Web Standards
As many Flash Developers have heard, ECMAScript 4 has died. I’m not going to go into the details of the decision, although you can most likely blame Microsoft and their 80% browser stronghold on the web.
Nevertheless, the decision has raised significant issues around the web regarding web standards, and whether or not they have worked in the past or not.
Take for example IE and Firefox. Every web developer has experienced the browser compatibility problem. 90% of forum posts start with “Strange CSS bug, works in IE but not in FF” or “Script works in FF but not in IE” etc.
AS3 EventManager Class: removeAllListeners
I heard about a class that Grant Skinner wrote called Janitor that was supposed to help keep track of listeners, but I couldn’t find it. Consequently, I wrote my own “EventManager” class for a gaming project I’m working on which keeps track of Event listeners in a project.
As all Actionscript 3 developers know, one of the biggest annoyances is keeping track of listeners and ensuring objects are collected in memory. This class does a lot of that for you, and even has a method removeAllListeners which has different filters. So let’s say some listener keeps calling a function,
My Thoughts on Google and Yahoo Indexing Flash Content
Today Google reported that they’ve developed an algorithm to index Flash content (only text, not video or images). This news is clearly dominating Flash news sources around the web, with mostly mixed reviews.
Many bloggers are criticizing Google claiming that it’s impossible for any algorithm to figure out the text information of SWF files which load text from external sources (such as XML) because it’s impossible to know the format of the XML documents being transferred over. But who cares? I still don’t get why people are saying that that’s how the algorithm works. Google has stated that it’s able
Firefox 3 Release: World Record? What world record?
The Mozilla team has announced that they are attempting to set a (Guinness Book) of World Record of number of downloads for a piece of software in 24 hours… A record never set before.
The first thought that came to me was… huh? How can this number not be set already - by Adobe (or back in the day Macromedia) Flash! Isn’t the Flash plugin downloaded millions of times per day? Flash is on more computers than any other software (including any operating system). Macromedia never and Adobe doesn’t really release any download statistics other than averages. I’m sure Flash 8
Astro (Flash Player 10) Beta Released!
Here are some highlighted features of the new player (a list by Adobe can be found on their labs page)
- Adobe has finally made noise (read introduction material parts 1, 2, 3 by Adobe Engineer Tinic Uro). Keith Peters (who is one of the lucky few to have a version of Adobe’s upcoming authoring tool) has posted a sample application showing dynamic sound.
- Native 3D effects! Interesting to see how Away3D and Papervision will react. While the native 3D addition will be great for vector graphics, Astro doesn’t support texture mapping or 3D
T-Square Security Holes
At Georgia Tech, the course system that is used by students is called T-Square (based on Sakai). It’s pretty nice system that supports forums, wikis, chats, blogs, and a bunch of other tools.
Sakai is open source; consequently, Georgia Tech can maintain the software and fix and bugs it finds.
Unfortunately, I found security holes with T-Square. These holes can allow a hacker to access another users’ identity. If that user is a teacher or TA, the hacker can easily take their identity and edit grades. In fact, due to the poorly organized structure of Georgia Tech’s backend, the hacker can not
Jacobi Algorithm in AS3
Recently, my “Calculus for Computer Science” teacher assigned the following problem.
So to complete this assignment, I decided to use Actionscript 3 and Flash. A friend of mine and I at Georgia Tech are developing a complex open source matrix library called as3matrix, and we were planning on implementing Jacobi to find eigenvectors of a MxM matrix anyway, so we decided to just apply it to our library.
The Jacobi algorithm is pretty straight forward. It’s impossible to use a formula to find the eigenvalues of a matrix larger than 5×5 because there is no equation
Object Oriented Programming without a Computer
Artists see the world as a canvas. They represent environments, objects, and abstractions with shapes, shades, and colors. Pride and honor can be shown in a sculpture, or love may be represented with red colors and heart shapes. Architects envision the world as a blueprint; objects have structure and forces acting upon them from other objects. Just as a bridge is supported with suspension chords and metal, a family is strengthened with care and unity. Profession influences perception, and while outlooks on space and matter may differ, none are right or wrong – only different. But these professions and
SmarterChild and ELIZA
This year, only three entries were submitted in the annual Loebner Prize Competition. The prestigious $100,000 dollar prize has yet to be won, and the competition is the only place where it has a chance to be awarded. If a team develops a chatterbot that can fool judges into thinking they are communicating with a human, that team will win the prize and the prestige. So why were only three entries submitted to this year’s 17-year-old event? Have developers given up? The answer is yes and no. While developers are still working to expand the intelligence of chatterbots, the
The Virtual Space-Time Continuum
The word space has a multitude of meanings depending on context. Space can mean leg room on an airplane or the distance between two letters in this essay. Kids want to grow up to become astronauts and travel to outer-space. The movie Office Space, about corporate obedience, depicts software engineers confined in a small cubical. All of these examples of the term have one thing in common: tangibility; physical areas that can be occupied by other physical objects. Consequently, the concept of defining space in a digital medium within the parameters of space in a physical medium is a
Really Quick Tutorial on One Way Encryption
It’s difficult for beginning programmers to grasp the idea of one way encryption. “How can I make an encryption that is impossible to reverse? Even if I know the algorithm to encrypt? And why would I ever want to do this?”
First let’s review a very basic two way encryption algorithm.
Take a string of text Danny.
A basic algorithm could be to push each of the letters to the right once.
Raw = Danny
Encrypt(”Dan”) = yDann
Obviously, this is a pretty poor encryption algorithm. A simple way of improving the encryption and making the output more scrambled is to encrypt the raw text
My bad
Someone reported to me that none of the links on the blog were working (including comments). Turned out to be a .htaccess problem. Fixed it.
My bad.
A Few Things You May Not Know About CacheAsBitmap
cacheAsBitmap is a feature in Flash (since Flash 
that tells the Flash Player to store a movieclip of vectors into one static instance in memory. It’s a great way to boost the performance of your Flash.
But I’m writing about how to use cacheAsBitmap (you can just google that).
Some things you may never knew about cacheAsBitmap.
- With the exception of changing position, if a movieclip animates with cacheAsBitmap set to true, performance will slow down. This is because the Flash Player must recalculate the vectors and reload the Bitmap instance into memory. Moving x or y doesn’t change the
Flash Player 9r45 Weird Behavior
So I was working on the sequel to Boomshine this week, and for some bizarre unexplainable reason, the file SWF perfectly in Flash Player 9 r45; however, if I dropped down to Flash Player 9 r28 (or anything lower), the Flash wouldn’t work at all!
I looked at the change log for r28 to r45 released by Adobe. These are the four I could find:
New ActionScript 3.0 components for Flash CS3 Professional do not function correctly in versions prior to Flash Player 9.0.45.0.
Well, I am using some CS3 components, but Adobe doesn’t say they should crash, only that they
Ground Control to Major Tom
I know I’m supposed to say something like “Welcome to my blog, here I’ll try to write about …” or something of the sorts.
Truth is, is that this is probably the 4th time I’ve started a blog. It’s not like I don’t have the time (and often I don’t) or have nothing to say (and often I don’t), it’s that I get lazy or preoccupied with other work.
But hey, 5th time’s a charm!