We just launched a new web site for ZillionTV, a start-up in the Bay Area that has a revolutionary new idea for video entertainment.
Declare your independence from one-size-fits-all television. The ZillionTV™ Service is all about putting you in control. Choose the shows you want to watch, when you want to watch them; choose the ad categories you want — or watch no ads at all. It’s your very own personal television experience.
Most people are getting pretty hyped on design patterns and frameworks these days. Most of what I have seen floating around though is the use of MVC. MVC is a really nice pattern, and I wish I had known about it when I was doing a lot of PHP work as it would have saved me at least 100 huge headaches. When I looked at rails I was really impressed with how easy it made it to change the application view and data as two very isolated entities. Now there are tons of frameworks available for flash that use this pattern. PureMVC and Cairngorm are both really nice options that encourage loose coupling. If your project is big, or has multiple developers involved than using one of these frameworks is going to be the way to go. Your application will be scalable and multiple people can pick out their own parts to work on without messing with the others. This is flash though, and a lot of times you are not building something this big.
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Automated Document Factory (ADF) is one of the solutions that InfoPrint offers. ADF provides a fully automated system that optimizes output productivity, postal optimization, and mailroom integrity in the production process, saving customers time and money. The ADF solution needed to be explained in an engaging and interesting way with great detail. Ogilvy recommended an interactive demo with 3D elements to create a compelling demonstration of the ADF solution, with the customer able to choose from three different information streams. The ADF demo was translated into other languages for global use and was well received.
“Visible” works a little differently in as3. Seems that it disables button actions and turns the alpha to 0, but keeps the item as part of the display list. This means that old tricks of turning things visible = false then getting the parent size do not work correctly anymore. At first this was frustrating until I realized that removing an object from the display list is much more clear and effective.
Here’s a slightly different way of thinking:
package{
import flash.display.*;
public class SomeObject extends Sprite{
public function SomeObject(){
super();
}
/**
* Will add and remove the child object from the sprite if needed.
* @param targetChild The child to add or remove.
* @param isVisible Add or remove it. Default is true.
*/
public function setChildVisibility(targetChild:DisplayObject,
isVisible:Boolean = true):void{
if(isVisible){
if( !contains(targetChild) ){
addChild(targetChild);
}
}else{
if( contains(targetChild) ){
removeChild(targetChild);
}
}
}
}
}
As usual a tad bit more code, but a lot clearer about what results we want. The hardest part is the transition in a production environment where all the old shortcuts just don’t work anymore.
