Archive for category Uncategorized

Introducing the Dreamsocket Media Player

Posted by Kenny Bunch in ActionScript, Flash, Uncategorized on March 3rd, 2009

Today we released the first “face/player” to our framework today, which you are free to throw on your site and use yourself. Check out below, go read the article we wrote up about it, and download it for yourself today!

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BUG: Flash Google Analytics trackEvent

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 1st, 2009

Today I was integrating with Google Analytic's Flash codebase and ran into a bug that had me running up against a wall for about 45 minutes. It was a simple bug, but no details bubbled up from the code base to let me know what was occurring. I'm noting it here for everyone else's sanity. If you want to skip all the details and just know the cause jump down to the end of the post.

SYMPTOMS
I had set up my analytics package all via code and made a simple track call.

For the sake of this example, it looked equivalent this

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. import com.google.analytics.GATracker;
  2.  
  3. // setup tracker
  4.  var tracker:GATracker = new GATracker(this, "UA-111-222", "AS3", true);
  5. // make simple track event with a numeric value
  6.  tracker.trackEvent("MyCategory", "MyEvent", "Title1", 10.5);

Very simple right? I had followed examples online and on the surface it all appeared to work correctly. I could see the calls in the visual debugger working exactly how I wanted. However, when looked to see if the calls were going to the server with a packet sniffer, no dice! Nothing was going through. I checked my code about 500 times, looked to see if trackEvents were just beta, and tried to find out if I wasn't setting something for production.

DEBUGGING
I couldn't find anything. It wasn't until I switched the call to trackPageview that it started to go through. That worked. I decided to take the numeric value out of the call for the trackEvent call, since that was a variant between trackEvent and trackPageview. Ching, ching, little winner. Everytime I added it back in it failed silently and didn't call the server. I then noticed that the number was a fraction and not a Integer (even though the call's signature has it as Number). Therefore I decided to round the fraction everytime, and triple ching, we had the final winner.

CAUSE
The bug turned out to be that trackEvent can only take Integers as the numeric value in it's call. If you make calls using trackEvent you must round all numbers going in or the calls will not be sent out to the server.

Hope this helps with some folks headaches. Also if you ever have a bug with no details, follow the example above and work backwards. Looking at variants and testing multiple inputs you can find the root.

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Presenting Dreamsocket Media Framework Tomorrow Night

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on February 23rd, 2009

I will presenting our media framework tomorrow night at the Flash Platform meeting.

The general outline of the presentation is to talk about our client work history, run through the framework, talk about what we are working on, and basically field questions and get input from folks.

Anyone that is interested please come out. The presentation will hopefully give you insight on what we have done and the field in general.

The meeting is being held at 7pm over at Round Box (King Plow)
981 Joseph E Lowery Blvd NW
Suite 100
Atlanta, GA 30318

You can get all the details at Meetup.com

I look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow night.

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Tonight: “Extending Flex 3 Components” and “Concurrency Approaches in Flex and Air”

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on February 18th, 2009

"Extending Flex 3 Components" and "Concurrency Approaches in Flex and Air" are the two topics for tonight's Atlanta Flash/Flex User group meeting. From reading the description, it looks like the presentations are going to be winners. I'm definitely planning on making it out and you should to ;) . If you want to chat, feel free to introduce yourself. I'm sure to talk your head off about programming!

Below are the details

Feb 18, 2009 Meeting Details
Date: Web., Feb 18, 2009
Pizza & Schmoozing: 6:00 PM
Meeting Time: 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
Location: EchoEleven Offices
Dress: Anywhere from casual to business formal
Price: FREE!
RSVP

Extending Flex 3 Components
Presented by Matt Boles

Start your learning of how to customize both functionality and appearance of built-in components through this session. You will see now to manually add objects to the display list, as well as how to override built in methods to alter component functionality.

Concurrency Approaches in Flex and Air
Presented by Charlie Hubbard

As the Flex platform matures, our ability to write more complex programs increases. As complexity increases, so does the need for long running computations. Technologies like Air force us to solve these problems without the aid of a server. While Flash, on the surface, seems to be missing things like threads to solve running concurrent jobs there are techniques for handling this. In this talk we'll explore those techniques for handling long running computations on the Flash platform. We'll look at classic computational problems such as fractals, and more common place problems like parsing large XML and JSON data in Actionscript. We'll also talk about the future possibilities for Actionscript in this area.

About the Speakers:

Matt Boles is the Technical Lead for the Adobe Partner Enablement group and has been developing and teaching courses on Flex since the 1.0 release. Matt has a diverse background in web development, computer networking, and teaching in both professional computer classes and the public schools. He coauthored the Flex Training from the Source books for both Flex 2 and Flex 3, and was also a coauthor on the Certified ColdFusion Developer Study Guide. He has also developed official Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe curricula in the Flex, ColdFusion and Flash development content areas.

Charlie Hubbard is a 10+ year veteran of the software industry, blogger, open source project contributor and project creator. His days are filled as a Senior Software Engineer at Nexidia working on a grid based approach for searching audio. In his free time he enjoys working with Ruby, Java, Flex, Javascript, and has been known to make a film every once in a while. Charlie and his wife live and work in Atlanta.

