After a very worth while presentation by Joey Lott last night on Test-Driven Development using AsUnit I was sold.

Up until this morning I was doing unit testing on a very minor scale. I would make these empty FLAs and write some code to test all of the methods in class I wrote. While this method worked well, the testing FLAs weren’t very organized or consistent and have certainly cluttered my folders. My problem was I was lacking a formal approach.

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I’ve rewritten my LiquidGUI tutorial for use on Adobe’s developer center. The new tutorial was revamped using ActionScript 3.0 and Flex Builder 2.0. The original tutorial I wrote using ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8 can still be found on my site.

In trying to create a read-only property for your class, you declare a private variable with a public getter. By omitting the public setter, you feel confident that you’ve just created a read-only property. However, not all variable types are created equal. In this entry I’ll examine a case where a property mistaken for being read-only is actually modified outside it’s class and how to avoid this gotcha.

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One of the new features included with ActionScript 3.0 is the Timer class. The new Timer class is essentially an encapsulated setInterval command with an intuitive stopwatch-like interface. Creating a new Timer object requires two parameters: delay and repeat count. Once instantiated, you assign one or more listeners to the Timer which listen for events. After assigning listeners, you use the Timer object by calling it’s start(), reset() and stop() methods.

My first thought when I saw the Timer class was “Sweet, I wish this was available in AS2.” Well, it didn’t take long for me to start thinking about how I could recreate this class in AS2. A short while later I had something similiar.

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With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This is part three of the tutorial about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

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With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This is part two of the tutorial about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

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With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This tutorial is about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

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John has been working on a great 3D Framework for AS3 called Lux. You can see it in action on his blog. The depth of field feature is really nice and something I haven’t seen before with ActionScript. On his site there is a performance test available for viewing and he’s looking for feedback on framerate results. I’m looking forward to playing with the framework when that becomes available.

Back in ActionScript 2.0 using type annotating was a “best-practice” approach that helped speed up development by identifying type casting errors at compile time. The actual values were stored in memory as dynamically typed atoms so the type annotations never really mattered after you published. However, dynamically typed atoms tended to waste memory as values were loosely stored leaving breathing room for changing values.

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