2005 - Page 4 of 7 - Michael Bianco

with() Problem/Bug

This is yet another bug I found while doing some Flash-dev, it has to do with the with() statement. If you use with(this){…} it will give you erratic/unpredicted behavior, for instance take this code: You would think that output would look like this: But, instead it comes out as: Seems as though Flash does not allow you to set variables when using this in a with() statement. You can get the .fla i used to make the test cases for this bug here. Thanks Macromedia for wasting another hour of my time! 😛

App Stop Comic?

I recently found this while browsing the web: It came from this web-site. Someone made a comic about my free-ware application.. hehe 😛

App Stop V.9

App Stop V.9 has just been released, here is the list of changes: Added the much requested support for background applications Added a UID/User-name column to the table-view Fixed problem where the menu icon would be really small on OS X 10.3 Fixed a problem where checking for updated while disconnected from the internet would report than a new version is availible Obviously the big change in this update is the support for background processes. If you are running OS X 10.3 you may experience crashes when changing preferences related to background processes. I have no idea why these crashes are occurring, hopefully I will be able to track down the problem by the 1.0 release…

Of Flash & ID3 Tags

Flash says it supports ID3 1.0 & 2.0 tags, but from my experience MM implementation of ID3 tags in Flash is very poor and half the time I cant get any ID3 information. Has anybody had any luck with ID3 information in Flash? Most Flash-based MP3 players out there don’t use ID3 information for song titles and such but load the information from an XML file, so I assume this is a commonly known bug although I haven’t seen any information about this anywhere on the net…

Determining When A Movie Clip Is Initialized

This is a common problem in Flash, determining when a MC is fully initialized. This problem only really arises when you are using attachMovie() to dynamically make/attach MC’s to the stage. An example of this problem is if you have a MC with timeline animation that you are going to attach to the stage. The timeline animation has stop() on its first frame and its last frame. You use this code to attach it to the stage: The attached “box” MC wont play (Here’s an example of what I’m explaining). Other common problems like this are trying to grab the height of a dynamic textfield with autoSize = true contained in a MC that you have just attached to the stage and assigned alot of text to the internal textfield…

App Stop .8 Released!

App Stop version .8 has just been released, it includes the following new features/enchancements: Fixed bug where CPU usage for applications running as root would display incorrectly, now applications running as root will display CPU usage as -1 Added ability to force update CPU usage Added ability to select all running applications Added ability to select all paused applications Rewrote the CPU refresh timer code, now allowing preference changes to be reflected immediatly without restarting App Stop Fixed human readable priority representation…

Class Variable Weirdness

This is a weird bug/feature I found in Flash a week or two ago. I like to declare my variables in classes like this: Well, I was working on a project a few weeks ago and I had a class that looked something like this: Throughout the SWF I code like this: When I traced dataOb, I got this output: But I only added “info 1” and “info 2” to the dataOb.info array? Why would “info 3” and “info 4” be in their too? It seems as though if you declare a variable as an array in the variable declaration and dont re-initalizie it in the constructor (IE, info = []) then the array will be shared across instances of the class. This effect doesn’t seem to happen with number declaration like the one in the example electric class I posted…

Vacation & App Stop

I just came back a few days ago from vacationing in NH and immediately following vacation, going on a retreat in Massachusetts. Both were awesome! New Hampshire has to be one of the best places in the world its so rural and beautiful, if i get some motivation I’ll post some pics from my vacation. On another note, a bug has been found in App Stop that will cause it to crash… alot. I am currently working on fixing this bug, but work is taking most of my time so I haven’t had alot of time to look into it. Hopefully in next week I’ll be able to find time to fix it.

Batman Begins

A little off-topic, but anyways… I saw Batman Begins the other day, I was never really a Batman fan, but the previews looked cool and I hadn’t seen a new movie in awhile so I went out and saw it. I’m happy I did, it was really a incredible movie; the actors were great, the plot was good, the action scenes were awesome! I highly recommend you go out and see it!

App Stop V.6 Released!

App Stop V.6 is now available for download. This release includes the following features & bug-fixes: Fixed bug where stopped applications would prevent your computer from sleeping Support added for sleep/awake/shut-down operations Added preference panel Added hide application before stopping feature Added show application after continue feature Added ability to specify the icon size Added ability to set priority for applications Added authentication for lowering priority on applications Full source code is now available (To correctly view the project structure you must have Xcode 2.1) Enjoy!

Year: 2005