At a recent FlashCodersNY meeting where the discussion centered around the subject of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern, it struck me that a lot of Flash developers, especially those coming from design backgrounds, did not see the value in using the MVC design pattern.

Well, I’m not here to make the case for using MVC but if you have spent enough time struggling with structuring an application so that it’s clearly represented by a set of well-defined relationships and responsibilities, you would’ve likely tried to implement some kind of MVC pattern. Now, some design pattern is certainly better none. Trouble is, every developer has his or her own approach to MVC. When a team of developers are working on the same project, things can get confusing pretty quickly if there are no common standards to adhere to. (more…)

Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to rely heavily on FDT for my Actionscript development work. An excellent plugin for the Eclipse IDE, FDT provides developers with a rich set of editing and refactoring tools unavailable in the Flash IDE. Back in the AS2 days, one can bypass the Flash IDE altogether and compile his or her SWF directly in FDT using the MTASC compiler. With the release of Flex Builder 2 (and now 3), one can compile AS3 projects directly using the Flex SDK.

Now, if you’re a fan of FDT, there’s no need to worry that you need to switch over to Flex Builder for your AS3 projects. The latest version of FDT (ver. 3), provides a way to compile your AS3 projects using the open source Flex SDK via the fcsh script. Instructions for doing so are available on the FDT forums. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to do so step-by-step. (more…)

I recently started looking into using PureMVC for our Flash projects at work. While the project site has plenty of great demos for one to download and examine, there aren’t enough tutorials out there that show step-by-step, how to start building an application using the framework. Fortunately, my friends over at 9M Media have put together an excellent series of articles on PureMVC to help get you started. Check it out for yourselves. (more…)

Recently, in a project for a client where we needed to make the application ADA compliant ie. keyboard accessible, we damn nearly pulled our hair out trying to figure out why, in spite of the fact that every button had been assigned an unique tabIndex value, we were still unable to tab to it. Turned out that the “tabChildren” property of the parent clip and its parent and so forth, all had to be set to “true”. I had thought that that was only necessary if one wanted the tabIndex to be automatically assigned to a particular movieclip’s child clips. Contrary to Adobe’s documentation, this turns out not to be the case. Very strange indeed.

Adobe finally released a version of the debug Flash Player that works on the Intel Macs. Here’s how you can use the debugger with Sephiroth’s Flash Tracer plugin for Firefox to view your trace outputs in Firefox. (more…)