http://www.gskinner.com/blog/ News, views and source code from Grant Skinner & Company. Including information on OOP / OOAD, user experience and RIA development. Copyright 2010 Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:15:45 -0700 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.14 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss We have made some changes to the free Project Panel Update that we released last year, which makes it compatible with Flash CS5. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/07/project_panel_u.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/07/project_panel_u.html Flash Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:15:45 -0700 I have to admit, I'm excited about FITC San Francisco. The conference has an amazing line up, including my personal Flash hero, Yugo Nakamura. It's also in an awesome location. I'll also be debuting a brand new talk, titled "ADHD FTW, LOL!!". It's basically about how to turn your distractibility into a strength. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/07/fitc_san_franci.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/07/fitc_san_franci.html Events Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:34:00 -0700 http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/07/some_thoughts_o_1.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/07/some_thoughts_o_1.html Flash Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:47:44 -0700 Lately I've been messing around with Flash on devices and in other "new frontiers". It's fun, but sometimes getting debugging working is hit or miss. To address this, I wrote an ultra simple class for tracing to a text field. It's nothing fancy, but that's the point - it's simple (~15 lines of code), tiny (~0.5kb), handy (at least for me), and works well, so I thought I'd share. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/06/ultra_simple_ou.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/06/ultra_simple_ou.html Flash Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:54:35 -0700 Androideroids is a prototype multiplayer asteroids game in which each player uses an Android phone as their game controller. Player's can see a top down view of the game on the main screen (which could be a PC, TV, or projected in a public space), and a first person view with their health and score on their phone. Player specific sounds are played on the phone, whereas general sounds are played on the host. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/06/androideroids.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/06/androideroids.html Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:28:12 -0700 Recently I've been trying to carve out a more time to play with technology. One of the first results of this is a library for creating peer to peer LAN connections between AIR applications, with a strong focus on mobile to desktop applications... I wanted to share something I built on top of it... the Nexus One Wireless Slot Car Gas Pedal. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/06/air_for_android.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/06/air_for_android.html Flash Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:02:06 -0700 We have uploaded updates to ASDocr to make it compatible with the recently released AIR 2 Release Candidate build. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/05/asdocr_update_f_1.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/05/asdocr_update_f_1.html Flash Thu, 13 May 2010 13:15:25 -0700 A quick way to set multiple properties on new instances, and a related AS3 feature request. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/05/quick_way_to_se.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/05/quick_way_to_se.html Flash Mon, 03 May 2010 11:23:22 -0700 BitmapSlice9 is a command for Flash Pro that preps bitmaps for use with Scale9. Among other things, this makes it easy to use bitmap skins for controls, which is quite common for games and mobile apps. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/bitmapslice9_sc.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/bitmapslice9_sc.html Flash Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:23:02 -0700 Apple eliminated the blue lego icon that indicates a missing plugin on the iPad. I believe that this is a not so subtle way of shifting user's belief that the iPad browser is lacking something, to believing that the site they are viewing is broken. In response to this, I've created the blueLego edition of SWFObject 2.2. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/return_of_the_b.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/return_of_the_b.html Flash Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:41:12 -0700 Colorgasm Music Visualizer http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/colorgasm_music.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/colorgasm_music.html Flash Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:32:08 -0700 The flash.sampler.* package gives you access to the same profiling data via AS3 that FlashBuilder uses for it's profiler. It's a very useful API for performance and memory profiling, offering enhanced introspection tools, more granular timing, method invocation counts, and of course invocation sampling. I thought I'd write up a quick post about the API to help people get started with using it. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/the_flashsample.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/the_flashsample.html Flash Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:22:32 -0700 I've recently encountered a couple of libraries that despite being 99% pure AS3 had minor dependencies on the Flex framework that prevented their use in Actionscript projects or in Flash without modification. This limits the immediate usefulness of the libraries, and fragments the community's access to them. Here are some tips to help you build framework independent libraries... http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/03/building_framew.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/03/building_framew.html Flash Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:49:02 -0700 As some people have noticed, I will be speaking at Microsoft MIX this year. I'm sure a few people are curious what I'm doing there... http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/03/silverlight_mix.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/03/silverlight_mix.html Flash Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:06:46 -0700 ASDocr 1.1 is available. This update provides compatibility with AIR 2 beta 2, fixes a bug that prevented multiple exclude-namespaces values from working, fixes a problem with locating the default output directory on OSX, and correctly opens the last used configuration when you restart the application. http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/02/asdocr_update_f.html http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/02/asdocr_update_f.html Flash Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:19:28 -0700