I’m happy to announce that we just released version 1.2 of our client-side, check-as-you-type, spell checking library for ActionScript 3 projects in Flash, Flex, or AIR. This version includes some significant updates including:

• rewritten spelling suggestions algorithm, which is faster and returns better results
• better support for AIR, and addition of an AIRMenuHelper class to reinsert editing options
• enhanced multi-line highlighting
• improved support for languages other than English
• RegExpHighlighter source code, which highlights matches for a regular expression in a text field (as seen at regexr.com)
• various minor bug fixes and enhancements

SPL 1.2 is a free upgrade for current users. If you own a license to SPL, and have not received the update package, please contact us through the support form on our product site.

You can find more information on the Spelling Plus Library, and see demos of it in action at the SPL product page.

Last year I ran an intensive, one day workshop on ActionScript 3 covering a wide range of topics including AS3 / AVM2, migrating from AS2, runtime errors, the event model, the display list, regular expressions, E4X (XML), loading data and assets, optimization, and more.

Today I released all 167 slides from the workshop on my talks page at gskinner.com/talks/. I’m not planning any workshops in the immediate future, and I thought the notes would be useful for developers learning AS3. The content ranges from basic to intermediate, and includes a few obscure tips and architectural ideas.

I haven’t looked over the notes since I ran the workshop, so please pardon any errors.

I’m bad at drawing curved lines in ActionScript. I’m always too lazy to figure out how to calculate exactly where the control point should go when using curveTo. Because of this, most of my experiments have relied on drawing a lot of short straight line segments to simulate curves, rather than figuring out how to draw the curves properly. For example, my tree experiments are drawn entirely with straight line segments.

While revisiting my grass simulations I decided to bite the bullet and figure out an easy way to work with curves. The result is a couple of “spikes” or isolated test cases that demonstrate the logic behind converting a series of straight lines into a nice looking curve.

The basic concept is to bisect each of the straight lines, then draw a curve between the bisections, using the original points as the curve’s control point. Nothing new I’m sure, but it works really well for me, because I can continue to think in straight lines, but draw in curves.

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I showed this experiment at FitC Toronto, then forgot to post it until today.

I’ve been experimenting on and off with grass simulations in ActionScript 3 (ex1 , ex2) for a little over a year. I recently rewrote the logic to draw the grass and wanted to build out a new experiment to use it. (I’ll be posting a bit about the drawing mechanism in the next day or two)

The result was cutByTheWind, which you can see below. I tried to do something that was more cinematic than most of the pieces I’ve built to date, and had some form of open ended narrative. This isn’t really my usual forte, but I’m fairly happy with the results. It is very CPU intensive, so don’t be surprised to hear your fans start up.

Special thanks to Keith and his lovely wife for translating the title into Japanese.

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I’ve decided to start a little series of articles on the blog called Core AS3 that will deal with small, simple snippets of code (<5 lines) that are very useful but not particularly self-evident. I often encounter questions at workshops and conferences about small coding constructs that I take for granted, and it occurred to me it might be helpful to document and share them with the community.

The first article in this series is about modulus. Modulus, which is represented by the percent sign % simply returns the remainder of a division operation. For example, 21 modulus 5 is 1. This is handy for a lot of different things, but I’m going to focus on four of them: alternation, frequency, wrapping, and two dimensional data sets.

All code will be simplified to focus on the concept at hand. Most of it should also be applicable to any similar language (ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3, JavaScript, etc)

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We were recently approached by Adobe to build a simple set of demos for the Flash Player 10 beta. The concept was to deliver a set of very simple, feature specific demos and descriptions tied together by a consistent theme. We thought it would be fun to key the demos off of the Astro code name, and develop a fake product box with a retro-space feel.

The end result was released on Adobe labs today. You can check it out here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/

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I often talk about the important role visualization plays in my work. I personally don’t really understand things until I can see them. One example of this that I showed at FitC this year was the SparkTable tool I use to visualize and compare easing equations. It’s very simple, but I’ve found it very useful when trying to choose between two similar eases, such as a quintic versus exponential ease. It’s also very handy when developing custom easing equations.

Simply queue up a bunch of easing equations to test, then sit back and watch the results.

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It seems like every UI design we are asked to implement these days has what I call “designer scroll bars” – skinny little tone on tone scroll bars that have no scroll arrows. While I’m not a big fan of these scroll bars for a number of reasons (not least of which is usability), they are still something we’re required to do on a fairly common basis.

Luckily, in Flex 3 hiding the scroll arrows, and making the scrollbar thinner is a fairly simple task that you can accomplish globally with just a few lines of CSS.

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