Stuck in a for loop» Tips

Trying out Dwarf

Mattias — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:30:21 +0000

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

Disable Mouse Scroll Wheel on textfields

Mattias — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:21:01 +0000

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;

Breaking the conditional statement

Mattias — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:09:40 +0000

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.

Custom Ease Builder in TweenMax/TweenLite

Mattias — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:21:42 +0000

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

Fix smoothing bug on scaled bitmaps

Mattias — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:43:39 +0000

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

Xml line break issue in Flash

Mattias — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:08:32 +0000

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);

How to disable the HTML wrapper file in Flex

Mattias — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 07:51:28 +0000

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.

Making large numbers look good

Mattias — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:41:59 +0000

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

Force decimals with .toFixed()

Mattias — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:45:10 +0000

I have missed that AS3 have a built in support for fixed point notations. This means that you can choose the number of decimals you want to output. Great!

var num:Number = 7.31343;
trace(num.toFixed(3)); // 7.313
 
var num:Number = 4;
trace(num.toFixed(2)); // 4.00

Found at livedocs

Merging XML files

Mattias — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:11:21 +0000

My friend Fredrick at undefined-type.com blogged about a really smart (lazy) and easy way of merging xmlfiles.

Check it out here