Check it out. When will we see the first web server running in AIR?
Monthly Archive for November, 2009
Page 3 of 5
Why you shouldn’t use them. What’s more, every function call costs time, think about inlining simple functions code.
A couple of weeks ago I released my new personal portfolio/sandbox site — va.lent.in. I need more opinions and less bug reports.
I like projects which make me learn something. During this one I learned a lot…
Continue reading ‘va.lent.in — what a flash developer’s site should be’
I heard on Russian twitter that flash decompilers fail to parse embeded binary data (for example another SWFs). Tested it locally and that rendered to be true — the content of embeded SWF was impossible to extract. That seemed so simple yet effective. Just use something like
[Embed(source="swf.swf", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
Someone could write a simple command line script to split SWFs into several parts to embed them inside a loader SWF and assemble again. Or it’s possible to add simple encryption to go further.
This idea is indeed very simple so someone might have made a tool like this already. I didn’t find a tool but I did find a post about this technique. And since then I successfully used it in one of my projects.
This is really interesting read about so-called Entity Systems and Component Oriented Programming. The inheritance pattern described is close to how I planed to arrange stuff in my small indie MMO. But after I read the article I’m leaning more to use Entities and Components with Systems which control them as described.
Here the guy encourages to do what’s is strongly prohibited in AS3 — to use a Global object. Using such global objects is a VERY bad practice which can save you some time in a small project but will grow in a major pain in the ass later. I’d say he should write a warning at the repository page for newbies.
Since there’s no perfect tool for me I decided to create one myself.
If you want something done do it yourself.
Right now the only platform I can create application for without additional training is Flash/Flex/AIR. AIR looks perfect for this purpose, but I doubt flash can handle some of the features I need. Here’s the list of features from my previous post.
- Be able to create rich text nodes,
- Insert images, movies, audio files and PDFs,
- Have everything searchable,
- Tag everything,
- Be able to sort nodes to folders and smart folders,
- Be able to crosslink files,
- Add small notes (as clouds) to everything,
- Annotate PDFs,
- Have a usable intuitive interface,
- Run on a mac offline.
AIR can run on Mac, with Flash I can create any interface I need, I can show images, movies and mp3 files, I can edit text in a WYSIWYG mode (though I have yet to find a good one, and not only me), I can store data locally and online with full search index. But there’s huge problem with PDF support. Seriously, Flash PDF support sucks.
The plan.
First, I need to research a lot more about handling the PDF issue. If I fail to find a good solution I should probably stop and spend time learning Objective-C for native OS X programming. Right now there are several possible ways to go:
- pdf2swf library. It comes with C source code. The easiest way is to invoke it from command line from AIR application but this is not right. I might be able to modify it a bit and compile to SWC using Alchemy. The problem is that I don’t know C and have never tried to do anything with Alchemy. pdf2swf has some issues too, especially with fonts.
- Port a Java PDF library. With Flash 10 it is much easier to port a Java library to AS3, there’s even a special syntax converter and there should be AS3 implementations of core Java classes. This should be much easier than rewriting from scratch. This is what PDFCase has done, but I can’t contact its author. It is a port of PDFBox Java library. I played a bit with it but am not sure still what exactly it parses PDFs to. I am getting a lot of COSObjects and don’t know what they contain and how to work with them. Also, it takes 20 seconds to parse a 60 pages PDF file with several images. So in a port there must be a way to break the whole task into small subtasks not to hang the player. And I still have to understand how PDFBox works to start porting it.
- Write my own PDF parser. From what I saw PDF format is complicated. And I couldn’t find a free format spec.
Another question is what to do after I parsed a PDF file to simple instructions. I need to render them with Flash. This might be a problem too, especially with fonts.
Well, if I find a solution to the problem above the rest is pretty straightforward: prototype the interface, use Flex and Swiz to code it, fix bugs.
Afterthoughts.
I think that AIR might be not the tool of choice (see the irony?) for this type of project. I might need to learn Objective-C and code this application as a native OS X app, because there are frameworks to work with PDFs for Objective-C. For example PDFKit and SkimNotes. This might take some time but I am an experienced programmer after all. How Objective-C can be so different from ActionScript? Doubt it.
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