I’ve only been studying Objective-C seriously for three weeks now, and I’m already  frustrated. To go from being totally competent and confident in one field (ActionScript) to being confused and clumsy in a very closely related one isn’t why I decided to go down this path.

I am trying to study as thoroughly and carefully as possible – I don’t feel like it’s good enough to stumble through some sample code, twist it in to my own design and upload it to the app store. (It’s amazing how many apps I see where the only reviews are “It crashes all the time” or “Doesn’t work as advertised” – I’m determined that won’t be me). And I learn better when I work from first principles (coding my TableViewControllers from scratch, for example), and through repetition (coding in a blank document every time instead of copying and pasting from previous projects).

For me to be satisfied programming I need to know what I’m doing. (I was always amazed by how few Flash developers I met were curious about the available frameworks or who would even bother reading Adobe’s documentation). I want to be proud of what I make. So I’ve put myself in the unfortunate position where I won’t be happy until I’m at least as confident in Objective-C as I am in ActionScript.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a kind of magic number – around ten thousand hours – of practice that seems to be required to really excel at a particular skill – and seven years is about how long it took me to clock up that many hours of Flash.

I actually feel like I’m progressing at a reasonable pace – I’ve already producing totally functional (if flawed) apps as learning exercises, and the way that XCode and Apple’s frameworks allow you to get up and running quickly really is a thing of beauty. If I can remember to remind myself that ActionScript and Objective-C are both classes of the same activity – “Programming”, then I don’t get so dejected about the Ten-Thousand-Hours thing. And I’m still sure that I’ve made the right decision.

I just think that maybe I fooled myself in to thinking that it wouldn’t be hard.

I spent some time today watching a video from the latest WWDC on using the Model View Controller design pattern in iPhone development – a software design pattern that I have been trying to correctly implement in flash for years now.

I tried, I really did. I would start with a grand class diagram and a beautifully loosely-coupled group of classes… and then I’d end up with application logic in a view, or a bloated controller class, views directly referencing a model, multiple lines of switch and ifs in places that they shouldn’t be, or (worst of all) exceptions thrown in to the empty-catch-black-hole. My beautiful, reusable classes would end up being site-specific monsters that would need be re-written again and again for each project.

While some of this can be attributed to me and my lack of knowledge, an awful lot of this poor design was from expediency  – when developing for the web with a multitude of clients and rapid turnarounds, often the “just make it work” solution was the only solution (or at least, the only solution without pissing off the account manager and giving the studio manager yet another 50 grey hairs). Projects always had a “few” (read 25 to 50) design and or functionality changes that would require either a) a total re-design of a large number of the model, view and controller classes, or b) a whole bunch of hacks to get the project out the door as rapidly as possible. Needless to say, the manager(s) always wanted option b.

Now that I’m working for myself, I’m finding a certain joy in sitting with a  pen and paper and designing. Design is what it looks like. Design is how it works. Design is how it will be built. Slowly. Thoughtfully. Carefully.

Redesign to use flash-based scrollbars wasn’t an option. After hours of messing around, I found a solution: use Javascript to keep the size of the flash within the renderable area, and fool the user in to thinking they are scrolling HTML content when they are actually scrolling the flash.

Do this by:
- Initially setting the size of the flash element to the desired full size (this sets the correct scrollbar size).
- While scrolling, use external interface to pass the scroll value of the browser in to flash.
Track the value in JS and in flash, and if the scroll value hits the maximum value:

1. In Javascript - reset the size of the flash html element to the max renderable size
2. In flash – as the browser scrolls, scroll the flash content container in the other direction (this keeps the flash content within the maximum render area)
3. In Javascript – add padding to the top of the flash html element to keep the scroll position correct

I had a lot of trouble finding resources about this issue online, I hope this can help someone with the same problem.

I’m about halfway through developing my WordPress / AS3 library and I thought I’d note down a few things that have come up during development.

Does anyone know their blogId?

The blogId parameter is required for most wp, mt, and metaweblog calls, yet there is no easy way for a user to find this out (you can’t get your blogId from the WordPress admin interface) – it seems the only way is through a call to wp.getUsersBlogs, using the data from the returned array to match up with the blog url that you are calling. I’ve simplified this process in my API so that whenever you make a webservice method call the api will check to see if a valid blogId is available, and if not, make the wp.getUsersBlogs call for you first.

Inconstencies

WordPress XML-RPC is inconsistent in the way it sends and retrieves some types of data. For example, categories are retrieved using wp.getCategories with the properties categoryName and categoryId, but if you use wp.suggestCategories you get category_name and category_id instead, meaning I have had to write duplicate parsing functions on a few occasions.

