Forest and the Trees » Flash

PatientsLikeMe (where I work)

Doug — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:32:17 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while. But, looks like infosthetics beat me to it. I’ve been working at PatientsLikeMe for about a year – first consulting and now full time. PatientsLikeMe is a social media site for people w/ serious diseases. There are currently eight main disease communities: ALS, Epilepsy, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue System, HIV/AIDS, Mood Conditions (Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, OCD, PTSD), MS, Parkinson’s, and Organ Transplants. I’m making charts. It’s awesome. I really believe we’re making a difference in people’s lives and contributing to medical discovery. Please take a look at the very nice infosthetics post about us to learn more. I’ll try to start posting more about what we’re doing soon.

Flash Builder 4 DataVisualization Update

Doug — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:53:01 +0000

Just saw this post from Matt Chotin. Looks like no big changes to the Flex Charts, which is a bummer. However, I also came across this post (easy axis inversion in 4), which leads me to believe some changes have been made. I’d love to see a complete list of improvements, but, can’t seem to find anything. I will buy you a beer at the next beerfug, if you know of such a list. (I also promise to finally get the beerfug blog up and running before the next meeting. Blink tags are only funny for maybe 2 months.)

[UPDATE]
Here are some more links w/ info on charts.
Render Direction property on Pie Charts
More on the reversing axis direction.
Info on new filter functions for chart items.

Thanks to Sangavi for the links.

Crime Spotting

Doug — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:57:18 +0000

Oakland Crime Spotting time selector is great.

Flash on Tap

Doug — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:27:47 +0000

UPDATE: Flash on Tap has been postponed to May 2009. It will now be even more awesome!

I’ll be speaking at Flash on Tap this October 7-9 in Boston. This should be a great conference: Flash + Beer = Nothing to Fear? Or something. Anyway, the speaker line up is top notch. I’m pretty psyched to be included in such an impressive group. My topic is Five Minute Design Patterns. Description below…

Screw eight minute abbs. We’ll be learning a new design pattern every five minutes in this high-impact non-aerobic session. That’s ten whole patterns: Adapter, Template, Singleton, Factory, Strategy, Facade, Iterator, Command, Bridge, and Composite. Why so many in so little time? Because patterns are used for many things, but, mostly they are used to impress other developers. So volume counts. “Composite your tree structure!”; “Facade those classes!”; “UML your bridge!”; and “Iterate this!” are just some things you might say after you’ve paid a little bit of attention during this session. Feel the burn!

We’ll see if the preso works (I think it will be fun), but, hey, if it doesn’t, what do you care? You get to drink beer.

Google Data Viz API

Doug — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:14:48 +0000

Google has released a data visualization API. Some of it is Flash – specifically the code they got when they purchased Gap Minder.

Update: Infosthetics has a good post about this as well.

Election Update

Doug — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:48:31 +0000

Entered the latest state info from CNN. Again, I can’t figure this data out: Is it wrong? (state totals don’t add up to overall totals) Is it sloppy? (Texas 12 superdelegates, but, 12 to Clinton and 9 to Obama) Well, it’s updated anyway. I changed the colors a bit – don’t love them, but, at least Clinton and Obama colors are consistent.

Also – the source is a mess, but, if anyone’s interested – here’s the xml file adn the xsd. If you make a chart, please send me an email.

Dashboard here.

AS4, ES4

Doug — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:55:23 +0000

Colin Moock posted his “What’s new in ECMA Script 4” lecture. Looks great. Personally, I can’t wait for array types and overloaded methods. I guess there’s no guarantee that Flash will support all the new functionality, but that would be my guess.

Official (40p) pdf of the ECMA spec here.

toXMLString

Doug — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:01:34 +0000

File this under either RTFM or “can I get that hour of my life back”, maybe both. To trace xml that is simple (e.g., one node), you need to use toXMLString.

public var myXML:XML =

public function init(): void {
trace(myXML);
trace(‘*************@mID_n==2**************’);
trace(myXML.item.(@id==2));//traces 2 nodes
trace(‘************@mID_n==1***************’);
trace(myXML.item.(@id==1));//traces nothing
trace(‘***************************’);
trace(myXML.item.(@id==1).toXMLString());//traces the node
}

For Each Is Fastest

Doug — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:35:41 +0000

I was doing some coding where optimization really mattered and made a little loop test. The ‘for each’ loop is the fastest – even when you need an index.

Also of note, the debug player has ‘incrementing while’ as faster than the ‘do while.’ And both as faster than ‘for each with counter.’ There is a huge difference between the performance of the debug and the release player in Flex. (Using the Flex Beta 3 Release 3 here.) Check out my friend James’ test for more info on the diffs. He has a lot of benchmarking around typing vars here. Those posts completely refute some earlier, widely read, posts that suggested you should never use int. Lesson here is, make sure you test performance with a version published for release. Unfortunately, that means you can’t trust trace statements for your benchmarking. You need to put your time displays in a text field.

Also, I did some tests, and it appears that ‘for each’ preserves order – which is obviously very important to know. If you have found different, please post a comment. Example here. View source enabled.

Physics Engine

Doug — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:05:55 +0000

This looks pretty cool. Box2DAs3 Physics Engine.

(via polygonal labs)

Other physics engines:

APE

Motor Physics