Every now and then, ActionScript 3.0 bums me out. Sometimes, when you want to do a thing seemingly straightforward, AS3 makes you drudge through a lot of monotonous boilerplate coding. For me, this is most true when creating custom events. That’s why I was so relieved to come across Robert Penner’s AS3 Signals. AS3 Signals is a faster and easier way to deal with events—particularly custom events—in AS3. I haven’t delved too deep into its capabilities but what I have experienced so far has been fantastic.
Working on a recent Flash/ActionScript 3 project, I got a chance to use an amazing library by GreenSock (the makers of arguably the best tweening engines, TweenLite and TweenMax) called TransformManager. As the name implies, TransformManager is an incredibly easy way to interactively move, scale, skew, and rotate DisplayObjects in ActionScript 3.
For me, the coolest part of TransformManager is the level of detail in the functionality, above and beyond standard moving, scaling, and rotating. Are you used to holding down shift on a control point for proportional scaling? TransformManager does that. Have that instinctual urge to press the delete button to get rid of a selected object? TransformManager does that too. Want to select multiple objects at the same time? Yup. You can also control everything programmatically. And, with a heavy set of event notifications, your app can always know exactly what TransformManager is doing.
You might experience some sticker shock at $299, but if you consider all of the time you’ll save, it’s a pretty sweet deal.
Here’s another useful little diddy for you web dudez. If you’re like me, you like to start off laying out a new web project with some sort of grid (if you aren’t like me, you really should, it makes things a lot easier), you know how annoying it can be to do all the math and what not when setting up your document.
Gridulator has your back. You just plug in the width of your document and how many columns you want, and then it does all the work for you. It makes a little png of your grid that you can use in photoshop, fireworks, or whatever it is that you use. Done deal. It literally takes about 30 seconds.
Yardley showed me this the other day and I thought it was worth sharing. Have you ever been trying to mock up a website real quick and needed a bunch of placeholder images? Well, Placehold.it is exactly what you should be using!
Basically you give it a URL like http://placehold.it/350x150 and then it magically gives you an image with the dimensions you supplied in the URL. “Holy crap!” you say? I know. You can even customize the image colors or text to make it match your site a little bit better.
Go on, try it out.
I was browsing the webz and just stumbled across this and thought it looked pretty cool. According to their site, “Sencha Touch is the world’s first app framework built specifically to leverage HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript for the highest level of power, flexibility, and optimization.”
What does this mean for you developers? Basically you can use their framework to build completely standards-compliant mobile web apps much more quickly and easily than doing it all from scratch yourself. Right now it supports iOS and Android devices, but the site says they will be expanding on that some (not that they really need to, those 2 OSes are basically the entire mobile app market).
I’m pretty excited to get a minute to mess around with it some. I’ll be sure to make a post on here about it with some more info once I do.
