Flashmech

If you’re still among the crowd who’s asking “what’s Singularity?”, you really ought to read this post.

The Singularity Web Conference is a global event taking place between the dates of October 24-26 2008, held online on their website, with renowned speakers from across all popular web technology platforms. There’s just too many web rockstars to name, so why don’t you just drop by and take a look?

I can’t wait for the list of topics that they will be speaking about! What’s great is that all sessions will be recorded and made available for all ticket holders. Very nice!

Just about an hour ago, Singularity has just started the sales for tickets! Go grab an early bird ticket at a discounted rate now~!

Great job and kudos to Team Singularity for making this possible! Finally here’s a conference where you can attend from anywhere in the world (with Internet of course! ).

If you have been following through the last few versions of Dreamweaver, you would have noticed that Dreamweaver jumped version after version without any revolutionary, ground-breaking changes. And it’s nearly understandable, since the demand for the Flash platform drives Adobe to focus and develop more and more tools based for it, making the platform the centre of their game.

With Flash, Flex, AIR, Thermo, and other legacy products like Photoshop to focus on, IMHO I felt Dreamweaver was somewhat neglected?

Even as a web developer myself, the maximum use I used to have for Dreamweaver was just to centralise my Flash movie at the centre of the html page (using tables to layout). After I picked up CSS skills, I could do this and a lot more in any text editor (e.g. FlashDevelop), with Firefox (and Firebug) being my first mate to check my latest changes. Dreamweaver no longer was of any use to me!

As CSS support increases across the various browsers, and AJAX becoming increasingly popular and amazingly easier to write (e.g. jQuery) compared to traditional JavaScript, and alternate IDEs (e.g. Aptana) springing up to compete for the same pie of business, Adobe realises that their acquired product needs a lot more attention and work.

What Dreamweaver CS4 offers is really game changing, and is making me as a web developer, excited over Dreamweaver again. Personally I’m really psyched over these 3 features:

1. It gets live preview, which uses Webkit, so you can see how your site looks like straight in the IDE (e.g. no more F12 and countless refreshes!)
2. When it’s live previewing, you can see at runtime how the generated DOM changes, and see how your design interacts with the code (e.g. no more Firebug!)
3. Code completion for JavaScript and Ajax libraries

I’m really excited with the code completion by the way. Being an entry level JavaScript coder, I find myself relying on a lot of help because of unfamiliarity with the syntax. After the code completion, if Adobe makes it as easy as the way it is to get syntax help like Flash and Flex (e.g. moving your cursor in between the code and pressing F1), I will say that Dreamweaver will become my editor of choice again.

Here is the screencast where Andre Charland caught up with Scott Fegette from the Dreamweaver product management team to get a demo of the new features (view original post).

Give Dreamweaver CS4 beta a roll today!

I’ve procrastinated a while to publish this post, because I wasn’t sure how useful it would be to the community. Hack it, I finally feel it’s important enough for all to come to know of this wonderful font that made my programming life better when chunks after chunks of code became much easier to look at.

If you’re still using Courier New, the default font for a lot of IDEs, I can certainly tell you it isn’t the best. Here’s a simple comparison of two variables:

You may or may not notice straightaway, that one of the variables has a "0"(zero) rather than an "O"(capital O) for the text "Outro". Although functionality wise it wouldn’t have cause much of a problem since it’s still a valid variable name, it’s something that I deem as very bad, since it might potentially cause bugs when I least expected it to be.

I began my search sometime around end of last year, and I’m pleased to bring your attention to Dina, which had become my favourite programming font. From the creator’s own words:

Dina is a monospace bitmap font, primarily aimed at programmers. It is relatively compact to allow a lot of code on screen, while (hopefully) clear enough to remain readable even at high resolutions.

Here’s the same comparison of the variables as above. Note how easy it is to spot the mistake now?

The full set of characters from Dina:

And finally an example of how things will look when using Dina for programming:

As the author had hoped, Dina has really allowed me to see huge chunks of codes at 8pt and yet maintains the crisp-and-clear readability. Its clean nature has also made looking for bugs less frustrating (it’s something that I find to be psychological ).

Dina is however, for Windows user only. I’m really keen to know what good programming fonts are out there for Mac users (because I’m thinking of getting myself a MacBook Pro in months to come), so it’ll really help if anyone can recommend some fonts that you have used and feel it’s great to use for programming on a mac.

Download Dina Font

Andre Charland just posted some cool information about Flex 4 (Gumbo) over at InsideRIA.

It includes a video by Ely Greenfield, an engineer from the Flex team, talking about the new way to skin components using MXML which I think is really worth checking out.

What I’m really interested to see in Flex 4 Builder is how the interface will be to aid designers to customise all these components. Will it look like the current CSS panel? Integrated with it? Whatever it is I just know things are only going to get more exciting!

Download the Flex 4 SDK and start playing with things! *w00t~!*

Objective

• Learn how to make your Papervision3D object interactive.

Prerequisite

• Skin A PV3D Plane Using BitmapFileMaterial

Files Required

• PV3D 2.0 Alpha: Great White Framework (learn how to get it)
• Tutorial Files (see folder structure)

Let’s Get Started!

From the last tutorial where I loaded an external image using BitmapFileMaterial, you should have guessed that this tutorial is next to come. *lol~* The purpose of breaking them up into 2 separate tutorials is to modularise them, just like programming.

First off, we have to edit our viewport instance in the init3D function.

viewport = new Viewport3D( 0, 0, true, true );

The fourth parameter, “interactive”, determines whether the viewport should listen for Mouse events. Since we want to make things interactive, we pass in true for it.

[UPDATE]: With thanks to Marco for pointing this out, to show the hand cursor when rolling over interactive objects, you can add the following line after you create the viewport instance.

viewport.containerSprite.buttonMode = true;

Next up, in our createPlane function, we have to change the interactive property of the material that we created for the plane to be true as well.

material.interactive = true;

To listen for the events, we will add the event listener in the addEventListeners function:

plane.addEventListener( InteractiveScene3DEvent.OBJECT_CLICK, __onPlaneClick );

(Note: Don’t forget to import the InteractiveScene3DEvent!)

To wrap things up, we have to create the new listener function __onPlaneClick, which for the purpose of this tutorial, navigates to my blog’s RSS feed.

private function __onPlaneClick ( e:InteractiveScene3DEvent ):void 
{
	navigateToURL( new URLRequest("http://feeds.feedburner.com/flashmech"), "_blank" );
}

Final Note

At this point of writing, it seems that there’s no easy way to make use of useHandCursor. From my research online, probably the best way to do that is from Papervision 2’s tutorial of Advanced Interactivity 2.

Hope the guys over at Papervision3D will add this functionality into the engine soon.