KringBlog

So we got back from Amsterdam last night. Wow, had a great time! Quite an amazing city. I just wish we had more time there to look around! Got to hang out and party with some of my friends as well…Thijs, Valerie, Louisa, Storm, etc. Flash In the Can was amazing, of course. There were so many great presentations. Looking forward to getting the videos from the event so I can hopefully see some of the presentations I missed. Anyways, below is a link to my flickr photos. I’ve uploaded the Amsterdam photos we took. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any photos from the FITC event itself since my wife had the camera during the days while I was at FITC. But, if you search on flickr for ‘fitc amsterdam’, there’s quite a few uploaded pics of the event already.

Our Amsterdam Pics

I am working on a Flash 8 Actionscript 2.0 project here this week and remembered quickly that I was never a fan of the EventDispatcher, EventBroadcaster, or ASBroadcaster systems that Flash provides for Actionscript 2. Luckily I remembered that I had created my own simple EventDispatcher class that I liked much better. I hated the fact that the mx.events.EventDispatcher class didn’t allow you to assign specific methods to events, etc. So anyways, I thought I’d post my EventDispatcher here for anyone looking for a simple yet effective event dispatcher system for Actionscript 2.0. You simply extend this EventDispatcher class to gain the common event methods: addEventListener(), removeEventListener(), and dispatchEvent().

Method definitions:

addEventListener(type_str:String, listening_obj:Object, method_str:String)

removeEventListener(listening_obj:Object, type_str:String, method_str:String)
(same method parameters as explained above)

dispatchEvent(evt_obj:Object)

You can download the EventDispatcher here.

I’m working with a small group of friends on a great open source projects that will become a P2P Social Flex Wiki / awesomeness! The idea is to create a social P2P Flex Wiki (with scripting support), for now called the Collab Platform. We’re talking about a desktop app built with Adobe AIR and Python that is a P2P platform also supporting content management, file sharing, video/text chat, VOIP, instant messaging, email, and on and on. It’s in the initial planning stages right now and is something I’m very excited about working on. Some of the components of this that we’ll be using are already ready. Such as PyAMF which provides AMF support for Python. Anyways, check out the main Collab project site to see all of the ideas, plans, and sub projects.

http://www.collab.eu

I’ve been wanting to attend one of the Flash In The Can (http://www.flashinthecan.com) festivals for quite some time now, but every year it just ends up being too expensive to get there and pay for the tickets. Well, this year I finally decided to go. The 2nd to last FITC event of the year is in Amsterdam and has an amazing line up of presenters and presentations. Check out the Amsterdam event page for more info on the festival and the presentations. Plus, a lot of friends of mine will be there and are having a party the night before the festival starts. Time for some fun in Amsterdam! =)

I’ve been working with YouTube a bit recently for some clients, allowing them to display YouTube search results and videos directly on their Flash Sites. In doing so I realized that it wasn’t as easy as I though. I assumed there was an easy API I could just connect to with no complications. Finding a good PHP YouTube API wasn’t as easy as I thought either. I ended up using the Zend framework which contained some YouTube and Google data classes that allowed the connection. But the documentation for this stuff was lengthy and confusing and lacking in good simple examples. I finally trimmed the Zend library (which is quite large) down to the necessary files just to interface with YouTube. I’m working on packaging all of this up and also pairing it with a little Actionscript API as well. I’ll post it here as soon as it’s done. I need to clean it up and organize it a bit. In the meantime, if anyone knows of any other good Actionscript and/or PHP YouTube APIs, let me know!

So I went to the Adobe onAIR Tour conference last night in Minneapolis. Wow. If I wasn’t excited enough about Adobe AIR already I’m ecstatic now! The conference started around 6:00pm and lasted through 11:30pm with speakers Ryan Stewart, Mike Chambers, Kevin Hoyt, Adam Trachtenberg from Ebay, Grant Skinner, and Daniel Dura. If you haven’t checked out Adobe AIR yet and you are a Flash/Flex developer or a HTML/Javascript/AJAX developer then you have to check out AIR (http://www.adobe.com/go/air). What an amazing product. It is bridging the worlds of HTML/AJAX development and Flash/Flex development together while providing an amazing API with OS level funcitonality for creating rich desktop applications. The presentation that impressed me the most was Kevin Hoyt’s segment on script bridging where he showed how, using AIR, HTML/AJAX code can reach into the Flash world and use all the native flash functionality such as Filters, XMLSocket, etc. And how Flash could load HTML/Javascript content and reach into the HTML and Javascript and pull/set data, etc. I’m very excited to start developing with AIR now and see what kind of amazing hybrid desktop applications can be created with AIR.

I’ve posted a few photos from the event taken with the phone here: http://www.kringen.org/PhotoGallery

=)

I’m seeing this strange error when I am testing my AS3.0 application. I’ve seen some other people having the same issue online and I still don’t know what the solution is. This seems like a major problem.

It seems that if you reference a static class in one part of your application and then load a .swf that references that static class also, the compiler will throw this error at you:

ReferenceError: Error #1074: Illegal write to read-only property YourClass on global

I have not found any way to fix this yet. Does anyone know anything about this? Below is another post about the same issue with some code examples even. Thanks for any help!

http://blog.fuelindustries.com/archives/000144.html

I’m currently working on converting my FlashRTE system into Actionscript 3.0. Along with that, I’m also improving upon many of the classes and components that currently are used in the FlashRTE. One of the first ones I improved upon was the debugging system used for the FlashRTE. The Debugger is a static class that has the ability to set default global debug levels such as “error”, “info”, “debug”, etc. Each class extends the Debuggable interface which automatically registers that class with the Debugger allowing you to define a custom set of debug levels for each class. Not only can you define levels for you class when it’s instantiated but I’ve also now added the ability to pre-register all of your classes by listing them in a Debugger.xml file. The Debugger will load this XML file the first time the debugger is used and will register all the classes and levels defined in the XML file. The link below is a .zip containing the source files and an example Debugger.xml file. Let me know what you think.

Download Source

I’ve finalized my guitar gear setup finally! Whoo. I returned the TCElectronic M350 Effect unit that I got and decided to get a TCElectronic G-Major effects unit instead. I still need to get a couple of the items, but here is what my final setup will look like:

Rack:
Furman Power Conditioner
Ground Control GCX Audio Switcher
TC-Electronic G-Major Effect Processor
Behringer AutoCom Gate/Limiter/Compressor


Floor Controls:
Digital Music Corp Ground Control Pro
Crybaby Wah

So Christmas was very good to me! Got a bunch of great things including some new guitar toys! See the pic below. Can’t wait to try em out tonight. =D