As my document class files get larger and larger I tend to have a hard time keeping my place. Especially when I need to jump back and forth between a couple spots. So one trick I just naturally started to evolve was to add my own “bookmarks” into my code.
For example if I am working on a function called “showMessage” and I want to jump between the function and where it is being called I might do this:
//#
showMessage();
// blah blah blah other code
// 1000 lines later
//#
private function newMessage():void { }
This way I can just search for the # and keep jumping back and forth. If you were really ambitious you could derive a whole system from symbols
# = links
! = currently working on
% = work on later
Not perfect since a lot of symbols will be used by operators, but it felt like a good LifeHacker type of tip. I supposed you could always search for //! to avoid the operators.
For those of you who don’t know about it, Snipplr is a handy site for people to share quick code snippets that they think may be handy to others (or just themselves). I created an account and have added a few little Snippets that I tend to reuse often. Mostly AS3 things, but I have included functions for loading xml, reading rss2 and atom feeds, removing all children from a holder, etc.
Recently I came across this program called OE Cake which absolutely blew my mind. It is basically a fluids (and solids) playground where you draw your material, edit the gravity, etc., and then watch it all interact with each other. When playing with something like this is just furthers my feeling that Flash can’t handle the type of stuff I want to be doing. I guess I am just a sucker for particle effects.
So there is a hypothetical; Would it still be considered original artwork if you were to a take a program like OE Cake, and create a series of art from it? I suppose it would be the same as creating art from Flash. Everyone is using the same program, but the outcome is what defines one artist from the next.
I highly suggest checking out OE Cake. You can download it from here (mac and pc). It even has motion sensing for the people with Macbooks so you can splash the liquids around.
I am not sure how widely known this program is, but if you are on a Mac and you can’t stand how long the Flash help file takes to come up, then you will definietly want to get Xash. It searches through the documentation as you type, and seems a lot more forgiving in its search results than the dafult help program is.
The only problem is that I can’t get it to load the CS3 documentation. It worked fine when I still had the Flash 8 documentation installed, but it can’t seem to find the path to the new stuff. The only suggestions I have seen said “you can open preferences of XASH and add an additional search path, /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CS3/en/Configuration/HelpPanel/Help, then reload help files. (This assumes installation of Flash CS3)”.
Tried with no luck. Any suggestions are welcome.
UPDATE:
I tried one of the other suggestions that someone in the Xash comments mentioned, and it seems to work for the most part:
actually if you take the contents of
Library/Application%20Support/Adobe/Flash%20CS3/en/Configuration/HelpPanel/
and place it in the path that is listed in xash preferences you’ll have an external as3 documentation viewer.
