The life of a wannabe Games Programmer
I’ve been using Interfaces a couples of time now when needed but I never fully understood those down-sized Class construct wannabes. I knew they are useful when it is required to have an universal type for different objects but I haven’t fully grasped to scope why they are so useful otherwise. Also the fact that they can’t contain properties and only public method declarations confused me.
If you’re working with XML on Windows and you like your tool full-featured there’s a good chance that you have worked with Altova XMLSpy, a first of all very good and powerful XML editor but on second look becomes a nasty bugger that calls home as if there is no tomorrow.
Thats fine and good! Let them try it to call it home as long as they want, I can block it with my Firewall! It was noted by some other blogs that XMLSpy not only transfers data to check the legal ownership but also transfers private data that is none of Altova’s business, so there is good reason to block the spy (what a fitting name!) off!
But what if you want to use the Eclipse (or Visual Studio) XMLSpy PlugIn? If you block Java’s JRE, Eclipse also can’t connect to the web anymore. But fear not, there’s an easy solution. Here’s how to block off XMLSpy …
Go straight to your WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc/ folder and add the following line to the host file:
127.255.255.255 link.altova.com
This redirects every access to link.altova.com to the local machine, thus blocking of connection attempts. With that you’re free to let Eclipse access the net while XMLSpy has to stay inside the system.
How about applications? Flash runs fine, though it’s tool windows look a bit odd with thin borders/corners around it. Photoshop runs smooth as if it never did anything else while ImageReady’s tool palettes seem to be not style conform anymore. Illustrator then goes completely bonkers with Molasses style window-dragging and tool palettes that sometimes have round corners and sometimes not. At least Eclipse runs fine! Well, on 32bit that is! On 64bit it will spit out an error about an incompatible DLL.
That said my Vista Experience went a bit limiting so far! Dynamic Font Management is a foreign word for Microsoft too! It seems nothing has changed about how Fonts are handled! They are either installed or not. I guess I hang a little longer with MainType! Let’s hope other companies aren’t sleeping and have drivers ready until release, even if they don’t loose one word about it. It would suck otherwise!
Fotologue which was Japanese only for a while has been translated into English and opened up it’s gates for anyone else around the globe! Not only does it look much more stylish than Flickr or any other photo sharing site, it’s also completely done in Flash! Check out my gallery for a quick preview of how the user galleries look.
via If Then Else
A couple of days ago the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook has been published. Obviously it’s a Must-Have but so far I resisted to buy it, waiting for some User Reviews on Amazon. Anyone else got it already? I would be interested in if many new stuff is covered or if it’s just a AS3.0 fitted version of the older AS Cookbook (though I doubt that when I read the authors names).
Then there is the highly anticipated Flex 2 book which is due for the 1. quarter next year and so it still takes a while until then. Another book I’m looking forward to is Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns, also by Joey Lott, especially because I still haven’t fully grasped patterns. Maybe this will help.
It was about time! According to PowerFlasher a new (and free) update of FDT is due in October. But it will not support AS3/Flex, this will come in quartal 1/2007.
I still need to use AS2 very often for jobs so it’s good to see the Eclipse 3.2 incompatibility being fixed very soon. However I’m using Flex Builder (plug-in) more and more to get on with AS3 and Flex and it’s hard to miss all those great features from FDT there! Therefore it would be awesome if Adobe is providing an update for Flex Builder in between. Some very helpful features from FDT that I’d love to use for AS3 are templates (we all use them, they make coding a lot faster) and Mark Occurances (this might seem inferior but once you used it you know that it is the number one killer feature). Another thing that bothers me is that one needs automatic build active to have compile-time error reporting. It would be cool if the Flex Compiler would report errors on-the-fly like MTASC does it, so I can turn off automatic build and use Ant for building instead which I prefer.
I’m really missing one great invention that has yet to come for global consumption … books made of electronic paper! I’m not talking about these LCD display-like books or these foil-like papers that are already used for some advertising purposes. What I’d love to see available is a pocket notebook made of finely woven ePaper that I can plug via USB to my PC and load documents on it, which then are displayed on the paper and can be read just like a normal paper book. I prefer reading long texts on paper rather than on the screen!
I often find texts on the web, tutorials or other interesting information that I could read while on one of these long Tokyo subway rides or simply while hanging out in the living room but it would be too elaborate to print them out and fold them into my Hobonichi Techo.
One could argue that I could need a notebook PC but that would be too much, all I’m asking for is a book for reading. Hey it would be cool if it also uses Solar cells so it doesn’t need to be recharged and while we are at it the pages could glow so it can be read in the dark too … oh well, one can dream, but this definitely doesn’t sound like a far away utopia!
I just had to refuse the second job offer this year where I would have to fix somebody else’s written ActionScript 1 spagetti code! I don’t know what is the reason for agencies trying to give such jobs but it’s save to say that the troubles of digging through the messy and often timeline-spread code is enough to justify an estimate that sounds too high for the client.
The question comes up why they don’t just ask the person who originally wrote the code! That could have many reasons but if a client comes back to me and asks me to fix something in a years old project then I’ll do it for a measly payment simply because I know my source code. It’s a total different thing to fix somebody’s code, especially if it’s pre-AS2.
I always feel uncomfortable rejecting jobs, even such ones so I would be interested how others handle this situation! Do you usually reject such jobs or do you accept them?
In ActionScript it was common knowledge that shorter Variable and Function names yielded better performance in situations were it depends but does that still hold true for ActionScript 3.0? I’ve ran a couple of quick tests to find a clear answer about this. I usually tend keep my Variable/Function names to 1-3 characters when performance really mattered but it might actually not be necessary. Consider the following test …
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | package { import com.hexagonstar.util.debug.Debug; import flash.utils.getTimer; import flash.display.Sprite; public class PerformanceTest extends Sprite { private var aVeryVeryLongVariableNameaVeryVeryLongVariableName:Number; private var num:Number; public function PerformanceTest() { var startTime:Number = getTimer(); for (var i:int = 0; i < 4000000; i++) { aVeryVeryLongVariableNameaVeryVeryLongVariableName = (i * Math.random()) * 100; } var timeTaken:String = getTimer() - startTime + " ms"; Debug.trace("timeTaken (long): " + timeTaken); } } } |
I’ve ran this code ten times with the 50 characters long variable name and then ten times with a 3 characters long one, both in their own SWF’s. The results ranged from 757ms to 820ms, more or less the same on both sides. The sum of the long variable version was 7924ms and the one of the three characters long one was 7903ms, not much of a difference.
The next test was similar but this time with a 50 characters long Method name and the other again with a 3 characters long one, the Methods returned a random Number for 4000000 times during this test. The results looked similar but the total sum of each test gave a 12044ms for the long name test and 15570ms for the short named one. A noticable difference of over 3 seconds. This might have been coincidence but I’ve ran the tests a couple more times and it turned out every time that the result were very close together. This is quite interesting because I was safely believing that short names would still have an advantage. It might be time to rethink this.
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