This post describes how to filter data for use with any component that displays hierarchical data, such as the Tree, AdvancedDataGrid, or your own custom component. For the purpose of the post I’ll just consider the Tree, but the same technique applies to the others. Background Suppose I have constructed a “Library” of Folder and Leaf nodes and I want to display that in a Tree. Each Folder node has an ArrayCollection called “children” which contains any child Folders and/or Leaf nodes....

Console games, popular. Flash (browser) games, popular. Combining the two, winning combination. Flash games have made the leap to consoles several times, from full on ports like Alien Hominid, to Xbox live arcade titles, to Wii browser games. But one idea from Rockstar (creators of GTA), sees gamers laundering money and unlocking stuff for their Nintendo DS copy of GTA: Chinatown Wars. Another sign of convergence perhaps, where data and services related to a product are made available remotely, or even in the Cloud....

Today I had a bit of a nightmare with regards to loading SWFs into AIR. Specifically, I am loading my SWFs from somewhere inside app-storage://, and those SWFs use Flash CS4 UI components. These components extend UIComponent which accesses the stage object. When you attempt to load and add this child SWF to the display list of your AIR app, it generates a SecurityErrorEvent which stops things, dead. The AIR app owns the stage object, there is only one Stage instance, and depending on what security sandbox the content SWF is loaded into, the child SWF is not allowed access to that stage because it could run amok....

I rarely blog about gaming, probably because I rarely game, but occasionally something is so extraordinary it grabs my attention. I caught a video over at Offworld that demonstrates a new real-time strategy game. The twist is that you can both view and interact with the events in the past, present and future (interacting in the past costing a new type of resource). Here’s the video, it may appear confusing at first but he is demonstrating advanced tactics....

Maybe a sensational headline, but it’s no secret in previous posts I have said that I’d “bet the farm” on subscription based services completely overthrowing traditional media consumption in the next few years so this service has really caught my attention. One of the earliest mainstream examples of this kind of unlimited subscription media probably being Nokia Comes with Music, some years ago now. Well, music is one thing, and video took a little longer, but Netflix, XBox and AppleTV show that’s well and truly “solved”, but what about gaming?...

Yesterday, to much excitement, Microsoft released Silverlight 3 beta, and gave a run-down on the new features at the MIX09 conference. It has been a very long time since I first looked at Silverlight (here’s my post on a pre 1.0 early build I got to use over in Redmond), and I’ve used both Silverlight and WPF since (which will eventually be two in the same IMHO), one app for the BBC was demo’d at the MIX07 keynote, so I’m fairly familiar with the offering and how it compares....

There are now two types of font embedding available to both Flash (CS4) and Flex 3 and 4. These are DefineFont3 (classic), and DefineFont4 (supporting CFF and the new text engine.) In Flash, Flex 2 and 3 you’d traditionally embed fonts for use in the TextField class, whether that’s a vanilla TextField, or a component that uses the TextField class and has been set to use embedded fonts. This is DefineFont3 embedding....

Via Andrew Shorten, Flex Builder Professional is free to students. You can sign up for a copy here. Edit: Also free to those unemployed, limited time only on this one I would think.

I don’t have enough time right now to go into too much detail so I’m afraid this post will just consist of pointers and no real code samples, but I wanted to say that bullet points, although technically un-supported in the Text Layout Framework right now (in terms of <li> tags), are possible. Text alignment is already supported, and you can build a pretty solid text editor that uses these, as well as all the kinds of formatting you’d expect from colour to font weight....

Short and sweet, if you want to know the Unicode ranges for various glyphs, such as Latin 1, Cyrillic and so on, open up flash-unicode-table.xml from your “Flex SDK/frameworks/” directory. You’ll find everything listed, and it’s a good way to save on font size.