Now, for those who actually come and read my blog (I get a whopping 20 hits a day!) you may be wondering why the delay in posts… Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of those blogs that gets a few updates in the first few weeks then disappears into oblivion. I’ve been coding like crazy in Flex and trying to write my first component! Ok… make that components, because the main one I’m trying to create actually involves quite a few mini-components and classes built into it.

I’m trying to make an image viewer that connects to a users Flickr account, grabs 100 images or so, and displays them in a rotating circle, with the one selected displaying in the middle. The image selected will also magnify slightly, as well as the ones next to it (in a sort of Fish-Eye view but not quite that advanced at the moment). Well, I’ve gotten a good start, and having some 600+ lines of code written! It may not look like much, but you can see the of it start here.

A few things I’m having issues with… I can hear a COMPLETE event when the image is loaded, but for some reason the width/height/x/y values aren’t initalized yet. When the image is done loading, I want to move the Images so their registration point is actually in the center of the clip, not the top left corner, but without those values initialized when the image loads I’m at a loss! If anyone has suggestions on what I’m doing wrong, I’d love to hear them!

The e-Learning applications we develop at work are often used by employees out in the field. Not all of these employees have broadband connections, so figuring out ways to lessen the wait time for course distribution has been an on going battle. As our courses become more advanced, the file sizes often increase as well. This led me to develop the PreloadQueue (PQ) class which continues to pull content to the users computer while viewing other sections of the course.

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A hot topic at work right now is Just In Time Learning. Applications and training materials that can be used by clients to learn about a topic on their own time, right before needing it. Putting an application online isn’t enough, because clients don’t want to require an internet connection to access it. The topic got me thinking about a report I did in college on video games. In it, I discussed the benefits video games have on human development, learning and briefly touched on whether or not I believe they cause violent behavior in users. (Which I don’t)

If you are not an avid gamer, or perhaps even if you are, you may not realize the amount of learning that one does while interacting with the game. Games have come a long way since pong. The mere fact that instruction manuals and game guides can be hundreds of pages long is evidence that the user will need to learn a great deal to complete the game. This begs the question, why is it so a player will pick up and continue through a challenging and often frustrating game despite the excessive amounts of learning it may take to complete? What makes this type of learning so different from the learning we experience in other areas of life?

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As a relative rookie to the e-Learning scene (about a year and a half professionally with a small amount of research done in college), and trying to write my first post on the subject, I was struggling for a topic. Maybe this is a sign that I should keep this blog about Flash and leave it at that. Pushing forward, I thought back to my first experiences with e-Learning… Math Blasters back in 4th grade… sitting infront of a tiny 8 color computer screen, trying to click (blast) the correct number to simple math equations. It was always a treat to get to use the computer lab.

Today at work I wrote a nifty little piece of code that I couldn’t believe we hadn’t written before… To center a MovieClip on a point regardless of its registration point. Until now we had never really needed a MovieClip to center like this, and always justified things to 0,0. I’m creating an application that creates a group of movieclips in a spiral formation from the center of 0,0. This meant that I would have to figure out a way to center it to its absolute center, not just to 0,0. I added the following function to my AdvancedMovieClip class (which I’ll upload eventually).

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DelegatePlus is a class which is almost exactly like the Delegate class except you can pass parameters with the function.

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I’ve been experience an unusual problem when working with singleton classes in the Flash IDE. When testing a movie and using the simulate download my singletons aren’t initalized corrected. The problem occurs because you can’t immiedetly test using simulate download, you first have to test the movie and then run it again to start the simulated download. It appears that the Flash IDE doesn’t reinstantiate static variables (like the ones used in singletons) and thus getInstance will return the singleton object created on the first test without actually reinstantiating the class. Its as if it returns an empty object. I have yet to find an acceptable solution for this, but have found a workaround.

I usually know which object will create the singleton class first, so by adding a boolean variable to the getInstance function I can tell it to call an init function regardless of whether or not you ran it in the intial test movie or the simulated download afterwords.

class com.dcholth.singleton.MySettings {
private static var __uniqueInstance:MySettings;

private var __myWebsite:String;
private var __myName:String;

private var __numberOfMySettings;

private function MySettings(){
init();
}

private function init(){
trace("MySettings Created");
__myWebsite = "http://www.dcholth.com/blog";
__myName = "D.C. Holth";

}

// Delete the else if when using in your final version in production
        public static function getInstance(firstInit:Boolean):MySettings{
if(__uniqueInstance == undefined){
__uniqueInstance = new MySettings;
} else if(firstInit){
init();
}
return __uniqueInstance;
}
}

Now when when the first MySettings object is being created I pass the the true parameter with the getInstance() function it will run the initialization functions. It is important that init is declared as private and that the ‘else if’ is removed from the getInstance when using in a production environment or you may experience problems.