Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

Open-source and the Flash community are both great. We share our ideas and source files freely.  How much money have we made off of someone else’s free source code or their open-source product like Red5 or PV3D? How much time have products like XRay saved us?  I bet LOTS would be the answer. Â

John Grden wants to replace his old Dell with a brand new Macbook Pro so he can continue to provide the best cross-platform open source Flash possible and he doesn’t have the funds for it. He’s taking donations and I think giving back to someone who has given thousands of hours of his free time is more than worth it.   Head over to his site and give whatever you can afford.  Every little bit helps.

http://www.rockonflash.com/blog/?p=66

Yahoo has a new revamped Flash Dev Center online and they’ve released some Flash CS3 components that we’ve wanted but Adobe didn’t put into Flash CS3.

 http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/

• Tree component
• Menu
• Tab
• Autocomplete
• Charts

A friend of mine was having problem with some ActionScript code on a frame and couldn’t figure out why part of it was working and then it just stopped working. I took a quick look at this code and immediately saw a “return” statement where it shoudn’t be. It was outside of a function and probably something that got copied-n-pasted from somewhere else.

So here is a puzzler, Flash didn’t throw an error about this return being outside of a function and I have no idea where the flow of the code would return to. I did a quick test of it in a AS3 file and got the same behavior.

Is this something Flash should be throwing an error on? If not, why?

Here is a quick code snippet:

[as]trace (“fe fi fo”);
return;
trace(“fum”);
// traces fe fi fo, but no fum

[/as]

I just happened to swing by the Dx3 conference page and saw this:

Due to unforseen circumstances, D×3 has been cancelled.

For further inquiries, please contact: registration@dx3conference.com

Wow! I had just gotten approval at work to attend this conference too. Maybe we’ll find out more in the next few days. I hope they re-schedule because the conference looked awesome and had all the right people and topics that mattered to me.

Get it while its hot. Apollo is now out in the wild.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

Guess I know where my time will be spent tomorrow at work.