Something I discovered a while ago has popped up in a recent project and I decided to share my experience. To put it in a nutshell, the Timer class is not what you think it is (a perfect timer); it is actually influenced by the user’s frame rate. Let’s take a look at what it says right in the documentation that can be found in the Flash Help book within Flash CS or at the online Adobe® Flex™ 2 Language Reference:
You can create Timer objects to run once or repeat at specified intervals to execute code on a schedule. Depending on the SWF file’s framerate or Flash Player’s environment (available memory and other factors), Flash Player may dispatch events at slightly offset intervals. For example, if a SWF file is set to play at 10 frames per second [fps], which is 100 millisecond intervals, but your timer is set to fire an event at 80 milliseconds, Flash Player will fire the event close to the 100 millisecond interval. Memory-intensive scripts may also offset the events.
Continue reading ‘ActionScript Timer class seem offset/inaccurate/way off? It is!’ »
Today I finished putting my entire portfolio in Wordpress, so I thought it would be appropriate to write about my experience setting it up and using it.
I was interested in using Wordpress as a CMS for some time now, mostly because I wanted to be able to edit my portfolio anywhere from a web interface and allow people to comment on all of my work in an open format. In addition, I was looking forward to Wordpress automatically taking care of a number of things I would normally have to do manually like organizing my content and setting up permalinks.
Continue reading ‘Wordpressified’ »
Flash Help Book Creator is a tool to create a Flash extension for an ActionScript library that adds a help book to Flash Help and adds syntax highlighting and code hints to the editor. It started out as something solely for the Sandy 3D engine, but I decided to make it public since it’s a helpful application that others may find useful. If you have an ActionScript library that you support, this is what will integrate your code into the Flash IDE. So be sure to give it a try.
I decided to make WebDevPage public. It is something I’ve used for a while for determining information about users’ browsers and installed plugins. To make it more useful to the public, I added a listing of links that I have found as useful web development resources. Let me know if there are any problems with it.
Virtual cube is something I finished a little while ago and have been revisiting every now and then, but I think it’s time to finally post it.
The application is a virtual cube (basically a Rubik’s cube). It displays a cube that the user can manipulate by rotating both the cube itself and its different levels. I have included support for different cube sizes and a few different scramble methods.
Currently the “solver,” it’s fake 
. It simply retraces the rotations of the user (as well as the scrambler) to return the cube to its solved state. I know someone who is making a solver that will solve any size cube (NxNxN) in Java, which I will port to ActionScript and incorporate in this application. This will also allow me to make a feature where the user can “paint” the cube by individually placing the stickers on the cube since the solver will then be able to solve a cube without needing to know the rotations it takes to get to that permutation.
It almost took a year, but here I am, alive and posting. School is out now, so I will be cleaning up my portfolio and posting some of the things I’ve been working on. Some of them are already up and running online, let me know if there are problems. 
Tetris is one of those games that I just had to make…because I can…and I did! I tried putting in a few different game modes and will probably add some more in the future as well as more challenges.
