I just found an Adobe Air application called Dwarf. It is created by Jonnie Hallman who is a Developer at Adobe Systems. Dwarf allows you to add multiple guides and rulers directly to your desktop. This means you do not have to make a screenshot to open up in Photoshop every time you want to measure for example the contents on a website. In my work this is really helpful because there is a lot of pixel pushing going on. Another thing that makes this a great tool is that almost every action can be triggered by keyboard shortcuts. I LIKE!

There are, however, some things I miss in Dwarf that really could make this a top notch tool.

- Implementation of Rule of thirds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds)
- Implementation of The Golden Ratio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio)

Hope this will be implemented in a future version.

Download Dwarf
http://github.com/destroytoday/Dwarf/downloads

In the project I am currently working on I got textfields that scrolled when I used the mouse wheel. To avoid this you simple disable the mouse for the textfield.

textfield.mouseEnabled = false;

I just discovered a really nice thing (thanks to Pernilla) using multiple conditions (&&, ||) in the if…else conditional statement in Actionscript. The thing I did not know (you probably did) is that the statement do not check the remaining conditions when a condition is not fulfilled. If you look at the image below you can see that we get a crash on line 32 but not on line 28. This is because we add a check to see if _userVO exists before we check the contents. We also get a crash on line 38 because we check the conditions in the wrong order.

This little tip will help me save some lines of code.

Create your own custom easing equation:
http://blog.greensock.com/customease/

Since upgrading to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) on my Mac I have had some problems with Flex Builder. The most irritating problem is that the right (and left) column that highlights class errors are not updating correctly.

I realised that this only happens if I use Flexbuilder on my external monitor. However … if I resize the window of Flex Builder it updates correctly. Really strange.

Solutions?

Every time you change the bitmapData source for a Bitmap you also need to set the smoothing property on your Bitmap to true (if you want the bitmap to use smoothing).

var bitmap : Bitmap = new Bitmap();
bitmap.smoothing = true;
trace(bitmap.smoothing); // true
bitmap.bitmapData = new BitmapData(320, 240);
trace(bitmap.smoothing); // false

I got some xml text line break issues in my latest project. The texts look good viewing them locally, but when uploading the project to the customer server I get a lot of extra line breaks. I am not really sure why this problem occurs but I guess it has to do with the server platform. I tried to save the xml with a different encoding but with no luck so I wrote this simple method. It works. 

public function fixLineBreakIssues(value : String) : String
{
    return value.split("\r").join("");
}
 
// usage
txtField.htmlText = fixLineBreakIssues(xmlText);

I stumbled upon a this new search engine dedicated to Actionscript.
Pretty neat.

www.hexosearch.com

I haven’t  been able to post on the blog lately because I’ve been really busy lately making games.

But soon. Soon! Promise …

Flexbuilder generates a HTML wrapper file by default when you run your projects. I usually turn it off while developing to save some time waiting on my browser to reload the HTML file. After disabling this setting, your application will be launched within the standalone flash player. 

Open the project properties, and select Flex Compiler properties.

Uncheck Generate HTML wrapper file.