Flash on the Beach 2009 – The Aftermath

Well I’m back from Flash on the Beach 2009 in Brighton and yet again I wasn’t disappointed. There were a couple of sessions that weren’t as good as expected and a couple more that unexpectedly blew me away, all-in-all I had a blinding time. Needless to say I’d thrown out my previously organised schedule by Monday lunchtime though

This year was so enjoyable I’m still buzzing a week later, hence this post. I’m not going to go massively into detail about it all, but there are a few highlights and lowlights that I think are worth talking about…

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Tweeter v1.0 – simplifying Twitter and Actionscript

If you want to add a Twitter feed to your flash website, currently the best way to do it is to pay a visit to Matt Pearson’s (Zenbullets) Twitter API explanation and buckle down to the code. However if like me you are finding your clients increasingly requesting Twitter feeds in their sites, perhaps you’ll appreciate my new Tweeter class for ease of re-use.

Try it out:

It’s based around Matt’s explanations and centres on drawing a single tweet from a single user (using the API’s “status” call). All I’ve done in my clumsy ham-fisted way is to simplify it for anyone who either doesn’t have the time to learn it or simply can’t be bothered. Now all you have to do is use something like the following code for it be up and running in seconds…

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The CSSLoader Class (v1.0)

AS3 is a wonderful thing, but it can be really long-winded sometimes when you’re trying to achieve something simple – the perfect example being the replacement of AS2′s getURL() class with a series of listeners. I know why it has been set up this way, I understand why it’s better that everything follows a uniform methodology and I do wholeheartedly agree with it, but there is no getting around the fact that you can get bogged down writing the same long-winded code over and over again. Frankly, it can be a pain in the ass and can sap the fun out of simple tasks.

Sometimes I get around these chunks of code using snippets (see Lee Brimelow’s tutorial on how to set up snippets in Flex Builder), but sometimes the code is crying out for a simple class to be made – in my opinion, loading external stylesheets is one of these times.

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Updated: FindURL (v1.1)

The FindURL class has been updated and the new version can be found here.

This new version corrects a rather embarrassing issue – the class was returning no text at all if no URL was present in the text. I was so wrapped up with trying to get it to look for URLs in a text block, it didn’t cross my mind to test it without any at all! Problem solved now though, simply overwrite the previous version and everything should work as before.

The FindURL class (v1.0)

Please note: This class has been updated. Please click here to see the latest changes.

Whilst I was playing around with the Twitter API I was beginning to get wound up by the fact that the XML feed from Twitter only sends out text versions of tweets and not HTML versions. For example, lets say a tweet says “Check out this cool link: http://www.plagro.com”, the xml feed from twitter would send out:

Check out this cool link: http://www.plagro.com"

as oppose to the html version containing the “a” link tag:

Check out this cool link: <a href="http://www.plagro.com">http://www.plagro.com</a>

So after trawling the forums looking for alternative feeds and/or HTML convertors, I came to the conclusion that it would be easier to write a small class that simply finds links within blocks of text and adds in the html tags so it can be displayed as HTML text. The result is the FindURL class.

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