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…)

Adobe announced H.264 support in the latest update of Flash Player 9, officially sparking off speculations of impending iPhone support for Flash (alas!). More details can be found in Adobe’s press announcement.

Download the latest Flash Player update and check out this sample video which my friend Colin has kindly uploaded.

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…)

Today, I played around with Actionscript 3 and the Flash 9 AS3 Preview release. Turns out that the AS3 Preview currently does not support the Intel-based Macs. When you try to compile, or export as one used to say, you get an error message, “Error initializing java runtime environment. You may need to reinstall flash?” The Flash IDE then crashes. According to Adobe, they have no plans to offer any Intel-based Mac support for the preview releases. I guess we’ll just have to wait for the official release of Flash CS3 to see the new Flash 9 IDE in action on an Intel-Mac. With the increasing number of Flash developers switching to the Mac platform, I find this lack of support by Adobe particularly hostile and disturbing. (more…)