ActionScript is awesome, but developing with it can be tedious. I have compiled a list of 10 resources that I use on a daily basis to help speed up development. I have purposely not included any animation, 3D or physics frameworks because there are far too many to include in a top ten list. If you have any that I didn’t include, feel free to post them. So here we go, listed in no specific order.

Monster Debugger
I’m loving this new debugger. It’s very easy to include in your code and it even has live editing! Moving that sprite over a couple pixels has never been easier.

Degrafa
I’ve been using this a lot lately. If you are doing any skinning in Flex you’re crazy if you aren’t using Degrafa.

Actionscript 3.0 TextMate Bundle
Here at BKWLD we LOVE TextMate. Although I still use Flex while developing with the Flex framework, I use TextMate for all of my Flash projects. The AS3 bundle makes Flash Development a breeze. Imagine being able to create a class file with the constructor, package declaration and custom class comments already there. At BKWLD we have taken it a step further by creating a huge list of custom snippets and templates that work with our AS3 library.

Pure MVC
While there are many great AS3 frameworks out there, this one is my choice. There are better solutions out there as far as frameworks for Flex development go, but the beauty about Pure MVC is that it is compatible with both Flash and Flex.

Flash Tracer
I use this thing all the time! It’s a Firefox add on that enables you to see all the output generated by any running flash swf, even the ones in your browser. It works great for debugging live content. Also, you get to see all the curse words that other developers have “accidentally” left in their trace calls.

Firefox Web Developer Toolbar
Every web developer who uses Firefox should have this. I mainly use it to test various screen sizes with liquid flash layouts.

Flash Player 10 Debugger
An absolute must have for any flash developer. Make sure you have the debugger version and not just the regular flash player.

Tour de Flex
This is really nice Flex component inspector that also allows you to quickly view the documentation of any component you are looking at.

Losum Ipsum Widget
Quick, randomly generated lines of lorum ispum text.

SQLite Admin
A quick and simple tool that allows you to view the structure of any SQLite database and execute queries. This is a great tool for anyone who is developing for AIR.

I’ve developed some interesting talents in the past few months.  Tarot cards, deliverable projecting, palm readings, horoscopes, traffic management, mind reading.  You know, the usual.

Surprisingly enough, though I can manage the flow of work through the agency, check on deliverables and remember countless dates and status reports, I cannot, in fact, climb into your head and replay the conversation you just had with your client pushing the project schedule back three weeks.

Please excuse me while I go reassemble the carefully monitored schedule that’s totally shot to shit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Doing research for a pitch I found the USDA National Nutrient Database.  I haven’t found an elegant API for it, but at the very least you could use curl and screen scrape what you need.  But wow, it’s deep.  A great resource for providing data for a health related site.  It looks like you can download the database whole and implement it locally.

Jeff passed this around earlier this month, showing a practical use of augmented reality that was handled very elegantly by AKQA.  This isn’t flash, but shows another huge leap for this emerging technology:

While BKWLD may be one of the most Apple/Mac centric companies I’ve worked at (only 1 guy in our Seattle office uses something other than a Mac), Microsoft has been whittling away at their next monster, Windows 7. I’ve been really impressed with how Microsoft has been handling the lead up until its release of Windows 7, namely, its free release of the Release Candidate that will work until June 2010. I decided to check it out by installing Boot Camp on my iMac at home, so I could play some good old video games on Steam.

I won’t post a full tutorial here, there are plenty a Google search away, (I ended up with the 32-bit version because of some issues with the RC on a Mac).

Windows 7’s install is much improved from Windows XP (I have never used or installed Windows Vista) it was simple, non instrusive, and smooth.

However, I got everything running great, when I rebooted back into Mac OS X, my wifi would simply not work. DHCP would simply not grab an IP address from my router no matter what I tried.

I decided that it was time to try a good ol’ Archive and Install of Mac OS X, but I was worried about the reinstall messing up all my recent work getting Boot Camp up and running. I googled for hours and could not find a definititive answer to my question, “Will Boot Camp still work after a Mac OS X Archive and Install?”

I couldn’t find any definitive answer, so I just decided to screw it all, and try it out. Reinstall worked flawlessly, my wifi was back in Mac OS X, and Windows 7 on Boot Camp still works great!

Update: You can download Windows 7 at microsoft.com.

