journal

So I came across this interesting little write up on using the command pattern in WPF, in the article is also a link to a separate article on understanding events.   If you’re not using these techniques in your Silverlight or Flash apps, you’re really missing out and you should try to learn how to use them.  Especially in the internet app world these patterns are very important for decoupling your sender and receiver.  Its good practice not to tie a button click for example directly to whatever is receiving it.  I’m glad to see this being used more in the Silverlight/WPF community

Wow is all I can say, this is just an incredible piece of software. You can check it out at http://www.photoshop.com/express/ I would love to see an api for this so you can access your images.  Anyway AWESOME JOB ADOBE!!      

Ok I always forget this so I’m gonna blog about it and hopefully it’ll stick. If you want to dynamically change the color of a movieclip using hex values use this example

var c:ColorTransform = new ColorTransform();
c.color = 0xFFFFFF;
box_mc.transform.colorTransform = c;

Wow is this some surprising news.  Flash CS4 may be moving from a binary source (aka FLA)  to a more open source format called XFL.  It sounds much like a jar file (zip) where everything is packaged into one file with a manifest or xml file that describes the content contained in the file like sounds, images, etc.  There are many, many welcome advantages to this approach.  One approach is that anyone could be able to create an swf through command line just like Flex.  Another advantage would possibly be in the editing of an image in Photoshop and not disturbing the time line or other embedded assets.  The community would be able to build better tools instead of relying on jsfl scripts.  I’m thinking serious Ant tasks here.  Anyway I am really liking this idea.  Awesome job Adobe!!

So Mix 08 is this week and the rumor mill is flying around an off line version of Silverlight much like Adobe AIR.  Technically, Silverlight 2.0 is closer to the desktop version of WPF so the possibility is there.  Ryan Stewart in this article talks about the possibility of SQLite being in an off line version which is a bit silly.  Maybe Access Lite? :)  I don’t know, but I don’t think SQLite is going to even be considered. Personally I don’t think Microsoft has put any weight behind an offline version yet.  I think they’re so busy trying to catch up to Flash/Flex and the toolsets that they’re just not ready for an off line version yet.  Probably next year, but not this one.