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.

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

Commas or spaces can be used to make reading numbers a little easier. They are placed every 3 decimal places for numbers comprising 4 digits or more. I wrote a AS3 method that returns the nicer format.

$1000000
$1 000 000

public static function separateByThousand(valueNumber : Number, splitter : String = " ") : String
{
	var valueString : String = "";
	var valueLength : Number = valueNumber.toString().length;
 
	for (var i : int = 0; i < valueLength ; i++)
	{
		if ((valueLength-i)%3 == 0 && i != 0)
			valueString += splitter;
		valueString += valueNumber.toString().charAt(i);
	}
 
	return valueString;
}

separateByThousand(1000) //1 000
separateByThousand(100000) //100 000
separateByThousand(1000000) //1 000 000
separateByThousand(1000000,”,”) //1,000,000

It is hard to remember the whole ASCII key list when listening to keyboard events in Flash Actionscript.

Example:

I usually use the Keyboard Class (flash.ui.Keyboard) when tracking keyboard inputs but it does not contain all the keys you may want to use. Instead of googling tables with Keyboard keycodes I made this SWF to get quick access to the codes via the KeyboardEvent (flash.events.KeyboardEvent) class.

The latest release of Motor2 is using the Vectors class which means you have to compile your files for Flash player 10. If you for some reason don’t want to change to FP10, Michael (developer of Motor2) has the solution:

replace all Vector occurrences with Arrays
http://groups.google.com/group/motor2/browse_thread/thread/182291562d7dfd9a

Since I found out you can import Adobe Photoshop PSD files directly into Flash all external image updates have been a lot easier. The import function lets you choose options for each layer and you can choose what layers in the file you want to import.

When you want to import layers containing transparency, any objects on the layers behind the transparent portion of the object will be visible through the transparent area. To prevent this, import the transparent layer as “Bitmap image with editable layer styles”.

One feature I would like is that Flash should overwrite the images on the second import. As it is now, you need to copy the library items from the second import to the first manually.

One problem when exporting scripted animations to video is that the overall animation is not finished at the last keyframe in main timeline. This could result in a video where the animation is cut before it is finished. I found out you can export your animation based on time rather than timeline frames.

This video tutorial from Layer Magazine explains how to export a scripted animation to Quicktime format (mov) directly from Adobe Flash CS. I don’t understand why they made such a long video tutorial because the only important thing is the export settings.

File > Export > Export Movie

Select the Quicktime format

Stop exporting “After time elapsed [time]“.

Watch is the result (1.4 Mb)

(I used Adobe Flash CS4 for this example but it works just as well in CS3).