Tips for new coders

The comments in this discussion are priceless. They’re language or platform specific at all — for you folks out there looking for how to learn quickly, get better as a coder and thrive at a new environment, this thread is a must read.

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Zend + AMF

Lee Brimelow discusses the official announcement of the addition of AMF support to the Zend Framework in this post. A couple of details that caught my eye…

The AMF implementation in Zend is being done by Wade Arnold who also works on AMFPHP. The development of AMFPHP will continue but the Zend implementation will be officially supported by Adobe.

Adobe is working with Zend with the goal of being able to install the Flex Eclipse plug-in into Zend Studio. Not sure if this will make me start using Eclipse, but one of my personal hang-ups is that I needed a separate editor for decent PHP editing.

Update: The former title of this post referred to ZendAMF. According to a recent post on Wade Arnold’s blog … “There is no such thing is ZendAMF. I have seen this on some blog posts. There is the Zend Framework with the amf protocol server implementation using the package Zend_Amf and the class Zend_Amf_Server.”

Flash on Tap -- Now in May

Flash on Tap has been rescheduled for May 28th - 30th. This is a killer opportunity for all y’all who haven’t yet signed up and want to attend what will undoubtedly be one of the best conferences of the year.

Football season is no longer an excuse. Come. Drink with us. All of you. Sign up today!

Variable Declaration, aka Iterative Sanity

I was just talking to Tai U, a friend of the Spaceship, about this one. We were discussing how all these new young hooligan coders out there are committing the sin of looping using reserved variable names for iterators. Something sorta like this:


for(var x:int=0;x<foo;x++) {
// x?! what are you doing?!!?
};


Young friends, that may fly for other languages, but in ActionScript you are playing with fire. I have labored for many moons over a better solution for this and the most sensible in my head is described as follows:

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Custom filters (sort of) without Pixel Blender

Following up on Andrews post concerning Pixel Bender I’ve recently been playing with the convolution filter and I thought I’d share some findings. The convolution filter allows you to pass a matrix of values that are iterated over the pixels of a source image that influence the pixels in the original image. This is more or less what an image filter in pixel bender is doing.

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