I’m giving an introductory talk at FlashBrighton about State Machines on March 9th at the Werks. You can also catch it streaming live at http://live.flashbrighton.org at round about 7.00pm GMT (ok, it might not start till quarter past, when the bods in the real world have turned up :).
Status Ex Machina
March 3rd, 2010ReferenceError: FLBridge is not defined
November 11th, 2009Recently this happened to my Flash CS3 Professional:
On start up I get error messages that won’t go away. They’ll always say “At line 1 of file “FLBridge_init.jsfl”: ReferenceError: FLBridge is not defined”, and whenever I try to exit the pop-up message, another one takes its place.
I’d have to do some acrobatic mouse work to actually quit Flash. Note that this isn’t a crash, Flash seems to be working perfectly, just with consistent and irritating alerts.
Re-installation didn’t help, and I found only three reference on web (one in Chinese) with no answers, Adobe support was also no help.
However, in an inspired moment, I thought I’d change my user profile (using Vista Home). Yup, that worked. So, still no idea about cause, but at least I’ve got Flash Back.
Spread the (F)SM Love
November 8th, 2009Just seen that Joel Hooks has ported the pureMVC StateMachine utility to RobotLegs. Take a look at GitHub here.
Tidy up those unsightly Notifications
November 5th, 2009OMAR GONZALEZ has come up with a really cool way of tidying up those nasty (and so necessary) notification constants. So simple you should have thought of it first!
DominoLite
October 20th, 2009OK, so after some discussion with Nils Millahn I have cut down the functionality for my first release of Domino.
Domino will build and inject the StateMachine and add these additional functionalities:
- 1) the ability to define custom States in the XML markup
- 2) two additional notifications:
- 3) the ability to declare a command in the XML to be executed at each stage of the state transition cycle.
- 4) the ability to declare state specific notifications in the XML to be send at each stage of the state transition cycle.
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the XML:
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So at the moment I’ve given it to a few people to have a look at it to give feedback, and when I’m happy will upload it to my google.code site.
Oh and please feel free to leave your own suggestions :)
Domino rides again
October 2nd, 2009Strange how things come full circle.
Last year I was trying to manage the flow of pureMVC commands in my applications. Two things came out of this, the StateMachine utility, and an idea that I christened Domino. Well, Domino went a bit strange on me, and eventually I let it fallow for a bit while I worked on the FSMVisualiser.
I’ve been manically working on several projects this year, and as I was commenting a utility that had been evolving throughout this time, I realised that with a tweek here and there I could create a layer of abstraction over the StateMachine utility in a simple and (I hope) elegant way. It would fulfill the original purpose of Domino without getting really complicated in the process. Basically it extends the StateMachine markup XML so that it also defines the relationships between pureMVC actors within each state.
This month I’ve been able to do a bit more work on the FSMVisualiser, and am incorporating my Domino utility into it as a proof of concept.
Read the rest of this entry »
catch up with anti
September 18th, 2009Well, I’ve just got through a busy patch work-wise, with no time to work on any private projects, so I’m afraid the FSMVisualiser hasn’t progressed at all since my last post a while back.
However, I thought i’d post some stuff that I’ve been working on. One of these projects is a flickbook navigated trail commissioned by ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival in Finland. The work is by word picture studio (festival entry here). My part was to composite and make ready all the final prints using AfterEffects, Photoshop and InDesign.
Below are some choice thumbnails, because I sort of like looking at the flickbooks this way:
Flick the First
Flick the Fifth
Flick the Sixth
Flick the Eighth
FSMViz Version 0.4
July 22nd, 2009
FSMViz for pureMVC StateMachine Utility
source code here:
http://puremvc-utilities.googlecode.com/svn/tags/fsm_viz_0.4
Added the decode to AS3.
OK, so next I’m going to rip this all down and re-architecture it.
FSMViz Version 0.3
July 12th, 2009FSMViz for pureMVC StateMachine Utility
source code here:
http://puremvc-utilities.googlecode.com/svn/tags/fsm_viz_0.3
OK, so I’ve added the ability to open from JSON or XML and also to decode to them. Originally, I was just going to save out to JSON as the main “file-type”, and export to an AS3 file, but after Jason MacDonald suggested it would be good to export/import the xml, I thought why not, it only took an hour.
The only things to note are that the XML looses all the meta data that the JSON preserves. And secondly, because of this, it can only import XML that uses the naming conversions outlined below.
Naming convertions:
I think that these are pretty uncontentious with the exception of the choice of delimiter for the prefix. This I think will be changable by the user.
All I have to do now is that all important conversion to an AS3 file, then I can rip the whole thing apart and rebuild it.
So, any suggestions as to deployment? Air, online with php service?, Zinc? (Zinc? LOL only joking!)
FSMViz Version 0.2
July 3rd, 2009FSMViz for pureMVC StateMachine Utility
source code here:
http://puremvc-utilities.googlecode.com/svn/tags/fsm_viz_0.2
So this is just the visualisation and the editing of the States and Actions. I still need to implement the saving out of state, and the export of the StateConstants.as
A few points and pointers:
