My world has mainly been encompassed by Flash and Actionscript. That being said though, I am always trying/learning new things. The Cocoa display hierarchy, being a Actionscript oriented person, kinda threw me for a loop, then I listened to this podcast: (Late Night Cocoa (031): NSViewController with Cathy Shive and Jonathan Dann)
And took at look at these classes:
The XS (extra special) Controllers From Cathy Shive’s Blog
Anyway, it broke it down for me like this:
NSViewController == DislayObject/Sprite/MovieClip in Actionscript 3 or MovieClip in Actionscript 2 With their linkage set to the proper class (subclass of NSViewController for Cocoa or subclass for the proper class in Actionscript)
In the case of Cocoa however, continuing on the Flash/Actionscript terminlogy, the linkage is set in the NIB/XIB in Interface Builder on the “File’s Owner”
It’s always nice, in the interactive space, when you run across someone who gets it. Kate Pendley, she she gets it. That woman has her hands in everything, you name it:
Mobile Desktop Web Applications etc, etc, etc…
If it has to do with interactive, Kate Pendley has pretty much read about it or is thinking of things to do with it. Those gears, they are always-a-turning in that girls head.
Anyway, check her out here: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/6/209/210
This is just a little something I wipped up in about an hour.
When it comes time to develop an animators/designers flash timelines typically there are elements that will be driven by code, or loaded in at runtime. Anyway, the timeline representation will be gone in the final version, translated to code. In order to aide in this translation I would always open my calculator and do a fps calculation and the multiply by some number of frames. Not super tedious or difficult, but if I was on a train of thought, it would bug me. So I wrote this little guy to help.
It’s pretty straightforward. Choose your time units (seconds or milliseconds). Next tell it your frame rate and it will tell you how many frames per millisecond flash will try to execute. Next you can either tell it how many frames you want, and it will tell you how many milliseconds, or you tell it how much time you want and it will tell you how many frames.
All time input/output will be in the units you select first.
So I have had the chance to dive into Cocoa/Objective-C a bit more lately, and as a simple project to build I created this Project Folder /Setup Application. It is very useful to me when I need to make a new project, and though setting up the folder structure may only take 2 minutes, with the use of Quicksilver (command + <space> ) and the typing of “new” I launch this app, name my project, set the folder I want, hit create and I am done. Some simple folder creation automation.
Currently, the Flash 9 Alpha does not support adding SWC’s. Which is a shame since the Cairngorm microarchitecture for Flex 2 is so nice. Since both Flash 9 and Flex 2 are Actionscript 3 based, one would think that it was possible to use Cairingorm in the flash 9 alpha. It turns out you can… You can’t use the SWC, but you can grab the com.adobe.cairngorm.* folder from the zip you download and use that. The one issue I have found is that you need to be sure to comment some lines out of: com.adobe.cairngorm.CairngormError
This project shows how to populate a NSTableView with data from an XML file. It uses NSXMLParser to parse the XML file. This builds on the previous post Populating a NSTableView.
Nutrispot.com is a Nutrition, Weight, Exercise, Blood Pressue, Blood Glucose tracker that I and 3 other friends of mine built. It’s a Flash/Flash Remoting, Ajax, MySQL, PHP driven Web Application.
Anyway it’s 100% free, so if you know anyone who would like to be healthier, but not pay for a subscription to other nutrition web related services, point them to http://www.nutrispot.com.
We all put a lot of work in on it, and continue to try and improve it when we have the time. If you would like to help out, or have any suggestions, let me know.
