CSSEdit is a great app I can’t live (or at least work) without. I’ve recently discovered the LESS language, which basically extends CSS with some very very useful functionality – mainly variables and something like functions (called mixins).… Read more

Most of my Flash apps or websites use XML files, either for communication or initial data. They can get quite large, reaching about 100 kb or more is not seldom. You might say: so what?! 100 kb is like nothing… Read more

I went down a few algorithmic roads recently, digging into path finding and – for some obscure reasons – bit manipulations. Or byte. Whatever.

Along this way some utility methods (or functions) were born, and I thought: May be… Read more

As we all know Flash’s garbage collector is a hell of a beast. It tries to free memory from “unused” objects (aka objects not somehow cross-referenced by the root). So from time to time our garbage collector checks for those… Read more

Sometimes you need to test your Flash stuff with different plugin versions. Even if you just want to run some performance tests, it is very useful to switch to the release player (see below for another example).

For Read more

Yesterday I had a presentation at the SFUG meeting covering some bits of my rewritten BBML framework (originated from the project laax.com). I’ve tried to share some insights into the technical concept and strategies for CSS parsing, CSS… Read more

This is a follow-up of this.

Yeah well, I was more than optimistic to show those JS guys how fast Flash can be with the help of some brand new Adobe magic – but Pixel Bender was, unfortunately, quite disappointing:

I did a quick port of a «graphic demo» called «metatunnel» (created by FRequency).

Paulo Falcão ported this to Javascript using canvas.

To make the set complete I ported Paulos JS version to Actionscript, just quick’n’dirty.

Click on it… Read more

GridFitType has a great impact on Text rendering:

Well not really much to say here:

• NONE Good for animation and people who prefer Font appearance over readability
• SUBPIXEL Good compromise between readability (small sizes) and appearance
• PIXEL Pure nonsense

… Read more

I did some speed tests today, comparing two string parsing methods. And I’ve made some very interesting discoveries: The execution speed between SWF compiled for debugging and those compiled without differs.

Ha! Okay, that’s not that much of news (even… Read more