Best Flash Community Bloggers of 2011
Posted on Jan 04, 2012
The quantity and quality of content and demos created by the Flash community never ceases to amaze me.There is certainly no shortage of sites I could have highlighted here and it was difficult to just limit the list to a handful but each of these sites, in my opinion, is uniquely deserving of recognition for all the work they did during the past year to share their knowledge with the rest of the community and push the limits of Flash’s ability. Thanks to all of you!
Continue Reading →Best Music of 2011
Posted on Jan 02, 2012
For those of you that don’t already know, over the past year I have cohosted a biweekly radio show with my friend Bob Silverberg on CodeBass Radio in which we cover our favorite new releases. To find these songs I listen to a lot of music every week just to pick out the 8 or so songs I want to play. Hopefully this puts me in a good position to pick some of the best music of the year. Even if it doesn’t, I am doing it anyway. All of the below songs and artists I did feature at some point over the year on the show, Vitamin Sweet. I hope you enjoy them and also feel free to share you favorites from this year. If you do like my musical tastes (which can be quite different from Bob’s), be sure to tune in to Vitamin Sweet on every other Friday starting again on the 13th.
Continue Reading →Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 12/16/2011
Posted on Dec 16, 2011
The year is almost over and, if you are like me, you are already getting ready to go on holiday. Nonetheless, the community keeps pumping out new and great tutorials and projects. I did take a moment yesterday to call out some of the best Flex community bloggers of 2011 and hope to do the same for Flash next week. On another note, it occurred to me over the past week's that there was enough new material from the community purely focused on Stage3D in Flash Player to warrant its own section. So, this week features that section with a number of new tutorials and open-source library/framework releases related to Stage3D.
Continue Reading →Best Flex Community Bloggers of 2011
Posted on Dec 15, 2011
Admittedly, this has been a rollercoaster year for Flex. However, as has been very evident this week, Flex has a very strong community filled with individuals who share their time and effort to help other developers such as themselves. I want to recognize some of these today by choosing my personal top bloggers of the year from the Flex community. I know there are many of you who contributed and I wish I could thank all of you individually, but these nine individuals I think deserve some special recognition for their work this year. Here's to a bright, and community-led, 2012.
To be clear, I am including only community bloggers, not evangelists or employees of Adobe. Second, none of these bloggers blog exclusively on Flex but they did blog about Flex or Flex related topics such as Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and AIR over the course of the year. Lastly, yes, I do hope to do another one of these posts focused on Flash hopefully next week.
Continue Reading →Namespacing in JavaScript
Posted on Dec 14, 2011
One of the difficult things when transitioning from a traditional class-based, object-oriented compiled language like ActionScript or Java to JavaScript is that practices that were completely standard are now a matter of debate. Take for example namespacing. In ActionScript it would be completely ordinary and accepted to have a class such as com.rinaldi.portal.turret but in JavaScript, while that is technically possible, it is also both atypical and, apparently, not recommended. However, namespacing is especially important in JavaScript as the dynamic nature of the language and the lack of a compiler can easily lead to collisions. Nonetheless, there are multiple approaches to namespacing in JavaScript and, from what I could gather,no universally accepted standard. In this article, I will discuss what I have learned so far in terms of namespacing approaches and how to avoid variable and functon collisions.
As in my first article on prototype inheritence, remember that I make no claim on being a JavaScript guru. In fact, if you are a JavaScript guru, I’d love to hear feedback to clear up any misconceptions I may have. I am just sharing what I am learning as I go along.
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