Sprite: Properly update properties

Simple: update the x property of a bunch of Sprites on the stage based on the Mouse’s x position.

If you are on the right half of the stage, move objects to the left (scroll right/negative x). If you are on the left side of the stage, move objects to the right (left scroll/positive x). This also takes into account how close you are to the center; if you are closer to the edges, scroll faster.
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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.”

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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E4X: A better way to deal with XML.

I’m not writing anything that hasn’t already been documented out there before, but I did want to mention one of my favorite things about AS3 - E4X. E4X is ECMAScript for XML. You can read more about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E4X.

XML is implemented natively into ActionScript 3… no more parsing XML files form astrong. You can leverage this to traverse XML files for specific pieces of content without the need of running a for loop or converting the XML to an object or anything. The trick is mastering the syntax.

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