After 2 years in the making, a few weeks ago we have finally released www.voiceyourself.com. After all the voting that’s gone on of late I hope people continue to voice their concerns. This ones for the eco warriors, enjoy - yes you can ;)
Myself and our flex team have helped develop this site:
http://www.nokia.com/headsetdesign
We were privileged to be able to work with some great designs and 3D assets supplied but other agencies. The site has only been live for a week and already there are 1,428 designs!
For anyone who’s interested it was built using: flex3, puremvc, amfphp, papervision
The competition ends 31/12/2008 so there’s still time to submit your funky designs…
Although using MXML can be quicker to code up it appears that using it for itemRenderers is a lot more CPU intensive than coding itemRenderers in AS3. The Repeater component also seems to hog a lot of memory.
MXML vs AS3 for itemRenderers
this is an ItemRenderer memory profile using MXML
this is the same itemRenderer recoded in AS3
Example of Memory usage for a Repeater component vs AS3 (based on the Paginator Component we built)
Profile of Paginator using a Repeater Component
Profile of Paginator using a good old fasioned for loop:
Advice:
try and always you an AS3 Class for itemRenderers rather than MXML. I wonder if Gumbo is going to be any better?
Here’s a little paginator component we put together. There’s plenty of room to improve it - add css styling support, etc.. but thought I’d throw it out there in case someone finds it useful.
http://www.realestatetv.tv Example
Well, in an effort to wash that ActionScript out of my hair I’ve been doing a stone carving course every wednesday evening for the last 6 months. After much hammering, finally, my first sculture is complete. It’s based on a ancient stone spheroid that was found in the superstition Mountains, Arizona in 1933. It’s carved out of Bath sandstone (which, lets face it, is the most pathetic excuse for stone you can find). I’ll be graduating onto Marble next…
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Here’s an example of how to make a HDividerBox snap to 2 different positions:
(right click for source)
When to the London premier of this film last night:
Philippe Petit (the star of the film) was there for a Q&A session with the director. He’s totally mad, very French, with a typically flawed artistic character. Love it ;) go see ;)
hi Guys,
Over time I’ve accumulated about 4 copies of ‘Essential Action Script 3.0′ books by Colin Moock from conferences and talks, I have 2 left. Rather than using them as monitor stands if anyone wants one just reply to this post. On Friday I’ll pick 2 people from the comments and send them to you. If you don’t live in UK I might ask u to cover postage. (don’t put your address in the comments! I’ll get in touch with u from your email) ta paddy ;)
I’ve just gone through umpteen different code highlighter/beautifier plugins for wordpress. So far I’ve only found one that works correctly with the k2 theme (http://www.getk2.com) it’s this one:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-syntax/
this also looks like a good extension:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-syntax-colorizer/
anyone know of ‘better’ ones?
Often when you need to embed a font you also need to include ‘bold’ and sometimes ‘italic’ styles. Sometimes you need more than one fontFamily. Flex by default will embed all glyphs of a fontFamily. Embedding every glyph if generally unnecessary. By restricting the character set (’unicode-range’) you can shave off between 50-100kb or more per font style (FontFamilies have varying amounts of glyphs and obviously varying complexities of outlines which effects how much you can save). Anyway by setting unicode-range for fonts we managed to shave 300kb off our application, I wasn’t expecting it to be so much so thought worth a blog ;)
@font-face { src: url("assets/Arial.ttf"); fontFamily: Arial; advancedAntiAliasing: true; unicode-range: U+0030-U+0039, /* 0-9 */ U+0041-U+005A, /* Uppercase A-Z */ U+0061-U+007A, /* Lowercase a-z */ U+0021-U+002F, /* !"#$%&'()*+,-./ */ U+003A-U+0040, /* :;<=>?@ */ U+005B-U+0060, /* [\]^_ */ U+00A3-U+00A3, /* £ */ U+00A9-U+00A9, /* © */ U+00AE-U+00AE /* ® */ /* U+00BF-U+0259 FOREIGN CHRS */ }
if anyone knows of other ranges you think can be generally useful please let me know ;)