senocular.com

I've recently posted two new tutorial pages with descriptions of some common Flash Player-related errors and what can be done to fix or handle them. There's only a few errors on there now, but as I run into people finding more (especially many times over), I'll be adding to the list. The two pages are separated into runtime errors and compiler errors.

• Flash Player Runtime Errors and How to Fix Them
• Flash Player Compiler Errors and How to Fix Them

If you hadn't noticed, the ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform, which allows you to dynamically filter APIs by frameworks and platform, is now out of beta. And what's more exciting, the old Flash authoring go URL, http://adobe.com/go/as3lr now points to it! Sorry authoring APIs. You no longer have a dedicated go URL, but the full ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform includes you, as well as Flex, and TLF, and LiveCycle, and ColdFusion, and lions and tigers and bears - OH MY!

Where's senocular.com when you search for senocular on google? Nowhere. Because it's not listed.

senocular.com got blacklisted on Google recently because of a hacking that caused the site to violate Google's quality guidelines. This was one of a couple hackings that have occurred over the past couple of years. I only have myself to blame, including insecure source files in some demos and old projects on the site that have become easily exploitable.

Thankfully, so far, hackers have only been injecting links into the site instead of ruining content. Nevertheless, it is not tolerable. This past occurrence was an especially tricky attempt that only displayed the hacker's links when being crawled by popular search engines such as Google's.

Every time I think I've patched things up, something else ends up happening. I've finally decided to take action and wipe the site clean and restart again from scratch.

It's about time, too. The current system is running off of a flat-file database I started in college when we didn't have access to any kind of normal database for site development. And I've never been a fan of the design (also years old). I hate colored backgrounds. Blue? COME ON! Heh. I've been considering/threatening WordPress for a while now, but I might end up stripping everything down to the basics to start. Porting the existing content should be easier that way, at least. We'll see.

What does this all mean? Probably no site for a little bit, then an ugly (or "plain") site for a while after that, with some obscure parts deleted and others moved. Stay tuned.

Update: As of now, senocular.com is back up on google. I've also noticed that the post just made its way to MXNA. Good timing.

I've just added a new tutorial, Order of Operations in ActionScript, which covers, unsurprisingly, the order of operations in ActionScript. This includes topics revolving around the object life cycle, frame processing, and events for both Flash Player 9 and Flash Player 10. Yes, they are different, especially in terms of handling frames.

Have you ever noticed that you don't have to import any of the native flash classes when writing timeline code in Flash Professional? This is because they're automatically imported for you in an effort to simply basic timeline code usage. These imports are even outlined in a file called "implicitImports.xml" within Flash's configuration directory for ActionScript 3.0. Lets take a look at its contents:

One of the best things about Flash Professional (CS4 and those before it) is that you can open it up and immediately start coding with minimal syntactical overhead (class definitions, imports) to get results simply and easily. One of the worst things about it is the code editor's lack of maturity and inability to help you work with your custom APIs through code hints and auto-completion. That will change with Viper, the code name for the next version of Flash (CS5). flashmagazine has more with their coverage of FOTB09.

It's been a while, but I've finally added a new tutorial. This one covers what could essentially be threading in AS3 - taking synchronous operations and breaking them up to be executed in segments over multiple frames, primarily for the purpose of preventing player lockup (allowing rendering while processing).

• Asynchronous ActionScript Execution

I recently ported (most of) a small to medium sized Flash-based application from ActionScript 3.0 to ActionScript 2.0 - yes, that's going down not up - and I thought I'd share some insight gained from that experience.

For the longest time I've been using a "go" URL to quickly access the Flex ActionScript 3.0 language reference:
http://adobe.com/go/AS3LR
This is a redirect for:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/index.html
... or whatever is the most up-to-date language reference for Flex currently. Only today did I discover there's one for the Flash CS4 (or most up-to-date version of the Flash authoring tool) language reference. And that URL is?:
http://adobe.com/go/as3lr
That's right, the same thing in lowercase! This is, currently, a redirect for:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/