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 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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This feature does currently not work – see list of updates below

ShareThis is a great service for adding shareability to your website in a very simple way. It even includes the “tip a friend” option, so you don’t need to code that for your own site. I will describe how to embed it from flash.

Note 2009/05/19: Due to changes in the ShareThis API popup-functionality is broken currently (both in my example and in some of my live projects). I have filed a bug with ShareThis to fix this ASAP.

Note 2009/05/21: ShareThis have now fixed the above bug but there is still a minor JavaScript error thrown. The popup works now though as it should from both JS and Flash.

Note 2009/06/08: ShareThis now broke it again. And this time their support staff doesn’t answer. Please see an example implemented with AddThis instead.

Note 2009/06/19: ShareThis finally fixed it again. They wrote a mail on the 17th to me stating the bug was reintroduced when they implemented CDN, but would be fixed in the next release. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Note 2009/08/14: ShareThis has recently implemented a brand new version of their service – and surprise: it is not backwards compatible. Thus my popup example is broken again. I will investigate and fix soon.

Note 2009/08/17: ShareThis has promised to deliver a flash API within a few weeks. Let’s see what happens then…

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Adobe representative, Phillip Miller, recently guested Copenhagen, and during his visit he gave further insights into the upcoming client, Apollo.

When first introduced at MAX 2005, Kevin Lynch talked about Apollo being a browser substitute for offline browsing of HTML and Flash. Since the merger with Adobe, Acrobat Reader has of course been introduced into this project. Philip Millers recent talk about this stated, that it would be available for all platforms (Win, Mac and *nix), and that a beta was to come within the next year.
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I recently promised, that if I couldn’t find a valid URI-parser in ActionScript 2, I would create and release my own.

I’ve thus created my own built on simple string parsing functions (as opposed to using some regexp implementation, which is still not natively supported until AS3). It does not properly handle invalid chars of an URI (like spaces, special characters and more), but assumes an URL-encoded URI of some sort.
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When using FlashVars variables are pushed directly from the HTML-embedding of the Flash instance into the main timeline – _level0 that is.

To avoid having _level0.some_flashvar spread around the code without knowing, whether they exist, where they are used and more, I normally use a dynamic singleton FlashVars-class for first parsing these in the main timeline, and subsequently using this singleton class when loading vars.
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The sources are now available for download. It would have uploaded it yesterday, but Tom and Audrey starred in a nice film, I had to see.

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Is now over. I came home late last night by train after having attended FlashVision 2006. My presentation went very well – I think. Later a video of the entire conference/award show will be posted on the website. I hope to have a segment of it (the part featuring me) posted here. Also, both my collegue, Morten Reinholdt, and the hosts took a lot of pictures – some of which I will post here as well.
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For my upcoming speak at FlashVision, I’ve made a little demo of a multiuser whiteboard application entitled Biteboard, which can be demoed here.

Source code will be available late saturday, when I’m fully settled back in mainland Denmark and final corrections and documentation have been completed. It will of course adhere to the given license.

The server is made by my good friend Mads Jørgensen (at swag.dk), and it will as well be published under some some rights reserved Creative Commons license.
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