Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Update: I’ve added a nice little example below and all the code is up on Github.
So, I’ve been working on a simple tool that outlines how easy it is to upload a video to YouTube through your own web application.
Before you read this tutorial, it’s worth going through the YouTube GData API.
Now you may be asking yourself: “why would anyone need this?”, well think about this scenario:
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Tags: Actionscript 3, auth, CSS, gadget, html, igoogle, JavaScript, mxml, upload, video, widget, xhtml, XML, youtube
Posted in APIs, Actionscript 3, CSS, Development, JavaScript, XML |
2 Comments »
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
I’ve been working in Flex a lot recently and have rediscovered why coding with Flex is so great. Not only is it really fast to create prototypes, but styling is a doddle too. Anyone can use it!
But there will be times when the Halo skin doesn’t quite cut it and no matter how much CSS styling you use, you can’t make it look like you really want it to. So this is where skinning is so important.
In this series of posts, I’m going to cover different components that I’ve skinned, and if there’s enough demand for others, I’ll skin them too!
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Tags: Actionscript 3, component, CSS, Flash, flashide, flex, halo, hslider, ide, Illustrator, movieclip, mxml, Photoshop, scale9grid, scaleobject, skin, skinning, slider
Posted in APIs, Actionscript 3, CSS, Design, Development, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop |
6 Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2009
So recently I’ve been playing around with GZIP compression on Apache and PHP to see how fast I can get my assets to load. Now I’ve written a post already on how to compress sites with GZIP.
Now I’ve taken my script to a new level, that is the asset loader script that compresses text-based assets using GZIP. I’m not using any sort of code compressor on the assets, yet, as I’ve already compressed the scripts using YUI. More importantly, I’ve now added the ability for me to cache a number of files into one rather than loading several, as we all know: less HTTP request = more fun.
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Tags: cache, caching, compress, compression, CSS, gzip, JavaScript, PHP, text, XML, zip
Posted in APIs, Actionscript 3, CSS, Development, JavaScript, PHP, XML |
No Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Web sites need to be fast! Recently I’ve had some time on my hands so I’ve done some tests to see which is the best solution. I’ve had a read about different ways that web sites can be sped up, from compression before you upload files to server side compression.
Whenever it comes to speeding things up, I always remember the saying that “loading data from a flat file is slow, a database is slower, but memory is the quickest”. So that means if you’ve using server-side scripting such as PHP or Python, the best thing to do is to use memory caching such as APC or MemCache.
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Tags: apache, apc, caching, compress, compression, compressor, CSS, gzip, htaccess, JavaScript, memcache, PHP, XML
Posted in CSS, Development, JavaScript, PHP, XML |
No Comments »
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
Recently I joined a debate started by the editor of Flashtuts+ regarding coding conventions. Now I’m a strong believer that if you’re going to code, you best do it right. Yet on a day to day level I still see sloppy code. Gone are the days of Actionscript 1 and 2 coding when you didn’t have to declare variable’s type or a function’s return value, but still people continue this in their coding of Actionscript 3.
The fun doesn’t stop there. I admit, when I first started coding yes I was very sloppy with my convention, but I’ve cleaned up my act, honest. With other languages such as PHP and JavaScript, you see how easy it is to just keep typing and typing and through any sort of convention out of the window. But when the client turns around as says: “Why can’t that be 3D?” you’re then going to have to go through all your sloppy code and make it 3D.
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Tags: actionscript, Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, code, coding, convention, CSS, debate, guide, JavaScript, PHP, Python, style, tutorial
Posted in Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, CSS, Development, General, JavaScript, PHP, Python |
No Comments »