New & Improved Flex/Flash Data Binding

I’m just finishing up the development of another weak-referenced data binding. The implementation I’ll be releasing soon works seamlessly with Flex and Flash projects, ensuring that application bindings don’t cause memory leaks. And it’s smaller and faster than Flex’s built-in BindingUtils (more…)

ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference for Flash Player 10

I can never find the language reference for Flash Player 10. I finally bookmarked the thing, but thought it might be useful to share the (apparently un-indexed) web location: flash player 10 language reference

The api for the new Vector type is here, which is identical to the Array in all ways except the sort and sortOn (I wish they’d have Array and Vector implement a similar interface)

Also the references I use the most recently
• the new drawing api features: GraphicsPath, GraphicsData, lineBitmapStyle
• DisplayObject 3D: the ever-so-cool ‘z’ coordinate, PerspectiveProjection, Matrix3D

And I’d love to get involved with the dynamic sound generation, but right now that’s left to my genius co-worker Joe Snow.

<XML> Graphics

I’ve been doing some heavy research lately in FXG and Degrafa, digging through source code and everything. FXG and Degrafa are both graphics formats in XML markup (like SVG), both opensource, both pretty cool. I wasn’t particularly in favor of a markup format for graphics, with designing applications via MXML and such. I’ve now been converted. I think it’s really cool, useful for things like versioning, etc, and provides a more approachable file specification for developers to implement.

I still think designing is best done (for the most part) in a design tool like Photoshop and Illustrator. I’ve built several ActionScript-based design/editor apps in the past and wanted to put that experience toward a really great design tool that supports the two formats. Somewhere in the process I got a little excited (this will be no surprise to anyone who knows me) and started building my own graphics format. It serves no real purpose that FXG and Degrafa don’t cover, but I love it and it’s been very fun to build.

I’ll be getting back on track now with a FXG/Degrafa design app. Because of my under-the-hood time with the two formats I’d like to present on the formats and XML Graphics in general. I’ll get into the pros and cons and the future predictions sometime on the blog too.