According to this blog from planet gnome, open source projects are now able to use the flash spec to create their own SWF and FLV decoders. This is good news both for the open source projects that try to bring flash to linux and its ilk and for Adobe since there is no better way to put a spec to test than to have multiple implementations against it.
Actionscript 2 DateDiff function
Mostly a note to self for future reference. Not quite an implementation of the much loved datediff function, but close enough to get what I want:
// yearValue, monthValue, dayValue are assumed to be populated by the UI somewhere
startDate:Date = new Date(yearValue, monthValue, dayValue)
seconds:Number = ((new Date()).getTime() - startDate.getTime())/1000;
differenceInYears:Number = seconds / 60 / 525948.766; // google says a year is 525,948.766 minutes
Every language should have a date difference function and the ability to handle timespans as native types.
When Flash just aint flash - Part 1
So I’ve been working with the Flash guys in the design team at work now for a few months, trying to help them become more effective collaborative Flash developers. It’s not necessarily been the easiest process in the world as there have been a number of concepts that would be straight forward to most regular devs, but not necessarily Flash devs.
Some of the things we’ve gone through are concepts like:
- Using SCM systems to store the code in a central location
- Design Patterns (in particular the MVC and Command Factory seem to get allot of use)
- Multiple simultaneous checkouts of text source files (or “how to develop without individual checkouts”)
- Visually diffing two versions of a source file
And so on. Along the way I’ve actually had to learn a hell of a lot more Action Script than I would have thought I needed to and seen my fair share of Flash ugliness. I’ll probably do a whole series of these little rants, but this week in particular we kept coming across and trying to work around the same infuriating issue.
This has to do with Flash 8 (Action Script 2) and using the FileReference object to perform a multipart form POST to a server, that is, when you try to do a form submission that has a file upload in it and you care about the status of the submit. On most web systems this is probably a common occurrence; “Send us your picture and 25 words why you think you should win the …”. Sounds like a relatively straight forward thing to do in Flash, and in fact it’s not that difficult to code up.
The problem comes when your server tries to process the form upload/submission and send back some information to the Flash client about whether or not the submission succceeded (think form field validation). In theory a file upload is just another http request and the Flash client should have the ability to read the text in the response body. No such luck. It seems that in Flash 8, the FileReference object doesn’t expose the http response body upon completion, I don’t think the Flash architects thought it was useful. What the?
Why go to all the trouble to build a multipart form submission capability inside Flash and then decide not to pass on the response to the Flash client? What possible reason could they have for such a glaring omission of useful information in a standard web-type request/response scenario.
And just for clarity, we have a constant pressure to try and use the minimum version of Flash required to perform our particular task, so while this problem has been fixed in Flash 9, it’s rather annoying to have to change our system to use a whole later version of Flash for functionality that should have been there in the beginning.
hobnox Audiotool
Jean from work passed me this link for an audio mixing tool today, http://www.hobnox.com/index.1056.en.html. Be warned that the app tries to access your machine (I assume to get ahold of the audio files).
I’ve only really had time to play with the interface, and not really the actual audio side of it, but I must say as rich clients go this is impressive. It’s the kind of flash app that tries to bring across the UI metaphors from the physical world that it’s modeling literally into the application. Not sure if I agree with this approach of modeling the real world in software, but can see how in the audio tooling world the familiarity can be a bonus, and this approach has actually been executed quite cleanly here.
I believe it has a combination of java and flash client side smarts, and is quite a heavy app to start with.
Tags: audio, flash, java, rich client
Hello world!
So this is jbablog. I’ve only just gotten round to setting it up. I expect to make some actual customisations over the coming days.
While I’m here someone at work pointed me to this the other day; http://dothetest.co.uk. Great example of an engaging campaign that suits the medium it was meant to be delivered in, not just another tv ad encoded for the net.