We’re planning on using Cufón to a larger extent than we have before on our build for Gregory, which has to be localized in a number of languages.  Using a text replacer for the designed text will allow us to localize text without rendering out new gifs and pngs for every language and whenever copy changes.  Not knowing how fast Cufón could render when given a lot of text, I put a test together.  PHP renders out a bunch of random text in blocks ranging from 10 characters to 1,000,000 characters.  Then Cufón goes to task on each, in sequence.  JS tells  you how long it takes.  Try it out here, but be advised it can crash your browser.

Here are the results of my very non-scientific test:

At 100,000 characters, FF3 threw “A script is running slow, blah blah” messages.  IE7 just crashed.  Safari 4 hung in there till 1,000,000 but then it gave up.  It looks like Apple’s claims about Safari 4’s speed have some truth.  I didn’t test any of the past generation of browsers, I may go back and add them later.

It looks like Cufón works perfectly fine on a page where it’s converting a thousand characters or less.  But it shouldn’t be used to convert the majority of the body copy of a page.  That’s perfectly acceptable to me.

Campaign Monitor, who we use for our mailing list, recently put up this great post about the effectiveness of banners they ran.  They provide real numbers on conversions for each of the banners and landing pages they built.  And it’s interesting to see which ads provided the greatest conversions.  So far they’ve recovered 25% of the cost.

Check it out: Promoting your product or service with banner ads – is it worth it?

I love Photoshop. Okay, now that’s out of the way I can tell you about why I think every other web designer should consider checking out Adobe Fireworks for their next project. I realize this may be a touchy subject and that everyone is quite comfortable at the point using Photoshop and sometimes even Illustrator for web layouts. However, Fireworks is truly made for just this.

The first thing you’ll notice about Fireworks vs Photoshop is it’s ability to work with vector objects much better than Photoshop. I find this to be one of the biggest and best differences for me. This is extremely helpful when rapid prototyping projects and putting together wireframes.

I also love how Fireworks handles gradients over Photoshop. Giving you a simple handle to modify the direction and length of your gradients over the Photoshop guess and check method.

Another big deal for me is the Pages and States panels. When working on a large site it’s easy to get lost in Layers and constantly turning things on and off. With Pages you can easily setup a global layer that handles consistent elements like a primary nav, and then have a clean set of layers for each section of the site. I also find this functionality extremely helpful when brainstorming concepts and saving constant iterations through out the design process.

Another one of Fireworks big strengths is that it works very seamless into the Flash production workflow. You can copy a vector object from Fireworks and paste into Flash while retaining the vector object without having to create a bitmap, one of the first thing to wow our developers when introducing them to Fireworks for the first time.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the features in Fireworks that I use on a regular basis that improve my workflow and hopefully inspire some people to at least open it up and check it out. I think once you get used to it you’ll find it’s an amazing tool and hopefully integrate it as part of your web production process.

I’ve been doing a ton of work with the newest Zend Framework version 1.8.2 this weekend. At BKWLD, we’ve standardized on ZF for many of our sites and it’s also the base of our super-fancy BKWLD Unified CMS, so it behooves me to keep up with the latest hotness.

Since we are also always improving our standards and practices when it comes to coding and documentation, we’ve been using PHPDoc and ASDoc to create documentation for our code. I’ve found that typing out all the requires for each class can be a pain in php, so I made a quick TextMate snippet to make adding @see directives for phpdoc at the same time as the require_once directive. Here it is; simple but useful:

/**
 * @see $1
 */
require_once "${1/_/\//g}.php";$0

Add this as a “Tab Trigger” for the word “see” then just type “see” and hit tab then type your class name. It will auto fill the comment and the path to the pear-conventionally-named .php file.

Got any other useful TextMate snippets? Using something cool to document your code? Please do share!

As of lately I’ve really been meaning to explore Photoshop CS4’s 3D tools. After researching the programs new native 3D tools, they seem to be much more powerful than I had initially imagined. I also was really impressed with Adobe’s latest promotional site “Meet Dweezlbug” where artists Genevieve Gauckler and Erick Natzke created a beautiful creature using the suites new tools. The site features a brief breakdown on all the tools and techinques used such as the new native 3D tools, adjustments, 3D layers and also a bunch of new flash tools and techinques.

I love it all!

Enjoy!