One item that is constantly on my list is to “get better” at the visual side of programming. I started out with code when displays were character based, black backgrounds with white text. For me, the draw to computing in general was the logic. A pretty thing was (still is) a concise piece of code [...]

Recently, the need arose to take advantage of the flash player’s ability to display a “context menu” (wonder how they thought of that name?) in a Flex application. The menu is displayed by right-clicking (Windows) or Control-clicking (Macintosh). Every top-level interactive object has a context menu property. Just assign a context menu to that property [...]

The “technology roadmap” for the next version of JetBrain’s IntelliJ Idea IDE talks of some new features for Flex development. Planned features for Flex support include: * Debugger * Compiler integration * Additional refactorings and code analysis features (also for JavaScript) * Adobe AIR support That’s a very big improvement over the existing (actually bordering [...]

enums are a handy programming construct. I just had a glance at an overview of the next version of Actionscript, ECMA-262 fourth edition expected in October of this year, and I do not see that they will be included. I wonder why. In Java, enums and C# enums (as well as other OOP languages) they [...]

I recently had the need to implement “undo” capabilities in an application I was working on. The object I needed to keep around in case the user decided to rollback their last modification was complex (it contained other objects). Anyone who has used an object oriented language knows that there are two basic types of [...]