Emak Mafu Labs Blog

I’m doing a project at the moment which has a big word cloud as the landing page for which i used papervision. But as some of you might know - papervision doesn’t do vectors very well. I pretty sure i made the best of what papervsion offers - using smoothing on everything possible guided by the demo at zupko.info, but it still didn’t seem to pull off desired effect…. enter vectorvision - check out the demo below - i think it really captures the power of what it can achieve.

I haven’t looked into it much yet, but i’m pretty sure its exactly what i’m looking for as i breezed over the code.

check out the examples + code from the repository - you’ll need the greatWhite branch of papervision for it to get it to work

So just like Operating Systems before them, now browsers are starting to all look and feel the same. Personally I’m a Safari die-hard. I found Firefox 2 a bit slow and bloated on my MacBook Pro, and Safari has always been uncluttered and quick. The new Firefox 3 has stolen borrowed a lot of that from the “new” kid on the block. So much so that I find it hard to tell the difference while I have the 2 running. I went ahead and changed the Firefox logo for them to reflect the changes:

First of all, just installed the wp-syntax plugin, so now we can have proper example code on the blog. I can’t believe it took us so long to get it on here, seen as its pretty much ubiquitous among the developer community, I find it really useful when browsing example sites so I thought we better get it on here sharpish.
Will that in mind I thought I’d share a particular hack/workaround that I was working with last week regarding for..in loops (not to be confused with for each loops).

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for (var i : * in object)
{
 
}

This works fine for native objects and arrays, but back in the day of as2 you could loop over public variables and getters in custom classes as well. Not so in as3, it simply skips the loop. As you may have guessed by the title of this post the solution is to override the default valueOf() function with an object that represents your class, for example.

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package {
 
	/**
	 * @author alexanderfell
	 */
	public class GeomPoint {
 
		private var _dimensionMap:Array;
 
		public function GeomPoint(newDimensions:Array) 
		{
			_dimensionMap = newDimensions;
		}
 
		public function get x():Number
		{
			return _dimensionMap["x"];
		}
		public function get y():Number
		{
			return _dimensionMap["y"];
		}
		override public function valueOf():Object
		{
			return {x:x, y:y};	
		}
	}
}

This way, we simply loop over the valueOf() instead of the the class. As a side note the code above is for a co-ordinate generation system which may require the dimensions to be labelled differently depending on which frameworks we are using (for example APE uses “px” and “py”) which is the reason for all the dimensionMap funny business, not me being unnecessarily difficult.
The eagle-eyed design pattern enthusiast may be able to see the decoration of an array here (this is just an example, the real code has an abstract class that sets the dimensions, then everything extends that abstract…. what you think I’d put all the code up here!?).

edit: damn syntax styles….

We have just launched http://www.stockwool.co.uk, our most feature packed Architects site to date. Check out the “Now” section, a flash blog with a Flex backend.

We are looking for developers with AS2/3 experience keen to get into Flex and Air. We are also looking for a client facing senior developer to work on technical specs for our projects. Please send your CV through to studio “at” emakmafu.com

Previously I blogged about how to find something you were looking for, but sometimes you will find yourself down a rabbit hole with no idea how you got there, with interesting consequences.

I started off yesterday by adding all of the blog roles of the most popular flex blogs to my rss reader, so basically finding all the best blogs by association (you know the bit were they link to the blogs they read). After that I began skimming though them looking for something to read, and found an article recommended by Ryan Stewart about Why blist chose Flex and Flash, which reminded me that I had signed up for the beta for blist and so proceeded to read the post.

After reading this thoroughly interesting post (it finally clicked that the reason that the Flash player has so much penetration is because of the popularity of youtube), I saw that he had name-checked the sproutbuilder app as another cutting edge use of Flex, which I remember our mafu Sam had blogged about previously. So…… I began reading the blog over at sproutbuilder and found an usual reference to some vintage weight-watchers recipe cards via the post “Systems Architecture and Bad Cooking, Oh My!” and I have to say i have never laughed so hard at the this link, a dissection of the exactly what is going on inside the mind of a food-photographer.

“A universe beyond gay”

Be sure to check out some of the other cards as well.

I’ve been thinking this week about how best to describe the work I do here at emak mafu, in particular how I would brand the type of development on a business card.
Often when I meet new people in the the industry I find it difficult to describe my job without A. sounding like the most boring person in the world and B. pigeon-holing my abilities as a developer. Officially my title would be “Flash Developer”, but this brings up connotations of timeline based scripting when the reality is quite different. When you take into account the amount of UML modeling, PHP/MYSQL back-end scripting, Java and Javascript development as well as Flex and MTASC compiling, then the term “Flash Developer” doesn’t seem to do it justice seen as I haven’t used the Flash IDE in a number of weeks. In fact with the re-branding of the “Flash Platform” to the “Adobe Platform” then I have half a mind to re-title myself an “Adobe Platform Developer”.
I think half of the ambiguity is cleared up by the progression towards EcmaScript standards, indeed with our forthcoming move to BlazeDS I look forward to some consistency in the way in which we develop (it was hard enough going back to AS 2). From my perspective, as long as your rocking some design patterns, using an industry standard IDE (eclipse, builder, aptana… pick your poison) and describe what you’re doing in an OO way then I don’t think it matters which languages you are using provided your language supports these features. And this is my point, I don’t think I could handle languages such as LISP or erlang, but give me something that follows an EcmaScript standard and I think it would be quite easy to migrate.
Behold: Alex - “EcmaScript Developer”.


As a developer you will often find yourself scouring for information, whether it be a solution to your latest nightmare, source code for the latest framework or simply something cool and so you most of you will inevitably find yourself firing-up the web browser and hitting the big G.
So let me just stop you right there, you may want to consider some other sources before trawl through x million pages of results. The most important part of your search will be where you search, and searching everything is not a good idea if your looking for something specific.
First up on the list is del.icio.us, or “the web filtered” as I like to call it. The idea behind delicious is simple, people tag links that they like so they can remember them, and find related links, however the fantastic side-effect of this is that only valid content is tagged, nobody is going to go around tagging messageboards, preachy fanboys or catchment sites because they have nothing on them. Thus a search on del.icio.us will usually give you a result that somebody thought was worth saving.
The website ffffound takes this concept one step further, you can only tag something if you are invited by a friend, and friends only have three invites each. Although strictly for images (designers) its a great concept and fantastic source of inspiration.
Of course you can still use google, who wouldn’t, but you would be better off searching Google Groups for code related stuff. Google has been increasingly gaining momentum with Google Code and the integration with groups means that a lot of developers are taking to the messageboards there.
If you like to keep on top of the all the latest information then you will want to search the “blog-o-sphere” at technorati, for all the post of all the blogs registered, or the increasingly geeky digg.com, which was here before del.icio.us, but has become slightly bloated by the number of backtracking urls and and abundance of people “digging” everything.
Finally you may want to consider some plug-ins for your browser, if your a mac user try inquisitor, find as you type functionality, and firefox has trailfire, but I’ll leave you to explore the concept behind that…..

Firstly a big thankyou to everyone involved, especially Adobe for helping with the venue and the free beer! The event went down really well, we got just under 200 people coming along, a lot of them from other platforms. The best question of the night in the Q&A was “How do I convince my clients to use Flex and not Ajax?”. Looks like it is all going in the right direction. The next big event like this will be in April, but there will be 2 smaller events between now and then.

Sorry about the delay, but we are back now. Loads of really good excuses, like moving office, moving server etc. but I won’t bore you with all that.

The biggest news is that after 3 years on Old Street, we have now moved to Shoreditch Park, photos are coming soon!