Francis Cheng

Yesterday I heard about the new Blueprint Eclipse plug-in from the announcement on the Flex Doc Team's blog. I was intrigued by the convenience it promises, so I installed it and gave it a spin. The idea of having code samples just a click or key-press away got me pretty excited, because for me at least, seeing actual code is a critical step for me in learning how to use a particular class or interface.

Installation was pretty straightforward. It's been a while since I've installed an Eclipse plug-in, so I followed the Blueprint installation instructions pretty carefully.

Continue reading "Project Blueprint, code samples a click away" »

Posted by Francis Cheng at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may have heard of the new Text Layout Framework, an ActionScript 3.0 component library that is based on the flash.text.engine package available in Flash Player 10. It first appeared on Adobe Labs last November.

At that time, we posted an overview of the framework that described the library as it existed last fall. Well the engineers have been hard at work improving the framework and have made quite a few changes to it. In fact, there have been enough changes that a new overview would be in order. As it turns out, I've been working on updating the overview, and have a draft of it ready for review. As it is a draft, I'm giving it an expiration date a week out from now, and will replace it with a new draft at that point if there are enough comments and suggestions to warrant a new version.

Continue reading "Text Layout Framework Overview Redux" »

Posted by Francis Cheng at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm back. I won't bore you with my personal travails, but will instead skip right to what I've been working on lately. Most recently, I've been documenting the new Text Layout Framework, which provides an easy way to take advantage of the immense power of the flash.text.engine package available in Flash Player 10.

Going forward, I'll be splitting my time between the Text Layout Framework and the creation of an updated version of the ActionScript 3.0 Language Specification.

Continue reading "What I'm working on these days" »

Posted by Francis Cheng at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Colin Moock blogged today about an interesting little ActionScript 3.0 string concatentation gotcha. I'll try to summarize what he said, but I encourage you to read his post and come back for my explanation.

The issue is that the following code:

generates the following error message:

Colin calls the error message misleading, and I can see why it seems so, but I'm going to argue that the message is accurate, even if it is obscure.

Continue reading "moockblog String Concatenation Error Explained" »

Posted by Francis Cheng at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Yesterday, Colin Moock published an interesting article about nine problems he sees with ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9. Most of the charges he makes are specific to the Flash CS3 authoring environment, and the general theme is that ActionScript 3.0 and its implementation in Flash CS3 makes the development process more difficult than it should be for users without significant programming backgrounds.

Continue reading "Colin Moock's Charges Against ActionScript 3.0" »

Posted by Francis Cheng at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)