switch(case)

Printing with Flash has always been one of those nagging issues I’ve never been able to successfully defeat, using the Flash PrintJob class that is. Although I want to sit here, and tell you how awful the PrintJob class is, I’ll let you try to explore that rocky road all by yourself; When you get to the point when you’re trying to use PixelBender for possibly getting a better algorithm for blending from pixel to pixel, and its still not working let me know, I could’ve saved you like 2 weeks worth of hair pulling by simply telling you to use: AlivePDF.

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I recently did a presentation for at DePaul University here in Chicago, for Upsilon Pi Epsilon, International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines. The talk focuses more on my view of Creativity as applied to Rich Internet Applications, and how I apply an Agile methodology in order to iterate quickly, and get a working product out of the door.

These are my “slides”… Well I Love Flash, and Hate PowerPoint. Google Docs is okay, but if I’m going to present I’m going to use the tools I use everyday, which in turn makes for a pretty cool presentation. I used OpenZoom for the presentation, its kind of a nice format if you have ALOT of ideas… but don’t feel like shrinking them into puny little slides.

OpenZoom Presentation

Work in progress

UPDATE: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. HIGH LIKELIHOOD OF CRASHING YOUR BROWSER

Here is basic proof of concept inserting OpenZoom interfaces within openzoom interfaces to make a basic image gallery. Further tweak of the controls will prove a very nice browsing experience. Also pairing with Flash Player 10′s capabilities for 3D and we make something quite impressive, and very lightweight (this swf being 76k).

I realized the mixture of OpenZoom with AS3′s 3D capabilities offers a pseudo-3D engine. That doesn’t mean OpenZoom won’t play well with a fully loaded 3D engine….

If you’re an Actionscript programmer, you should probably at least know of FDT. If you don’t, travel over to their site, and download a copy of the software (free trial for 30 days). I’m assuming in this post you already have it installed, and you know how to compile files, and maybe even know how write your own ANT scripts.

One of the nicest features of FDT is its debugger, it is full of features you would never find in the IDE’s (CS3/4/5), and if you’re used to debugging in Eclipse it follows that same route.

Quite often I’ll be brought onto a project in the middle of its development cycle, so I don’t have an option on how it’s setup. Quite often in Flash, I end up dealing with a bunch of FLA files and I’m forced to use the IDE for compiling. Same thing with Flex, but luckily FDT can run MXML, so that’s not much of an issue, it might just take a little extra time to setup your Flex project in FDT. What I’m trying to say here is don’t worry how you’re getting your original project (Flash, Flex, in case of a miracle its already FDT), with a little bit of configuration time, you can get just about any Actionscript project to run in FDT.

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Over the past year I realized my blog was an unorganized collection of random thoughts I decided to compile on a whim… which is okay, I like my train of thought, its sporadic. I’m sure like myself and anyone who’s ever read my blog, you’ve realized you never really know what to expect.

Well that’s going to change.

Over the past year I’ve been studying some really cool facets about multiple different languages, teaching myself Python (which has more functionality than i ever imagined), started learning OpenFrameworks, and started learning some juicy tid bits about Android development.  Then there’s always Actionscript, where I’ve increased my knowledge by leaps and bounds…

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I will explore writing an android application, that will let me transfer geo-location along with other data (pictures,video,etc) from android device, to the web using both Google Earth API (plugin) and Flash as Front-End(s).

Ok… So they don’t have anything to do with each other directly. But they do in my case! Since I love Gran Turismo and Actionscript… and although I can’t get better at Gran Turismo by using AS3, I can get better at AS3 while playing Gran Turismo (*this is highly speculative, and probably false considering I’ve just been putting quick hax apps with the IDE… ohh did I mention I hate the IDE… well I found a use for it… ). Because of my surgery (Spinal Fusion… it was awesome) I have a bit of time to lay on my back and stare at screens…. here’s a result:

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So let’s talk about spaceships… I mean Stratalogica.

Stratalogica has been my life for about the past year. It is a teaching tool for geography and history wrapped around Google Earth (for short). Roundarch the company I work for teamed up with Nystrom a division of Herff-Jones, to try and create a new platform to interact with their content. Long story short we came up with Stratalogica.

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So looking through my logs, I realized a ton of users have gotten to my blog by searching “flash switch case”. And well I figured I’ll give all of you who made it here, a little bit of help. First I’ll add a button directly to the Actionscript 3 API reference to the buttons on my main nav. And the rest of this article will consist on giving you a few basic examples on how to use it. Sorry for the delay, I should’ve done this a long time ago!

Adobe AS3 Languange Reference – Switch Statement

Switch statement can be quite useful, from shrinking down your navigation controls into one event listener, to determining something useful about a user’s environment. Now just because my blog is named switch case, I don’t mean to tell you that its the end all for statements. With good coding practices you will learn when it is more useful to a switch statement as opposed to just some if…else statement… but they kinda do the same thing… compare one thing to another, then return execute some piece of code to make your life better. The big difference is switch only tests for a specific case, so you cant really feed it a range (well there’s hacks, but then you’re not really testing against the expression you’re actually trying to evaluate. and its just plain dumb… unless you are that one in a million case, else just stick to the basics).

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I haven’t posted in a while, but in the past 6-9 months I’ve been working on some pretty cool stuff. Stratalogica Check it out. Through it I’ve been learning some really nice perks, especially FP10. That along with Python, which is a pretty sweet language… but this is about AS3… maybe some JAVA.

First off Event Priority, that little number we get use to always setting 0 (if you actually set it, otherwise it’s always 0….

this.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, someFunction,false,0,true);
//or just
this.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE,somefunction) //always  0

Anyways sometimes you want certain components to respond before others do, so bump this number up some, the higher the number the higher the priority.

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