Barklund.org

I have been doing ActionScript 3 projects for quite a while, but every now and then I (as well as many others in the trade) have to switch back to AS2 or even AS1 – the line between them is quite blurry really in retrospective. When doing AS3 projects, there are many features that really come in handy, but it is only when you don’t have them available, that you really find out which are the true improvements, that you cannot live without, and which are just nice little tweaks, that make your everyday scripting easier.

The latter category includes e.g. the for-each-in construct, different number types, class introspection or built-in class look-up by string, but these are my top 6 AS3 features, that I find myself constantly missing when fixing or improving scripts in older versions of ActionScript:

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I’ve been reading up on the matter of the National Portrait Gallery in the United Kingdom and their threatening letters to the Wikimedia Foundation about the legal status of the digitised works created by said public institution.

After reading up on UK copyright law, my judgment is unclear – but mostly in favor of the NPG and thus against Wikimedia.

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I just saw the most impressive, intelligent use of the regular expression backtracking engine and simply have to re-post it in order to give my own decryption of the infinitely simple expression. In short, it is a regular expression, that only matches non-prime sequences of 1′s. And it goes like this:

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/

I will try to explain it in a simple way and then do some benchmarking on this simple expression, a slightly optimized version of the expression as well as compare it to more optimal algorithms.

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Sys-Con Media has again and again tried to spread libel about Aral Balkan because he originally bad-mouthed them on Twitter and in other places, because they stole an article from him and claimed his endorsement of their products and services. Apparently they continue to try and spread rumors about him and recently Turks in general.

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Just saw someone post a link to the new Silverlight Smooth Streaming site. Clicked my way to the site and the download of Silverlight for Firefox 3 for Mac 10.5 worked smoothly – so far so good.

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I will try to explain my views about best-practice Flash development for rapid prototyping – and why Soft Coding and Scripted Layout is bad for everyone. The argumentation is partly based on this article from Daily WTF, that I have enjoyed and recommended to any and all developers. But when it comes to Flash a whole other possibility of Soft Coding comes into play, namely Scripted Layout, which is the practice of adding items to stage in script only with position, sizes and other parameters specified in script or external sources (e.g. XML, database or other source). Scripted Layout is a terrible waste of time and effort and completely undermines the power and flexibility of Flash turning it into a language-wise weaker version of more mature (but graphically challenged) programming environments like C# or Java.

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I’ve just discovered a “bug” in the latest Flash Player. Actually the “bug” was in a production, that only worked in the latest player and not in previous players. I’ve boiled it down to this:

If the x- or y-attribute of a DisplayObject is set to NaN, in previous players this caused the attribute to be set to -107374182.4. In the latest player, the attribute is set to 0.

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