King of the Shortcuts (FlashDevelop)

I’ve been using FlashDevelop for a while now. As Actionscript editors go it’s great, but it’s also 100% free which sweetens the deal even more. It does everything I need it to; creates projects, organises files and code hints comprehensively. In a word, it rocks.

But yesterday I was introduced to something in FlashDevelop that I’d never seen before. The king of all shortcuts:

CTRL - SHIFT - 1

How I’ve lived without this shortcut before I don’t know. I feel like a fool for not discovering it earlier. It does absolutely everything…

• Place your cursor next to a class variable, hit the king and you get a little pop-up menu offering to create you getters and setters.
• Written a variable inside a function and now want to make it into a class variable? Place your cursor, hit the king and you’ll be offered to “Promote to class member”. It will then declare the variable at the top and correct your function accordingly.
• Need a new function? Type the function name, press the king, “Generate function”. Done.
• Need a new class? Type the name, king, “create class”, done.

This shortcut literally does absolutely everything from declaring variables to generating functions. I keep discovering even more things all the time. It’s such a timesaver. Truly the ultimate multi-purpose shortcut.

The FindURL() Class (v1.2)

I’ve updated the FindURL class because a couple of people were asking for the ability to target a new browser window. The class can be completely overwritten and shouldn’t affect any old code that you may have produced…it targets the same window as default.

However if you want to target a new browser window you can now do so by adding an additional parameter…”_blank”. See the example below:

var input:String = "blah blah blah http://www.burnedouthippy.com blah blah blah";
var fU:FindURL = new FindURL(input, "_blank");
var output:String = fU.Process();

If you run a trace on output, you’ll see that the new string has HTML a tags inside it and it also now targets a new browser. You can change “_blank” for any other HTML target and it should work just fine…alternatively, completely leave out the second parameter and it will automatically target “_self”.

Download the FindURL v1.2

Warning 1090: Migration issue

Actionscript 3 errors and warnings are not always easy to understand – especially if you’re teaching yourself and aren’t completely up on all of the terminology. Sometimes I scream for the error message to be plainer English and spend far too long googling the solution. So from now on if I get an error and found that the solution was simple but took a while to find, I’m going to blog it here. Hopefully it will help somebody else too! More

Actionscript 3 getURL() class

I don’t know about you, but one of the things that I miss most about AS2 is the simplicity to use…

getURL("http:www.mysite.com", "_blank")

…to launch a web address.

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Pixel perfection in Papervision3D

I’ve been tearing my hair out for the last 24 hours trying to work out how the hell to get my precisely drawn design to scale correctly in Papervision. Anyone who’s tried this will know that it’s a frustrating blend of messing around with camera zoom, focus and field of view. But try as I might, I found it absolutely impossible to solve. I had come to the end of my patience and was ready to give up with PV3D and change the design completely…

…and then I came across this.

The thing that crossed my mind first when seeing this demo was “not only is it possible to reproduce a good pixel perfect 2D design in Papervision, but potentially it could be really great”.

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