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Event type naming: qualifying vs simple

Posted by Kenny Bunch in ActionScript, Flash, Uncategorized on February 18th, 2009

I have put a lot of thought into event naming recently. In my research, I've seen a few developers fully qualifying their event type names. This is something I actually debated myself when writing our Media Framework, but opted not to do. The subject is debatable, so let me describe what I mean by fully qualified names and why I decided not to use them. Based on the points I outline you can make your own decision of whether to use them yourself.

What is a fully qualified event type name?
ActionScript 3 has a formal event framework where objects dispatch events and others subscribe to them and react accordingly. Each event dispatched is represented by an event object. All of the native AS3 event objects follow a formal convention of defining the types of events they can be dispatched as. This convention places a static constant representing the type name directly on their class to allow for strict typing. For example, Event.RESIZE denotes an event type of "resize" for the flash.events.Event object. The property value itself equates to a simple string. In all native AS3 objects these strings are simple and only represent the action (ex: "resize").

Some programmers are actually fully qualifying these strings. Instead of Event.RESIZE representing the string "resize", it is equal to "flash.events.Event.RESIZE". Now why do this? Well say you had another event ComponentEvent which had a resize event. If you fully qualified it as well, you would have ComponentEvent.RESIZE equating to "com.dreamsocket.events.ComponentEvent.RESIZE". Notice that now both events could be thrown from the same object and subscribed to distinctly. If they both represented the string "resize" then you would run into cases where you thought you subscribed to one event but would potentially receive both.

Why I chose not to use full qualifed names
Even though fully qualifying the string that represents the event type resolves subscription conflicts, for the most part you can resolve them just by prepending your event's name to the type. ComponentEvent.RESIZE could be "componentResize". In a sense this allows you to qualifying it without having a very long unique string. This is what I opted to do. One of the reasons I did this was for less advanced users and for code spiking. Simply, if you want to do things fast, it is easier just to type in a short magic string when listening to an event vs actually importing in the class and typing it out statically.

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. foo.addEventListener("componentResize", this.onEvent);

vs

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. import com.dreamsocket.events.ComponentEvent.RESIZE;
  2. foo.addEventListener(ComponentEvent.RESIZE, this.onEvent);

Yes, this is kind of the lazy approach and one might also say its bad practice since without strict typing it could result in a "magic error". However, I do it when I'm trying to spike an idea real fast, and I know others do it as well. I'd even venture to say designer/developer hybrids are especially prone to use it since it serves as a comfort concept they brought over from ActionScript 2. It is a practice that exists and I can't say whether it is right or wrong.

Summary
In summary, fully qualified event types have a purpose and serve their purpose well. In our case, we wanted to take into account developers who were used to exploiting existing conventions. I feel even bad habits have advantages if it creates productivity, so the coin toss resulted in a choice not to take them away.

What are your thoughts?

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MediaFramework FlashAS2 1.57, FlashAS3 1.67, FlexAS3 1.52 released

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on February 18th, 2009

We released a minor update to the Dreamsocket Media Framework that addresses issues with streaming video and mp3s. The release is an update to all 3 versions (Flash AS2, Flash AS3, and Flex AS3) and is available for download in customer accounts.

Here is a brief outline of the changes:
[FIX] ondemand streaming not being canceled out
[FIX] duration not being reset on close for StreamingNS
[FIX] corrected streaming mp3 initialization
[CHG] added autoloading of content if closed and setting a url back to the same one
[CHG] re-added getLength calls for StreamingNS content
[CHG] handling of netconnection status events after connecting
[CHG] added netConnection as a property of AbstractMediaNS

For the full release history for each version please check out our release notes section.

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How we built Dreamsocket.com

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on February 17th, 2009

Fellow Dreamsocketeer and partner in crime, Mr. Chad posted a short little article on Dreamsocket briefly outlining how we built the site. He mentions how he put together the store front, live docs, bug tracker and more all under one cohesive roof. If you are interested in how we accomplished it all, then definitely give it a read and post any questions you may have.

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Dreamsocket Site updates 2-17-09

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on February 17th, 2009

Based on all the feedback and site analytics, we've updated dreamsocket.com. The quick change list includes media framework demos, live support chat, code highlighting, and extra company info.

Check out our full blog post on the site for more details. We definitely care what you think so post your thoughts and ideas on what we are doing!

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Blog Facelift

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on February 13th, 2009

Yesterday I had Dreamsocketeer - Chad give this blog a much needed face lift. Unfortunately, I let it go to long with a dated default look that made it hard to read some entries. Obviously, most people just grab the feeds through a reader, but for those making the trek to the site it made sense to give you something that appealed to the eye. In addition to lovely new "clothes", I threw in some additional social links of mine in the navigation for those wanting more info on who I am, what I do. Enjoy the new lovely!

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Atlanta iPhone User Group: February Meetup TONIGHT!

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on February 10th, 2009

For anyone that isn't aware, Atlanta has a pretty solid IPhone user group that has been meeting frequently. Though, I've only been to one meeting, I was pretty impressed by the turnout and diversity of its participants. Whether you are just getting started or you are a veteran, it seems like a good fit for all. I encourage anyone in the Atlanta community that is interested in developing for the platform to go.

Tonight is February's meeting and below is the agenda
7:00 to 7:20 - Drinks and Introductions
7:20 to 7:30 - Mobile Strategy or User Experience Topic
7:30 to 7:55 - SDK Tutorial Topic
8:00 to 8:30 - Native Applications Show & Tell

If you are interested go sign up now. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend tonight, but am trying to have a Dreamsocketeer to go in my place.

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