Serge Jespers comes to Dublin on 11th June

Serge Jespers' Dublin talk

Posted by admin on June 5th, 2009 No Comments

OSS Barcamp, Dublin; Slides

I gave a lightening talk on Flex using the Flash Develop IDE at OSS Barcamp in Dublin at the weekend.  It was quite a challenge fitting everything into 15 minutes but I just about managed to fit a code demo in.  Here are my slides:


It was great listening to talks and speaking with people involved in technologies other than Flash Development.  Next week I plan on attending the Drupal weekend in Galway after meeting a couple of the Drupal guys on Saturday.

Posted by admin on March 30th, 2009 2 Comments

Video and subtitles using Flash: Flv, cuepoints and Actionscript 3

Stéphane Le Merre, a Flash Developer from the south of France, has written articles on his blog relating to accessibility on the Flash Platform.  This article walks the reader through how to create subtitles for a Flash Video File (flv) and references an article I wrote a few years ago over on actionscript.org.

Thanks for providing a follow up to this Stéphane.

(The article is in French by the way)

Posted by admin on March 24th, 2009 No Comments

Flash Develop and Flex Builder shortcuts comparison

I gave a presentation on Open Source Flex Development to MMUG Dublin last night and provided a shortcuts comparison between Flex Builder and Flash Develop.  It only lists the ones that I use and know about.  Feel free to mention ones that I haven't listed.


Flex Builder

Flash Develop

Description

 

 

 

Ctrl Click

F4

Jumps to class/method/property

 

Ctrl+F

Jumps to next occurrence

Ctrl+K /Ctrl+Shift+K (when text highlighted)

F3/Shift+F3

Quick find next/previous

Ctrl+F

Ctrl+H

Find and replace

Ctrl+Shift+T

Ctrl+J

Open Type dialog to jump to Class

Ctrl+O

 

Outliner

Ctrl+Shift+L

 

List of all shortcuts

Ctrl+M

Alt+Shift+Enter

Full screen the panel

 

Ctrl+M

Brings up code completion

 

Ctrl+Shift+1

Context sensitive code generator

 

Ctrl+B

Snippets menu

 

Ctrl+Shift+N

Create a copy of current file

 

F1

Google context search

 

Ctrl+Shift+K

Retrieve hexadecimal from colour dialog

Ctrl+Shift+P

Ctrl+M

Jump to matching bracket

 

Ctrl+D

Duplicate line

 

Ctrl+T

Transpose lines

 

F5/Ctrl+Enter

Test movie

 

F8

Build project

 

Ctrl+Q

Comment line

 

Ctrl+Shift+B

Comment selection

Ctrl+Shift+O

 

Organise imports

 

 

 

 

Posted by admin on March 13th, 2009 2 Comments

Thinking about version control?

I've recently decided to take the bull by the horns and bring a sense of order to my personal projects by using some form of version control.  My personal projects don't normally involve other developers so you might be asking why bother with source control?  Well, for several reasons:

  1. Having a single respository to act as a centralised location for source code retrieval - Although there is only one of me I happen to have several machines (work laptop, personal laptop, PC, etc..) and I move around a lot.  A USB key is very useful for taking the latest files with me but I have to be very disciplined or else this system will break down and I'll end up with multiple versions spread across different machines... and this is what Subversion was designed to help with!
  2. Being able to revisit older snapshots of a codebase - this is effectively a breadcrumb-like navigation that allows me to traverse the life of a project
  3. A web-based repository provides a set up for collaboration with subcontractors when the need arises
  4. I am familiarising myself with a popular method of version control that many companies use.
  5. I am tired of using VSS at work and I am interested in using an alternative.

I did a fair amount of research and finally settled on creating a free account with Unfuddle, who provide a Subversion Hosting service.  Subversion (SVN) is an open source version control system with a client/server architecture.  Using an online service like Unfuddle removes the need for me to set up a subversion server on my web hosting package (I would have had to upgrade my hosting package to accomodate this).  I already use Tortoise SVN as a subversion client for getting source from projects on Google Code and I am going to stick with this.

Here a some links that I found useful:

Version Control for Windows Users Presentation
Subversion hosting packages
http://unfuddle.com/
http://cvsdude.com/
http://beanstalkapp.com/

Set up your own subversion server
http://www.visualsvn.com/server/

Subversion for designers

Subversion project page

SVN Book

Backing up a subversion repository on Unfuddle

Posted by admin on December 26th, 2008 2 Comments