Archive for the ‘Flash’ Category

pureMVC presentation at LFPUG (London) tonight.

Friday, February 1st, 2008

I just returned from this, and as I hoped it has raised my interest in the framework.

This was, apparently, Paddy’s first public speaking experience and I have to say that he did a very good job.
The slides and structure were well thought out and prepared, and delivered spot on time, in fairly conversational but to the point manner.

We spoke for 5 minutes afterwards, he’s a very nice guy and it was good to see that we were in general agreement even if using different frameworks.
He started out with pureMVC at about the same time I did with Cairngorm and it would seem that our experiences and the benefits we’ve received are pretty well matched.
One of the points of his presentation was to recommend use of a framework (any one of the many alternatives) in general and held pureMVC up as being a good example.

That said, it’s got to be an almost impossible task to cover this sort of topic in one hour, to a mixed audience. I also saw Neil Webb’s cairngorm presentation last year, although that was probably rather easier for me to follow since I was already using it at the time. I think that knowledge helped me a lot with this one as well, but even so it’s hard to follow once someone goes through the code in even a small demo app. I’m unsure about how useful running through code actually is in this sort of limited timescale, though I guess it depends on the context.
I expect it did go over a few peoples heads, even when I knew roughly where it was going (as I said, I’ve looked at it before, read the docs a few times even if it was a while ago) it was still a little hard to follow so much in a short time.

I had a brief conversation with Tink about his flash on the beach 2007 presentation, where he asked if there was enough detail on the actual code. In his case, I think he got it pretty well spot on for that one. It was a fairly quick and sparse overview, pointing out the important points and things to look out for. For me, that’s ideal, since I can look over the code later, check out those points and see how they fit in. However, that was for a rather smaller example of flex skinning, and to go over a whole framework in 20-30 minutes is ambitious, maybe too much so.
No easy answer to that one, really, except to take more time perhaps!

In any case, I was after an overview, and I got a good one, so many thanks for your effort Paddy!

I also enjoyed Rob Bateman’s talk on the history and current state of 3D on the web, I was unsure if I was going to stay for that, but glad I did.
It was nicely delivered,and free from any hype (I’m slightly cautious about the current enthusiasm for 3d, and Rob seemed to understand very well the point that it’s great *where appropriate and well done*)

You wait ten years for a flash html renderer, and then two come along at once!

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

This is one thing that I am, and have been, really really missing in flash. My clients, of course, fail to understand why text handling in flash is basic, from their point of view it’s all text that appears on the interweb and why can’t flash “just” display the same kind of text???

Standing in their shoes, I do understand it, but in mine I appreciate the flash player difficulties (A bit, anyway :) I wish it were not so, nevertheless ).

Well, I’ve heard a whisper of flash player 10 having the ability to display tables in text fields, which would be nice, but then I guess we’ll see in good time.

In any case, just as the issue reared it’s head properly at work, I get not one but two little rays of sun shiney hope poking through the clouds, literally in the past couple of days.

Firstly, Alex Harui posted some code and what I consider some quite insightful comments on his blog here.
It is by his own words incomplete and possibly buggy, but that’s fair enough and I’m still very pleased to see it.
As he rightly supposes, in my case I only really need a small subset, and having code to start from will be an enormous leg up compared to starting from scratch.
So far I’ve only had 3/4 hour to play with that one, but it looks promising.

Secondly, another library (htmlwrapper) comes along, open sourced on google code (via FlashcodersNY). Not had much of chance to play with this one either, but reading the docs html tables are yet to come (a shame, since the text I have to render is table based, and unfortunately a little haphazard). Still, I’m looking forward to checking this out as well.
Again, just having something to start with and code to play with should be a great thing.

Many thanks to the respective authors for releasing the code, it’s so much appreciated.