Emak Mafu Labs Blog

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”.


Having just spent the last few hours trawling the web as to why my Ipod TV out wasn’t working when I connected it up to my TV - I thought I would post my findings as the solution was very different from what common sense would tell you.

To get the TV to pick up the output from the Ipod, (assuming you have the TV out option set to true in the settings) you need to connect the AV jacks in a different order than normal. The yellow video jack needs to be swapped with the red audio jack….. bizarre isn’t it!

I love this type of pointless interaction that is so engaging and can keep you entertained for ages; I spent at least 10 mins drawing lines with this app.

Basically Yellowtail by Golan Levin is a program that animates and repeats backwards whatever you draw with your mouse, the site describes it as:

Yellowtail is an interactive software system for the gestural creation and performance of real-time abstract animation. Yellowtail repeats a user’s strokes end-over-end, enabling simultaneous specification of a line’s shape and quality of movement. Each line repeats according to its own period, producing an ever-changing and responsive display of lively, worm-like textures.

If you like this type of thing have a look at some of the other interactive applets on the site and spend even more time moving your mouse around the screen for your own enjoyment.

They are so lame it’s unreal. If I wasn’t on hold right now this rant would be 4 times as long but my 1 finger typing isn’t too hot. If any of your clients use them, move them now!!! ….. you are at queue position mehhh….

UPDATE: And 2 weeks later we are still trying to move away from Clara.net, to be expected really

I think every flex developer has the same doubt: Should I move my application to Cairngorm? Should I start using Cairngorm? Should I learn how to use Cairngorm? The answer for all this questions and any other questions that you can imagine is YES.

If you have never heard about Design Patterns, this could be a really good moment to start thinking and looking for some information about it. In fact, I think you cannot be a good developer if you don’t know Design Patterns in a strong way.

If you still don’t know what are Design patterns, have a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_%28computer_science%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_pattern_%28software_engineering%29

In case you feel familiar with all this terms, and you still don’t know Cairngorm, it should be now a good moment to have a look at this:

http://www.cairngormdocs.org/

It’s a good repository, probably the best one, about Cairngorm. There you can find examples, documentation, tutorials, diagrams and everything related with Cairngorm.

Cairngorm provides you an easy, scalable, and reusable way to develop your applications, allowing your application to grow and grow without worrying about the future. If other developers join you on the development of your application, and they know Cairngorm, it will be extremely easy to have them working at their best straight away. If you don’t use Cairngorm, probably your poor new developer will be trying for weeks to understand your roller coaster application that you developed.

I insist: When you start with Cairngorm you will feel a little bit …..weird? A lot of stuff to learn, a lot of models, controllers, event dispatchers and delegates Business, but when you get inside it completely, you will never wanted to leave it.

Long live Cairngorm.

Check out a realy cool diagram explaining it here
and the application it talks of here

Soon there will be no need for developers in the world of multimedia content for the web as Sprout Builder is soon to be released some time (the home age doesn’t give a date but I’m sure its some time in the future)

The site says that the builder allows novice and advanced users the “quick and easy creation of sophisticated multimedia content” there is also a video giving a quick overview of it’s features, it looks like there are some nice sharing and managing features.

I think it’s either created in flash or more likely Flex but the site doesn’t say.

On the other side I don’t think this will replace developers for of multimedia content for the web completely as I’m sure it’s limited and will provide a tool for people with very little knowledge to produce absolute rubbish, designers might be able to make some decent content or just prototypes.

Long live developers!

Here at Emak Mafu we’ve been working on project that for one reason or another has to be coded in AS 2.0, which is a real pain seen as I’ve recently made the jump to AS 3. In this past week my screen has seen more yelling than ever, and I thought I’d let you know why.

Debugging

Where on earth are the compile time errors in AS 2? Seriously, if your working with complex/dynamic objects, or using any sort of design patterns then you might as well go home. I would estimate that about 40% of my coding time has been spent sifting through my code looking for things that AS 3 simply would not let you code, which brings us to…

Loosely Typed Objects

So it seems that without the mx library, AS 2 has about 4 classes (ok, maybe slightly more) which makes it really hard to predict the inputs and output of various core components. Worse still it seems that every plug-in and framework under to sun has been built with no extension in mind, at least with AS 3 you’d usually start off by extending the…

EventDispatcher

Thank god for the mx EventDispatcher, I think I would have gone crazy if I had to keep passing references in and out of singletons, where’s the cohesion in that? Its not the best though, and the number of times I’ve tried to dispatch an event from a MovieClip (errh, no Sprites?) or Object without first initializing it with an EventDispatcher, why its like trying to invoke Quicksilver on someone else’s mac, only to find there not using it (its doubly embarrassing if their using a PC). And speaking of Sprites….

CreateEmptyMovieClip()

I hate this, I really, really hate this. Lets say I want to create a MovieClip, and store a reference to that MovieClip. Here we go…
var mc:MovieClip = _scope.createEmptyMovieClip("mc", _scope.getNextHighestDepth());
Do any of you clever communication experts see the redundancy? I have a variable called mc, but I also specify a string name “mc” as well. Why? I don’t know, well I guess I do, its because the stage and variable components of the MovieClip model are not loosely coupled i.e. to create a MovieClip, you have to place it on the stage there is none of this lovely var mySprite:Sprite = new Sprite(); business that we have in AS 3. The most frustrating thing about this is, is that if you are naming clips in a loop, you may inadvertently confuse your variables, which is again all about the debugging. I suppose if you had to sum it up, you could say that its a…

Better Language

Because AS 3 is more like Java, you tend to think in a more OOP way, which in turn makes you think about things a bit differently. Instead of rushing in and hacking together a solution, you tend to think about how you are going to extend and re-use your code. Of course, this is not to say people didn’t do this in AS 2, it just feels more natural in AS 3 and it shows. You can tell when your coding in AS 2 that they haven’t gone the whole-hog. Some features in particular feel like they’ve been tacked on (the MovieClip.beginFill() as opposed to Sprite.graphics.beginFill() for example), creating some kind of mad-max-esque contraption.

I hope that this persuades some of you who are reading this to make the move to AS 3, best thing I ever did (coding wise, I’m not that sad).

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…..

I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while now and it’s really useful, I have used a dashboard widget to view some small amount of stats but it doesn’t have much functionality.

But now there is the Google Analytics AIR application built by Nicolas Lierman at Boulevart using Flex.

This 8min video I found via Serge Jespers blog has an interview with the team behind the application and it has some amazing features for the new version being released in March 2008, if you’re interested in Google Analytics it’s worth a watch or if your interested in a nicely skinned Flex application

Watch the video here: http://kitchencast.blip.tv/#606590