We’ve been getting lots of questions about why gProject has not been updated to support ActionScript 3. Until now I have not been in a position to respond appropriately, but today I’m happy to announce that Adobe acquired gProject late last year. Since then, we have been working with the Flash team to completely overhaul the panel for AS3, add new functionality, and significantly improve the interface.

As a result of the Adobe acquisition, we will no longer be developing gProject and have deprioritized our support for gProject as a product.

We will continue to offer gProject for Flash 8 and CS3 for the immediate future, but it will not be updated further. The product page for gProject and panel pack will be updated immediately to reflect this.

If you purchased gProject in the past 3 months, and have any concerns, please contact us through our support form.

During the course of developing the Spelling Plus Library, and more recently while adding multilingual support to it, I discovered two serious bugs with the Regular Expression implementation in ActionScript, and how it handles accented characters.

First, RegExp in AS3 does not include accented characters in the word character class. For example, the pattern /\w+/ (match one or more word characters) matches “r” and “sume” in “résume”, when it should match the full string. UPDATE: Arthur has pointed out in the comments that this is correct according to the ECMAScript and POSIX RegEx specifications. \w is intended to match just the set [a-zA-Z0-9_] , which it does in AS3. With that being understood, it would be nice to have support for unicode property sets (which allow you to match word characters in any language, among other things), but I can understand that this may have an unacceptable impact on the size of the Flash Player.

Secondly, there is a somewhat obscure problem with how the Flash player matches \S and accented characters. Specifically, it appears that it does not count accented characters properly when matching them to \S, and this results in weird results. This is not the case with the negated whitespace character set [^\s], although these sets should exhibit identical behaviour in RegEx. This issue is pretty weird, so I’ll give a few examples:

1. the pattern /\S+/ (one or more not-whitespace chars) will match the full string of “é aé”, when it should match “é” and “aé” separately.

2. the same pattern /\S+/ will match “aé” and “bé” correctly for the string “aé bé”.

3. the pattern /\S{2,}/ (two or more not-whitespace chars) will match the full string “aé bcé” when it should match “aé” and “bcé”.

4. the same pattern /\S{2,}/ will only match “bcé” for the string “éa bcé”, when it should match “éa” and “bcé”

All of the above work properly if you substitute [^\s] for \S.

Hopefully this is helpful for other people working with RegExp, especially with languages other than English. It is quite frustrating to work around – I ended up writing a specialized character lexer instead of using RegExp in SPL.

Know of any other RegExp bugs in AS3? Share them in the comments.

Just finished posting the slides from my FitC 2008 session “My Favourite Things”. I don’t think they’ll make much sense outside the context of my talk, but they might be useful for people who attended my session.

You can access the slides at gskinner.com/talks/.

I’ll also be releasing a bunch of source code and demos from the session on the blog over the next little while, so stay tuned.

As always, FitC was a phenomenal conference. Much love and Kudos to Shawn. It was great hanging out with everyone, and catching some interesting sessions. It was also a nice bonus that the weather was really pleasant (for once) during the conference.

Update: Adobe has added the Loader.unloadAndStop method to Flash player 10 to address some of the issues outlined in this article. You can find more details on this feature in my article “Additional Information on Loader.unloadAndStop“.

Flash Player 9 has a very dirty secret. It doesn’t even try hide this dirty secret, but it’s still not that widely known. You see, Flash Player has severe problems with separation anxiety – once it’s loaded some content, it has a really hard time ever letting it go. Technically speaking, it is extremely difficult to make Flash Player 9 unload ActionScript 3 content.

In this article, I’ll take an in-depth look at the issue, it’s implications, suggestions for addressing the problem in the player, and some workarounds for the time being. If this issue seems like it will impact your projects, I’d strongly encourage you to read through the article and educate yourself, then use the link at the end of the article to provide Adobe with feedback on it. Likewise, I would encourage you to share this issue with other developers, both to help spread awareness of the issue, and to give them the opportunity to also provide feedback to the Flash Player team. I see this as one of the most critical issues that should be solved in Flash Player 10, and the more people raise it as an issue with Adobe, the more likely it is to be addressed.

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Here’s some quick code to parse individual tags and text elements out of an html string. It might be handy for some people, but it’s also a good example of some advanced RegExp. Note that you could also do this by parsing it to XML, and traversing with E4X.
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The CS3 component architecture makes use of TextFormats for all the text-styling needs. This decision was (likely) made to simplify the API, but still allow full control over the formatting of the text.

Natively, there is zero support for CSS styling, in fact, setting a styleSheet on the textField of a component (all components expose their textField instances) results in a run-time error, since TextFormats can not be set on textFields with a styleSheet.

But fear not! Not only are the components easy to extend, but it is not at all difficult to add CSS support to any component. In this example, I have added a styleSheet component style to a TextArea, which plays nicely with the built-in TextFormat. Rather than just posting the source code, I have broken down how the implementation works to provide some insight on how the components work, and how this sort of approach can be applied to any component, for almost any task.

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A lot of my experiments utilize a *lot* of randomness. This is great because it produces very organic looking results, and often leads to unexpected emergent patterns or behaviours that are more interesting than the intended system.

The downside of this is that if I get a particularly beautiful output from an experiment I have no way of capturing or reproducing it besides taking a screenshot. I can’t easily reproduce it because the Flash Player’s Math.random() function is not seeded, meaning there is no way to get the same series of numbers from it again. Thus, every time I run the experiment I get a completely unique result.

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I thought I’d share the Rnd class I use for all of my experimental work. It’s a very simple collection of utility methods for working with random values, but it has been extremely useful for me. Here’s the list of methods:

// random();
// returns a number between 0-1 exclusive.
public static function random():Number
// float(50); // returns a number between 0-50 exclusive
// float(20,50); // returns a number between 20-50 exclusive
public static function float(min:Number,max:Number=NaN):Number
// boolean(); // returns true or false (50% chance of true)
// boolean(0.8); // returns true or false (80% chance of true)
public static function boolean(chance:Number=0.5):Boolean
// sign(); // returns 1 or -1 (50% chance of 1)
// sign(0.8); // returns 1 or -1 (80% chance of 1)
public static function sign(chance:Number=0.5):int
// bit(); // returns 1 or 0 (50% chance of 1)
// bit(0.8); // returns 1 or 0 (80% chance of 1)
public static function bit(chance:Number=0.5):int
// integer(50); // returns an integer between 0-49 inclusive
// integer(20,50); // returns an integer between 20-49 inclusive
public static function integer(min:Number,max:Number=NaN):int

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