Code Life

Webp is a really well compressed image format. About half the filesize from jpeg while looking the same. 

Unfortunately there is no native support in flash player yet, but here is a little workaround that seams to work:

There is no default way to truncate (shorten) a textfield in a good looking way in Flash. It is possible to set the width of course, but that could cut a character in half. 

So, I have put together a small script that truncates a textfield, and it even woks with complex HTML text if you want to correctly truncate links without destroying the tags.

private function squeezeText(field:TextField, txt:String, maxWidth=null, htmlWrapper:String=null){

if(!maxWidth) maxWidth=field.width

if(!fit(txt)){

var c=txt.length

var trunk=txt

while (fit(trunk)==false && c>1){

c--

trunk=txt.substr(0, c)+"..."

}

}

function fit(testString:String){

if(htmlWrapper){

field.htmlText=htmlWrapper.split("[squeezeContent]").join(testString)

}else{

field.text=testString

}

return (field.textWidth<maxWidth)

}

}

Here is an example of how to use it:

squeezeText(myTextField, "Link to my website that is way too long", 200, "<a href='http://www.codelife.tumblr.com'>[squeezeContent]</a>")

Would result in something like:

AutoDesk 123D.

Did you know how easy it is to get a slick 2D dock in OSX instead of that pushy mirror?

Just type this in the terminal and hit enter:

Now I am impressed by the development of the Stage 3D scene. A few big players are now providing libraries for Stage 3D.

I am currently working with Away 3D and that works pretty well. Their physics engine is still in alpha though and it is not really performing as I would like it to.

Alternativa 3D is another platform with Stage 3D support. I just recently turned into a free product I think which is a good thing. I haven't tried it but their demos are quite impressive. They also claim to have a 3d physics engine included.

My friends at North Kingdom are using Flare 3D for their latest project, they say its especially good for importing complex 3d models, but that Away 3D has more features. It is not for free.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me really want to get into html5 canvas programming.

I used to think that one of the things that could save flash in the future would be the emerging hardware rendered Stage 3D. After seeing this even that aspect falls flat.

I'm currently digging myself deep into my head trying to get Yahoo! BOSS v2 to work on Spezify. The big problem that I have struggled with all day is to sign my request using the HMAC-SHA1 encryption. As3CoreLib has this but I don't seam to get the right result. I get a 38 char long string instead of the 28 that seams to be what is to be used. I think itmight have something to do with base64 encoding of the result.

There is no example of doing this in Actionscript from what I can find, but I found a javascript example that I am now turning into a as3 class to see if that works better.