This week has been pretty slow, but I recently had a reader email me his answer to my twitter critter riddle and thought it was a funny yet cheesy ripoff of the woodchuck riddle answer…

Riddle: How many tweets could a critter twitter if a critter could twitter tweets?

Answer: A critter would twitter as much tweets as a critter could twitter if a critter could twitter tweets.

What do you think? Do you have a better answer?

I have been tinkering with haXe a bit more lately trying to get a good handle on how it works on a lower level and seeing just how much faster I can get it to go versus AS3. I hit a couple strange haXe syntax issues like why the heck I can’t declare local class properties with default values. Aside from this, I’m getting used to the language. I implemented the below particle system using a perlinNoise technique to generate motion paths, implemented color sorting with bitwise operators, and used some advaced features like inlining and generics. On my machine, the final SWF uses less than 10% of my processor which is about 4-5% faster than a similar AS3 counterpart. This is not much to write home about, but Flash is always lacking in the performance area so any speed improvements are welcome!

In case you missed it, there was recently an excellent article posted that poses the question if philosophers lived today and had to choose a programming language- what would it be? I found this article rather profound, and it does illustrate that programming styles are more than just syntax differences but whole philosophy shifts. http://developeronline.blogspot.com/2009/04/if-philosophers-were-programmers.html

Scarygirl is now live! This Flash game has same amazing illustration art going on (also on the website) and is filled with creative concepts. This is very much worth your time to come check out!
http://scarygirl.com/

Below are a couple good articles on why listening to negativity or causing it even when you are in the right has little benefits and is usually a waste of time. Thinking positive even when you are wronged will have the best long term results.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/ignore-your-critics.html
http://onflash.org/ted/2009/03/positives-and-negatives.php

How many tweets could a critter twitter if a critter could twitter tweets?

…these are the things I come up with when I have too much time.

In case you missed the news over the holidays, a new version of FlashDevelop was released. FlashDevelop has evolved over a number of years and has proven itself as an invaluable tool to Actionscript development. There is so much polish on this application that it outperforms Flex Builder when it comes to many of the basic tasks of code writing and navigation in my opinion.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4041

Changes:

* Live syntax errors highlighting (AS3).
* The editor font can now be defined in the settings.
* Automatic type selection after “new” with typed vars.
* Explorer shell menu has been added to “Files” and “Project” panels.
* Smart contextual event type completion, if declared with Event() directive.
* You can double-click on a class when exploring a library SWC to see the class model.
* Completion automatically adapts to the project’s Flash Player target version (FP9, FP10, AIR).
* External SWC’s (outside of the project tree) now appear like external classpaths.
* Updated MXML completion, now with effects attributes.

+ Lots of bug fixes and other small improvements.

If you look closely, the order of the color are the same except for the bottom-right blue that is used instead for the center color of the Chrome logo. This begs the questions… was this truly coincidental or is there a subliminal message in the reasoning Google decided to use a reminiscent design from the Siman game.

Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/gacl

On Tuesday, September 23, 2008, Adobe will be releasing details on the upcoming Adobe Creative Suite 4… however, some leaked information on the new Flash package has been released already to the public. Correct me if I am wrong, but I have yet to hear that Flash CS3 will support export to Flash Player 10 which leads me to believe they are going to keep that option for Flash CS4 exclusively. On the other hand, at least with Flex 3 one could use the new SDK to compile out to the new version.

New features

• Typed arrays (vectors)
• 64-bit support
• “Mobile convergence”
• Hydra to use the GPU (if available)
• New ‘object-based’ tween model
• IK (Inverse Kinematics) Tweens

Link: http://www.flashcs4.com/

TweenMax patch notes and updates listed below:
Note: I have bold some of the cool API additions made.

* auto overwriting – You’ll probably never have to type “overwrite:false” again! TweenMax automatically includes all the capabilities in the new OverwriteManager class. By default, only overlapping properties in other tweens of the same object are overwritten. There are actually 4 options for overwriting now. Read more below.
* setDestination() – Change destination values anytime. For example:

* timeScale - Slow down or speed up a tween anytime. Half-speed would be 0.5, double-speed would be 2, etc.
* reverse() – Not only does reverse() cause the tween to return to its starting values, it optionally adjusts the duration and the easing equation to look fluid (instead of simply swapping the start/end values in the tween which can cause abrupt jerking).
* restart() – ‘Nuf said.
* killProperties() – When tweening multiple properties, you can selectively kill individual properties of a TweenMax tween.
* yoyo – To make the tween continuously loop backwards and forwards like a yoyo, set this to true.
* loop – To make the tween continuously loop itself, set this to true.

Link: http://blog.greensock.com/tweenmaxas3/

Scheduled for 2009, Flex 4 intrudes some concepts like two-way Binding, skin-able video component, better performance, and a whole new way of skinning any component in general:

http://flexorg.wip3.adobe.com/gumbo/gumboplan.htm