Danny Miller wrote a great little class called EventManager. If used properly it keeps track of event listeners and their relationship to objects, easing a major pain point in AS3. Working at an ad agency it is hard to expect freelancers who are killer at scripting animation to create cleanup code for all of their clips. I have tried a lot of strategies for getting loaded clips to load and remove properly but I feel like it has thus far required a lot of micromanagement. Being able to pass off this class as part of the shared shell package removes all of that. I can just request that all event listeners are added via the manager, then cleanup can stay in the shell freeing up phone calls and giant error logs in the debug player.

Just set up the wordpress app on my iphone. Typing on the small keypad is a little slow, but it is a nice option to be able to just jot a bit down on the bus ride home from work. Setting everything up was 0 hassle and the interface is perfectly streamlined. It would be nice to see more of the web taking the iPhone approach of “simple is better”.

I just started using stumbleupon. It’s really cool. I was resistant at first because I usually can’t stand toolbars. Yahoo always trys to ram their toolbar down my throat with software installations. Stumble upon works really well though, it keeps pretty well in line with your interests and you get a pretty good range of content. I started getting all kinds of retro video game shit, javascript frameworks and really nice design samples. These are things that you just can’t find on google, doing a search for “best designer portfolios” will get you some SEOed garbage. Hopefully they stay able to keep stuff working well without getting the optimized crap.

After fiddling with AIR a little bit I decided to look at another option: zinc. This thing rocks. I had a standalone up and running in no time at all, and best of all it does not require an installer to run your swf. I really think that there is real value here. Having access to the mac shell and file system with no need for an installer is pretty darn handy, it also is probably the make or break of getting a widget on a users desktop. This will come in super handy for all kinds of things from mp3 players to rss readers.

All I did was make a little flash app that loaded an xml file and some images of all the employees at my job. Then I opened up zinc and made a new file with the .swf. There are good deal of settings but the transparent window stuff is the part that was immediately appealing. The only drawback I saw is that you only seem to be able to set transparency on mac via a color channel. That makes for only being able to have solid alpha transparency. Hit publish and you have your app up and running. This was real chore trying to achieve with AIR and CS3 although it is probably easier with Flex Builder. The tutorial I saw used stylesheets.

Was wrestling around with papervision and issues with the clickable objects not updating in the interactive scene manager unless the mouse was moved. Did some internet searching…. DOH! There’s a newer nicer version of papervision3d called great white. I kinda thought that folder was just an example of how to build their frontpage ocean scene. This solves a bunch of issues with interactivity and seems faster. If you grab the latest subversion release you’ll notice it in the branches folder under great white. There’s alot an effects folder that is looking kinda interesting.