shaun smith

Some little things I enjoy about Ruby: Read more…

I recently purchased @unclebobmartin‘s awesome book: Clean Code. What a book! I’m going to echo a sentiment that often ripples through the Twittersphere: If you are a programmer and you haven’t read Clean Code you are doing your fellow programmers (and yourself) a great disservice. Seriously.
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Want a framework like PureMVC but without Singletons, Service Locators, or casting? Perhaps one with Dependency Injection and Automatic Mediator Registration?

Well, you might enjoy RobotLegs AS3: yet another lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications.

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I asked this question on Stack Overflow:

What’s the best way to execute a function after exactly one frame?

Based on the feedback I wrote a little class to make it super easy to do. You add function references to a queue, and those functions get called (in the order they were added) on the next Flash Player Frame.

Herewith, the DelayedFunctionQueue.as

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itemRenderer = new ClassFactory( ItemRendererClass );

Just a little follow up to yesterday’s post.

Kyle was kind enough to put together a little demo for the Display Utility and send it my way. I tweeked it to reduce the filesize a bit. Herewith, the demo, source and all:

displayutildemo.zip

Disclaimer: My Mac has probably thrown some .DS_Store files into the zip file. If you are a Windows user.. “suck it!” No, I’m just kidding. The best solution is to switch to OS X as soon as you can: I promise you won’t regret it. Until you try to copy and merge two folders – at which point you will be amazed when your original folder gets wiped. Awesome! Apple, why oh why oh why? The best OS on the planet, with one of the biggest flaws imaginable!

UPDATE: Aha, here we go, this looks much better: Fit Display Object Into Rectange
UPDATE: Or check out CASA lib: http://casalib.org/

A day or two ago my man Kyle asked me if I knew of any good ActionScript image resizing utilities. I said “nay”, did a quick (and unsuccessful) search, and promptly forgot about it. This morning, however, I had to write some PHP to scale and crop images to fit inside fixed rectangles (for desktop downloads) and I remembered that I’d written something to do that very thing many years ago. I found my old code, tweaked it, and rolled it out.

This evening I decided to write an AS3 version – I’ll need it soon enough anyhow. Herewith, my Display Utility containing two static methods: resize(), and resizeAndCrop().

DisplayUtil.resize() will scale a DisplayObject to a target size, with an optional fourth parameter to determine whether the image should fit “inside” (default) or “outside” the target size. For example:

DisplayUtil.resizeAndCrop() will scale a DisplayObject to fit “outside” a target size and then crop off the excess (by setting a scrollRect on the DisplayObject). The optional fourth and fifth parameters determine how to align the crop (the area to keep – defaults to center, middle). For example:

Download:

displayutil.zip

Disclaimer: I’m absolutely sure that someone has already written something to do this, but I couldn’t find anything easily (quickly) enough, and it was fun to write.

UPDATE: Aha, here we go, this looks much better: http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/flash/actionscript-3/fit-a-displayobject-into-a-rectangle/
UPDATE: Or check out CASA lib: http://casalib.org/