Author Archives: crydust
Adjacency tables
I’m well aware that adjacency tables aren’t the newest way of storing hierarchies in a database. Personally I prefer to use nested sets. But on this one project I had to work with a legacy database. It took me quite … Continue reading
Css in Flex
I had some issues today to change the background color of a button in Flex. The up-skin was set for the Button selector which meant setting the fill-colors property for the Button.special selector had no effect. Setting the up-skin to … Continue reading
2M08 Silverlight
A hands-on workshop about Silverlight 2.0. The many MacBooks that are available are probably set up for the Air session this afternoon. Our speaker informs us "We wont be using those", quickly followed by "Silverlight is a cross platform …". … Continue reading
on Air Brussels
A long overdue overview of the on Air event in Brussels.
Parsing plist files in asp with Microsoft.XMLDOM
Plist files are more and more ubiquitous. Apple uses them for its configuration files and we use them to describe exercise content. They aren’t very pleasant to read for humans, but that doesn’t mean computers dislike reading them. So I … Continue reading
Silver Explorer
As most of my friends know, I’m partially colorblind. Most webdevelopers have no idea what their site looks like for someone like me. Thanks to the power of Adobe Air I’m now capable of letting you experience it firsthand. Silver … Continue reading
full-screen mode in Actionscript 2
How to use full-screen mode in Actionscript 2: _root.btn_mc.onRelease = function(){ if(Stage["displayState"] == "normal"){ Stage["displayState"] = "fullScreen"; }else{ Stage["displayState"] = "normal"; } } var listener:Object = {}; listener.onFullScreen = function(isFullscreen:Boolean){ if(isFullscreen){ trace("entered full-screen mode"); }else{ trace("exited full-screen mode"); } } … Continue reading
forceSmoothing
Rotating and scaling pictures in flash is easy. Just use _rotation, _xscale and _yscale. Except when you publish an swf for Flash Player 8 or newer. Every image you rotate or scale will become jagged. Very anoying. Tinic Uro even wrote a loadBitmapSmoothed function that uses BitmapData.
When Flash Player 8.5 came out it introduced the forceSmoothing property. This property is also available in as2. Now all we need to do is set it to true when we load images.
I works quite well. In the example below you can clearly see the left picture is more jagged than the right one.
pong0.5k, a game in 510bytes
Mr.doob created a 1k pong game in as3. Which made my fingers itch to do better. So here it is, in as2, less than half the filesize and the same functionality.
AIR afterhours
I’ve been to a great afterhours session about AIR with Peter Elst. He’s writing a book on the subject so obviously there was lots he had to teach. He covered the windowing, file, dragdrop, sqlite and upgrade apis. This was … Continue reading