Freshmaking!

UNFINISHED, but I’ll just post it for now, cause who knows when I’ll get around to this again!

One thing I don’t like doing is labeling things as “advanced”. I remember back in the day when I was just-barely-a-teenager and I was figuring out C. I read through a book or two and got to the topic of “linked lists”. I remember back then thinking that sort of stuff was considered, in my and the book’s opinion, “advanced”–and that I thought was pretty hardcore knowing how to do it. I knew that knowing it didn’t necessarily make me the best programmer in the world… but I had to have definitely been somewhere in the top 10. Maybe even the top 5.

Today, I’m a tiny bit wiser than I was back then.

For functional programmers, currying and/or partial application may be well understood early in the learning process. Actionscript 3.0, an ECMAScript language, is actually extremely versitile, even when it comes to those crazy Functional Programming topics. Still, AS3’s “classical OOP” appearance can make some of those functional programming paradigms a rough fit.

So I won’t say that this stuff is “advanced”, but if you’re not intamitely familiar with AS3, and if you’re not already comfortable with closures and partial application from other languages, then this is probably going to hurt, at least a little bit.

For the record, I’m a beginner at this sort of stuff. Keep your eyes peeled for mistakes!

Continue Reading »

For right now, this is a direct copy of a forum post (with a hard character limit on posts). I might come back and spiff it up some, but then again maybe not. I DO WHAT I WANT!

It’s on closures, and it’s stuff you need to know before looking at the stuff on partial application. You don’t necessarily need to know the stuff I address here specifically, just what a closure is and stuff.

First, before I even start to get into this, I want to say that Actionscript is an ECMAScript derivative. Javascript also falls into this category, so you can often find tutorials, examples, etc which translate easily from one language to another. A VERY good explanation of Closures and a few of their uses can be found here, but is biased towards Javascript, and isn’t the most accessible thing out there

Second, the uses of a “closure” are not really a clear-cut. If someone asked you “what can a class be used for?”, there would be no single definite way to answer the question. Closures, in fact, can almost be thought of as another way of representing a class (but don’t think of them that way!), but offer other practical uses as well. In this example, we’ll discuss what a closure is and then use one to help solve the common problem of “passing arguments to event handlers”, as well as pick up a nifty trick or two.

Continue Reading »

I remember when I started messing with this Flash/AS3 business a while ago, I read about these “new” uint and int types that would supposedly perform better than the “Number” type. THEN I read a bunch of articles by “reputable” people posting about how the performance gains didn’t exist, and which gave seemingly random benchmarks on some tests run using them.

So I looked into it and, barring some crazy patching by Adobe since those original articles were written (over a year ago as of this posting), I’m left to believe that they were just plain wrong. I think that this was due to a misunderstanding of the implicit conversions that happen, even though the authors of these articles *seemed* to be aware of the issue. Who knows.

But here are my results:

UINT time: 90
INT time: 92
NUMBER time: 303

WOW, seems pretty much like what you would expect, huh? Isn’t that just CRAZY?

Continue Reading »

So with all of this Guitar Hero and Rock Band garbage going around lately, every kid out there wants to make a rhythm based Flash game. It turns out that there have been some fairly complex attempts at this, and it also turns out that I didn’t know that until AFTER I started looking into it on my own.

The story goes that some random person on a forum asked for some help with this. I suggested using Actionscript’s FFT option on the computeSpectrum function. Some other random person acted like the idea wasn’t worth investigating, so I decided to take a stab at it myself to prove this person wrong. My attempt would be pretty trivial and straightforward, but hopefully a “good start”

Turned out that it was really easy to make excellent beat detection this way. And by “excellent”, I mean “absolutely awful”.

You can check out the finished product here. There’s no preloader, so just wait (2.5mb). Not impressed? Might want to skip this. Think it’s at least *sort of* cool and *potentially useful*? Read on, youngin’!
Continue Reading »