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Seven Symptoms of Poor Application Architecture
Recently I was asked to service a legacy application that suffered from a disproportionate amount of architecture faults. After having serviced the application for a while and having had several issues take many times longer than estimated, through my frustration, I thought I would share the basic architectural factors that led to such problematic implementation so that new developers can understand and avoid these mistakes for future applications.
Posted in Architecture, Software Design Comments closed
Eclipse bug: To install or update plugins you must quit flash builder or run with administrator privileges
I downloaded Flash Builder 4 standard edition standalone the other day but ran into the following error when trying to install Subclipse for working with SVN. Upon selecting Help>Install New Software I am greeted with the following dialog:
To install or update plugins you must quit flash builder or run with administrator privileges.
The problem is I [...]
Posted in Eclipse, Errors, Flash Builder Comments closed
How to calculate the intersection of two circles mathematically in Actionscript.
A client of mine wanted to create an interactive teacher animation that pointed to a point on a chart that could be calculated as the result of a user quiz. They were stuck though as creating a realistic elbow movement that points to the desired point from a programmatic perspective is actually harder than it [...]
Posted in Actionscript, Flash, Game development, Scripted Animation Comments closed
What is Flex?
I suppose sometimes as a Flex or Flash developer you are so immersed in the whole SWF ecosystem that occasionally you get asked a question that should be easy to answer but becomes difficult to explain to someone without a technical perspective.
The other day I was preparing a spec and getting a colleague to double [...]
Posted in Actionscript, Flash, Flex Comments closed
10 things any digital agency must do to work effectively
I just started working part time at a new small digital agency the other day and I noticed there were several things that I would normally take for granted that simply were not set up in this agency so I thought today I would share my thoughts on the things every leading agency needs to [...]
Posted in Efficiency, Process Comments closed
Introduction to collision detection & 2D physics
This is an introductory tutorial on collision detection and physics. Creating 2D physics is often daunting to the beginner flash programmer but as you will soon see it is really not that hard so long as you break everything down into small steps. Here we are going to create a world and populate it with [...]
Posted in Actionscript, Flash, Game development, Scripted Animation Tagged Physics, Scripted Animation Comments closed
Bash Scripting a new SVN Repository with Plesk API
I have recently found myself trying to automate setting up SVN repositories for my projects via shell scripts and thought I would share how I did it. I needed a script that would create a new SVN repository linked to a global user and password file. Since I was already using plesk I needed it [...]
Firefox Search Plugin Localization
Are you also living in a forreign country and want your firefox search results to return in english?
Alter the Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml simply so that all the URLs within the XML file point to www.google.co.uk!!
This has been driving me crazy and is so easy to fix!
Apache Virtual Hosts iTunes and cant connect to port 0.0.0.0:80
I recently attempted to install Apache webserver for local development and had a tough time getting it to start as it couldnt connect to port 80 on localhost. I found out that the problem was iTunes and all the stupid services it installs. somehow iTunes had taken over my port 80 on 127.0.0.1. so before [...]
Organising your Data Access Layer in an AIR Flex Application