listening to...
he said
-->
and then...
the idiocy of clocks
April 29th, 2007 by aethis blog is dragging along to no-where.
so.
i am going to give it one more burst of effort.
i’ll try 20 posts in 20 days… or give up and resign it to the google archives forever
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Pubstandards – Melbourne
March 23rd, 2007 by aeDrink and argue about the extent to which myspace sucks at PubStandards Melbourne.
Based on pubstandards.co.uk its basically like going to Web Standards or PHPMelb, but without the presentation – just the beer. Great.
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Reboot
October 15th, 2006 by aeRebooted to a reliable and decent server (we changed hosting companies). Also I stole the design from Hugeobject (Helena did the initial design, I just changed the colours).
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MySQL tweaks
April 28th, 2006 by aeI’ve spend the last half of the day trying to optimise (thats how you spell it in Australia) a MySQL script that was grabbing a heap of data to build a excel spreadsheet.
The script included four left joins and was selecting from about 20,000 rows. It had gradually become slower and slower over the last month as the database grew, until now it was taking over 30 seconds to run the script and make the excel file.
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Ax
April 26th, 2006 by aeAx stands for Actionscript XML
Please note: This is a work in progress………
In XHTML there is a standard which is used by all coders which enables browsers to render the code into viewable content.
For example, this sentence in XHTML is within paragraph tags <p >exmaple</p >
XHTML (when done properly) is seperated into three conceptual layers.
- Content
- Presentation
- Behaviour
Flash however is generally quite different. In Flash its very common to see the content seperated out (in xml or via loadVars), however the presentation and behaviour are often grouped together. It could be argued that with Flash this makes more sense. There are obvious advantages to this but there are also disadvantages.
What is Ax?
Ax is an attempt at seperating Flash movies into three layers: Content, Presentation and Behaviour.
But more than that, Ax is attempting to develop a standard for Flash.
The most important feature of Ax is the way that content is stored (The Ax file). This is a XML file which has set standards (similar to XHTML) for storing content. Like XHTML this standard is simple and caters for all types of content.
With a content standard, it is then easy to develop a contentRenderer class. The contentRenderer class talks to the presentationClass to work out how to display the different content elements. There would also be a behaviourClass that would handle things like navigation etc.
This means that you could have a working application as soon as you have the content in a Ax standards based XML. You could then extend the base classes to make the content render and behave as you want.
Advantages
- Very fast to develop
- Very easy to change how an application looks or behaves.
- External tools would be available to make development easy: For example, it would be possible to create a PHP renderer that took a Ax file and turned it into XHTML. Or a basic CMS could easily be build to handle updating Flash movies.
- Users could switch style sheets while viewing the movie. This means you could create a vision impaired presentation stylesheet (eg. high contrast, big font size)
- Plugins could be coded and shared. For example if someone created a Ax compatible drop down navigation system, it could be shared and other coders could drop the class straight into their app and it should work.
- You could have different behaviour and presentation for different devices.
- Standards are really good
- Easier to develop.
Example
This is an example of how Ax may work in its simplest form
function Application(){
// load fancy stuff only for those who can handle/want it
if(user == "someone who needs content to be accessible"){
presentation.setStyleType("highContrastStyleSheet");
navigation.setNavigationType("simpleList");
behaviour.setBehaviourType("none");
}else{
presentation.setStyleType("fancyStyleSheet");
navigation.setNavigationType("dropdowns");
behaviour.setBehaviourType("fadeIn");
}
// load content
contentRenderer.loadAx("myContent.xml");
}
IS this MVC??
No. Not really.
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ASForms Version 1.2
April 21st, 2006 by aeHave uploaded a updated version of ASForms (1.2).
In this version I have added a very simple button FormButton. There is also an example of how the event management works.
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ASForms released unto the unwary masses
April 20th, 2006 by ae
ASForms is a very lightweight Actionscript component set. They are basically very similar to forms in HTML, but done in flash. (You know, radio buttons, checkboxes – that kind of thing). This release is fairly stable yet lacks accessibility and the button class which I’m still tweaking. The code examples give a basic indication of how it all works and I’ll make an effort to fill in some of the commenting holes over the next couple of weeks.
The code is released under the GPL MIT and was developed with MTASC strict in a AMES dev environment.
technorati tags: Flash, ASForms, Components
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as2ant
April 19th, 2006 by aeUsing ANT files is to me one of the attractions of using open source flash. One of the things that I really like is the ability to be able to compile multiple swfs at once.
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Hugeobject launches mtaasuper.com.au
April 10th, 2006 by ae
Hugeobject has been ultra busy lately. MTAA super has just been launched – and we are pretty proud of it. From start to release took three weeks (Ackk!). Check it out here.
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ASForms bugs and features to add
April 5th, 2006 by aeTodo: need to create a ASForms submit button
Testing: The checkbox has not been tested extensively with more than one checkbox item in a group. One checkbox item is working fine and has been tested heaps.