tour guide, but Yuri knew the area well and we got a great walking tour.
I can’t believe that after being in this area for so many years, I had never walked along the Charles River by Memorial Drive. I was a little surprised at how ratty the grass seemed by the river…I was expecting something more manicured like a golf course or a park. It was a nice place to hang out, though.
As we exited Harvard Yard, we found ourselves confronted with Mr. Bartley’s Famous Burgers, another Harvard Square landmark. We didn’t go in, but I got this shot of the place.
One thing that Jason had noticed about the East Coast was that our graveyards were much more authentically spooky than the rather utilitarian grounds he’d seen back home in California. This is the graveyard by that church near the Harvard Square T Stop, very old.
This was some kind of memorial theater near the Science Center, the name of which slips my memory. Cool windows!
This was the kind of thing that Jason doesn’t see much of in California…heavy wood, dusty-smelling old buildings. The smell brought me back to Dad’s old church in New Jersey, and of old university libraries. It was a strangely comforting smell.
We’re going to take a Duck Tour and visit Salem on Wednesday. I’ve never done the Duck Tour before, so I’m looking forward to it.
- August 22, 2005
Flash Player 8 Niftiness
August 22, 2005Read moreWas browsing the very cool Open Source Flash website just now, and came across their Undocumented Flash Player 8 wiki page, covering tidbits of new actionscript. Neat! Note that this covers the beta version of the player, so it’s not known how much of this will make it into release.
Still, two things were of interest to me:
- Script-level access to bitmap data. That’s very cool. It looks like you’ll be able to composite bitmap data on-the-fly too, and apply those new glow and shadow filters programmatically. That is super cool.
ExternalInterface API for Javascript-to-Flash and Flash-to-Javascript Communication. Right now, this functionality is not supported very consistently at all in different browsers, making QA a bear. I am hoping that this gets fixed.
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p>And I came across this fabulous Debugger tip to help make the asinine Debugger in MX 2004 more useful. Ordinarily, you can’t set persistent breakpoints in your .as files; you get to load the debugger and reset them every single time you want to have a breakpoint. Yes, this is incredibly lame. You can, however, set them in frame scripts, so the workaround is to define a function in frame 1 of your .FLA file called
doBreak()and set the breakpoint there. Then whenever you want to implement a programmatic breakpoint, calldoBreak()and the Debugger will kick in. StepOut, and you actually can do something useful in the Debugger without all that tedious and unwarranted pointing and clicking. Sheesh! You still have to “Debug Movie” with the stub .FLA file in the foreground, using CONTROL-SHIFT-ENTER and not “Test Project” via CONTROL-ALT-P. Bah.