Null values

Ak33m’s XML-RPC library (correctly, I assume) serializes null properties to strings with a value of "null". This means  that when you send data to WordPress you can end up with “null” showing up everywhere – (A post with a category of “null” and a tag of “null”, a category with a slug of “null” etc). To avoid this I’ve had to create an IXMLRPC implementation for all of my WordPress structs that converts “null" to an empty string ("") before serialization.

Multiple authors

I haven’t worked out how to make metaweblog.getRecentPosts work with multiple authors. Because you have to authenticate using a username/password to make the call, you can only seem to retrieve posts by that particular author. I’m not sure how to get posts from multi-author blog without having to authenticate separately for each user, which is quite frustrating.

Apart from these minor issues, everything is going along smoothly though – I now have all post, category and page functions working correctly, options and comments to follow.

I’ve been using the Flash IDE as my development environment on the Mac since Flash 4. Around the time of Flash 5 I started using BBEdit to edit external .as files, around MX I switched to TextMate for AS2 development, and now use TextMate exclusively for AS3 projects. But I’ve always used the IDE as my compiler, and there was always my designer’s preference to use the IDE to draw and layout objects rather than generate everything programatically. In developing my WordPress library I’ve been forced to bite the bullet and move to MXMLC, for the simple reason that the built in RPC libraries and Ak33m’s XML-RPC are only available for the Flex SDK.

I’m basically a total unix-command-line newbie, and there is a real dearth of information for people like me on how to command line compile in the mac environment. There is this tutorial by Senocular for the PC, and there are plenty of tutorials out there about using MXML, integrating shell commands to use ANT etc etc, but all of these assume you know what you are doing already.

I don’t know what I’m doing though. All I want is to be able to integrate the Flex SDK classes without having to purchase and learn Flex and MXML – I’ve discovered  that this is of course not only possible, but easy - not that you’d know it by looking online.

Here’s a way to do it

1. Download the Flex2 SDK from Adobe Labs

The Flex2 SDK is free! It includes the flex libraries and and the mxmlc compiler you will need to use the command line.

2. Put the Flex2 SDK somewhere sensible

I put mine in ~/Documents/Library/Flex/flex2_sdk_hf1/

3. Open a terminal window

Usually ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

4. Navigate to your project folder, eg:

cd Documents/Projects/my_flash_project/Development/

5. Run fcsh

Fcsh is the Flex Compiler SHell, a wrapper for MXMLC that makes compiling fast and easy. The simplest way to run this command is use the Finder to navigate to where you put the Flex SDK, find fcsh (in bin/fcsh) and drag and drop this file into your terminal window.

You should now see the following:

Adobe Flex Compiler SHell (fcsh)
Version 2.0.1 build 159086
Copyright (c) 2004-2006 Adobe Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

(fcsh)

6. Compile your flash app using mxmlc

The syntax to use is:

mxmlc path/to/MainFileForYourApplication.as -sp path/to/source/folder -o relative/path/to/output/filename.swf

eg:

mxmlc src/com/reubenstanton/Main.as -sp src/ -o ../Deployment/main.swf

The output will be something like:

fcsh: Assigned 1 as the compile target id
Loading configuration file /Users/absent/Documents/Library/Flex/flex2_sdk_hf1/frameworks/flex-config.xml
../Deployment/main.swf (82769 bytes)

You see that last line ../Deployment/main.swf? If you navigate to this folder, you should see your swf sitting there! That’s it.

As you see above, fcsh Assigned 1 as the compile target id. This is just a shortcut to the compile command you just wrote – it means next time you want to compile you can just enter mxmlc 1 instead of typing the whole command again.

Now you can use Flex libraries in your flash projects without learning Flex and MXML.

This took me hours to figure out, so I hope it helps some of you out there.

Here are a few resources to help along the way:

• The Flex2 SDK from Adobe Labs
• The Flex Compiler Shell from Adobe Labs
• Using the terminal from OSX Faq

Recently I was searching around for an easy way to build a flash front-end for a WordPress managed website for a friend of mine. I was incredibly surprised to find that there doesn’t seem to be a properly integrated ActionScript library available for  WordPress XML-RPC, or if one is available, Google and the Actionscript community don’t seem to know about it.

So I’ve decided to build one.

I’ve had a little experience building ActionScript API libraries before when I was testing the Artbeat API with AQ – the Artbeat library has its flaws (not the least of which is no documentation of any kind), and I’ve learnt a lot from that experience.

My idea is single library that allows you to easily make all of the WordPress, MovableType, and Metaweblog API calls required to integrate flash with WordPress. I’m using Akeem Phillbert’s xml-rpc as3 library, as a base for the XML-RPC calls.

I’ll be posting my progress here as the library develops.