Archive → June, 2007
yay for events in the display list hierarchies
The new event model in actionscript 3 is glorious! At first I didn’t really appreciate how useful is was… I was pleased to see that you could create custom events as this, among other things, allows you to send custom objects in events without losing strong typing. Though it wasn’t until I came to understand the event flow in display lists that it made a massive difference to my code… (my thanks to Colin Moock for this book, that really helped me get to grips with events in as3)… when you dispatch an event in a display object you can specify a variable in the event constructor (bubbles) which causes the event to propagate through the display list hierarchy, enabling you to listen for events dispatched by DisplayObjects you do not have a direct reference to. This massively helps me centralising my code, de-coupling my code and cuts down on boring code repetition.
moxie makes beta
More great news coming out of Adobe today… Flex 3 (code named moxie) is now in Beta, and you can download the latest SDK, Flex Builder and Flash player from labs!. I’ve just had time to play with Flex builder and I’m already impressed.. the refactoring is better than I hoped, it gives you the option to preview the potential changes in a little file comparison window before committing them.. very neat ! Great work Adobe! …. Ooo, I just saw this video on video.onflex.org, it does a awesome job of demoing the new refactoring features!
more books than I can read!
I’m loving O’Reilly’s safari service… I subscribed last month and since then the learning curve has gone through the roof.. not only do you get to read all the little things you never thought worthy of buying a whole book for.. there are the so-called rough cuts… For me it’s all about this book on design patterns in AS3… many thanks to Bill Sanders and Chandima Cumaranatunge for an awesome read!
more Flex 3 from ted
Its all about Ted Patrick’s blog this week, as more news about Flex 3 is coming out everyday… Today he’s blogged on the Components and SDK Enhancements which is all good news… but for me thus far the best changes are those to the code base… refactoring sounds awesome!!.. especially for someone who always makes embarrassing spelling mistakes in his variable names 