inane ramblings of a geek » programming

a bite isn’t what it used to be

admin — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:17:43 +0000

So recently I’ve been learning this new programming language, FLEX, and have been very impressed with how powerful it is. That is to say, how much power it takes to run the goddamn thing. The benefits of having this rich environment are completely subsidized by todays computer climate. My app which is only one page is a staggering .25 mb, and while you are correct in asserting that this is .000125 of todays average computer memory, it’s also correct to say that it is 250,000 bites.

When once there was a need for programmers to save every bit of memory, now concern for cpu performane is pushed aside for todays new bottleneck. Bandwidth. Even that isn’t much of a hindrance with today’s willy-nilly use of broadband with all this ’streaming’.

I guess the point of this is, ‘media’, in all of it’s thousands of meanings, is changing so rapidly right now that no one can keep up. I’m excited to see what awaits us, and also terrified to watch people blunder about without a clue trying to make money off of out-dated technology.

If you’re still reading, buy nintendo stocks!

another update

admin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:22:22 +0000

just a quick update, trying to keep a schedule of some sorts (ie. put something up once a day sporatically)

i’ve been trying to get a drag and drop menu to work but the problem is I can hard-code it no problem, but that is very, very cumbersome and since flex doesn’t support CSS, only SS (properties of the parent don’t cascade down to the children yet) to change it is just as clumsy.

currently everything is working but I haven’t tried to add the dragEvent properties to an object dynamically created at runtime and added via actionscript… if I can figure out how to do that, the elegant solution has arisen easily… if not, i have a lot of research//haxing to do

if you’re still reading, wish me luck! if not, then go suck a lemon

deep linking in flex

admin — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:23:40 +0000

So I was looking into deep-linking, which is the practice of getting flash files to use the browser back button so that users feel comfortable navigating the app. Most of the time, hitting the back button will just go back to the last ‘page’ viewed and then when the ‘forward’ button is hit your dumped back at the beginning of whatever it is the flash was directing you to do.

Well, with deep linking, the url actually changes while the app. just keeps going (using fake #anchors). Now this means that for every single goddamn ’state’ you now have to program in a parser to take in the url and use that as the control for what state is being displayed, but looking at it now that really doesn’t seem like a bad idea. You can just throw a user halfway through a process, or deny them access to parts, but what I thought was really interesting was the ability to ‘re-use’ code…

Instead of including a file in multiple spots, just send the user to the same goddamn state! then use the URL to decide where the page will lead to next. This I assume will come in handy at some point… I hope…