dirtystylus

We Choose The Moon

I’ve been working on this site for a while: We Choose The Moon. It’ll accompany a real-time audio stream of the entire Apollo 11 mission, with each stage marked by a 3D cinematic. Great work by the crew here at Domani Studios, and our fellow astronauts from the Martin Agency and AOL.

Launch time is 9:32 AM EDT tomorrow, July 16. Buckle up.

Event.ACTIVATE and WMode

Another classic case of finding things out the hard way: in ActionScript Event.ACTIVATE and Event.DEACTIVATE do not fire if the swf is embedded with wmode set to transparent. I was working on a project that needed to know when the user switched focus away from the swf, and couldn’t figure out why the event would fire in the standalone player but not when run in the browser.

Changing Filename Case in SVN

This one has bugged me for a long time. During a project where things get passed from developer to developer or designer to designer things often get renamed to the same name, only with a different case. For example, myFlv_IN.flv becomes myFlv_in.flv. I used to think you had to move the files away, rename them, and then re-add them. Turns out if you simply include the full path to the repository it'll do the rename in place for you.

For example:

More details can be found here, at the Subversion FAQ.

Flash, CDATA tags and line breaks in htmlText

This is probably obvious to most, but it caused enough of a headache that I'm writing to remind myself down the line: when assigning strings containing <br/> tags remember to set the TextField's multiline property to true. Otherwise it will happily ignore the HTML line break.

Ghost in the Shell

Every now and then you find funny stuff in the trace() logs from the flash player. Usually it's just frustrated debugging statements, or the occasional one-line "Stop looking at my underwear" statement to fellow developers. But this one takes the cake, an inspired full-on Ghostbusters-themed ASCII invite to apply for a job at blip.tv. Nice.