Myself and the top notch team of internet professionals at Poke have just finished this monster project, check it out. It’s mental.

There’s now two examples in the zip, one for use with SWFObject 1.5, and a totally re-written version for use with SWFObject 2.0 (formerly SWFFix)

All you have to do in your main application class (or document class) is
[as]
import com.pixelbreaker.ui.osx.MacMouseWheel;

MacMouseWheel.setup( stage );
[/as]

You can then add listeners to TextFields, Sprites etc etc as you normally would any other MouseEvent.

Example JavaScript to be used with the dynamic embed method
[js]
var vars = {};
var params = { scale:’noScale’, salign:’lt’, menu:’false’ };
var attributes = { id:’testObject’, name:’testObject’ }; // give an id to the flash object

swfobject.embedSWF(“test_as3.swf”, “flashContent”, “100%”, “100%”, “9.0.0″, “js/expressInstall.swf”, vars, params, attributes );
swfmacmousewheel.registerObject(attributes.id);
[/js]

I have updated the SWFObject 2.0 version to be more compact, and it also falls inline with the code style of SWFObject2.0. see swfmacmousewheel_src.js for the uncompressed version, deploy swfmacmousewheel2.js on your site.

Download source and demo here or view the demo online

It returns the memory currently being used by the Flash Player. It’s in bytes so it pays to clean it up slightly.

[as]
var mem:String = Number( System.totalMemory / 1024 / 1024 ).toFixed( 2 ) + ‘Mb’;
trace( mem ); // eg traces “24.94Mb”
[/as]

It seems this takes account of all instances of the flash player. For example, I have a logger/debug panel running in the sidebar of firefox, built in flex. As soon as I open this and it’s initialised, it uses an extra 5 – 10mb of ram. So be warned, if you see a massive increase in memory usage, check you don’t have loads of sites open with ad banners or other flash based stuff.

The high points for me were Mario Klingemann’s “2D or not 2D, that is the question” talk about working with BitmapData. He showed how to make a “Magic Wand” tool a la photoshop. His process was impressive to say the least, and I’m very interested in playing with the paletteMap method of the BitmapData class.

The session from André Michelle was amazing, he demoed his PopForge sound synthesis engine. Generating sound entirely within flash at run-time. See the video below, this is all generated and manipulated in flash. It’s simply amazing, I can’t wait to get some time (after this post) to start messing around with sound in flash.

There were lots of other talks that were brilliant, Jared Tarbell, Eric Natzke, Craig Swann, they were all very inspiring to watch and listen to. I also went to a few more technical talks, Grant Skinner’s actionscript 3.0 talk was good, as was Ted Patrick’s Flex worst practices talk. Though I don’t use flex (well, rarely) it was still a good talk that highlighted some very important points about the development process for me.

I’ve just found some videos I filmed of André Michelle talking about popforge, see below

I found ActionScript 3.0 and AVM2: Performance Tuning by Gary Grossman, which covers many aspects of how AVM2 is different from AVM1. The part I was interested in was about $init and $cinit (class constructor) functions being interpreted and everything else being JIT.

The initial setup of the engine runs over a timed loop (to stop script timeouts), and this was typically taking 20 to 30 seconds. After reading the above PDF, it became clear that class constructors are interpreted, not JIT compiled, so all I had to do was move the code out of the constructor, into an init() function, and call if after the constructor, this shaved a huge amount of time off the initial build of the landscape.

Some initial tests, with a for loop running from 0 to 10000 showed that in the constructor it took about 350ms, and called via another method, it took only 240ms. It is not always faster, but 90% of the time it’s faster.

here’s my test example
[as]
public class Class1
{
import flash.utils.getTimer;

public function Class1()
{
var t:int = getTimer();
var a:Array = [];
var i:int;
for( i=0; i< 1000000; i++)
{
var x:int = i*i;
a.push( x );
}
trace( ‘constructor: ‘ + (getTimer() – t) );
}

public function init():void
{
var t:int = getTimer();
var a:Array = [];
var i:int;
for( i=0; i< 1000000; i++)
{
var x:int = i*i;
a.push( x );
}
trace( ‘init method: ‘ + (getTimer() – t) );
}
}
[/as]

in the .fla I simply add:
[as]
var c1:Class1 = new Class1();
c1.init();
[/as]

[as]
package
{
public class Singleton
{
public static var instance:Singleton;

public static function getInstance():Singleton
{
if( instance == null ) instance = new Singleton( new SingletonEnforcer() );
return instance;
}

public function Singleton( pvt:SingletonEnforcer )
{
// init class
}
}
}

internal class SingletonEnforcer{}
[/as]
Note: The class “SingletonEnforcer” is actually placed within the same .as file as the Singleton class, but placed outside the package{} parenthesis, therefore, the class “SingletonEnforcer” can only be accessed from within this .as file, so if the Singleton’s constructor is called from anywhere else, you’ll get an error.

I set up a for loop, to count backwards through an Array. But for some strange reason the loop was never terminating! It was simple, here’s the original code

[as]
var i:uint;
for( i=arr.length-1; i>=0; i– )
{
}
[/as]

The mistake was simple, I had set i as a uint, so it could never go below 0, so just had to make i an int. It sounds stupid once you realise it, but it wasted enough of my time!

A lot of people had been asking for this as a widget. So i’ve put together this version for the OS X Dashboard. The options are limited to language selection only.

Download:
[zip] PolarClock OSX Widget 356Kb

I had no idea how widgets were built until this morning, and to my pleasant surprise, they are basically Safari (WebKit) running on a transparent background. A good place to start is on the apple site.

The PolarClock widget is basically a blend on HTML, JavaScript and Flash, embedded using SWFObject. The one major issue was that I couldn’t get Flash movies to display in my widget. All you have to do is add an extra flag in the info.plist file named “AllowInternetPlugins” and set it to true.

[xml]
AllowInternetPlugins

It literally took me 5 minutes to write a simple wrapper class to handle the loading of the feeds, and simply trace out the headlines of each item.

[as]
package app.feeds
{
import com.adobe.xml.syndication.generic.FeedFactory;
import com.adobe.xml.syndication.generic.IFeed;
import com.adobe.xml.syndication.generic.IItem;

import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.URLLoader;
import flash.net.URLRequest;

public class FeedLoader
{
private var loader:URLLoader;

public var feed:IFeed;

public function FeedLoader( feedURL:String )
{
loader = new URLLoader();
loader.addEventListener( Event.COMPLETE, loadComplete );
loader.load( new URLRequest( feedURL ) );
}

private function loadComplete( e:Event ):void
{
feed = FeedFactory.getFeedByXML( new XML( e.target.data ) );

var i:uint;
for( i=0; i< feed.items.length; i++ )
{
trace( IItem( feed.items[ i ] ).title );
}
}
}
}
[/as]

To implement:
[as]
var feed1:FeedLoader = new FeedLoader( ‘http://www.guardian.co.uk/rss’ );
[/as]

If you’re using flash as I am, you may find that it spits the dummy when it tries to load mx.utils.StringUtil, you’ll need to add an ActionScript classpath pointing to the flex framework, which on my machine was in “/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/2.0.1/frameworks/source”

It’s all done!

Re-worked from the ground up in ActionScript 3, this release should be much less CPU intensive, and has had heaps of new features added. Read all about it at it’s new permanent home.

PolarClock Home