I’m really happy to announce my latest internal project, named glic (previously Daedalus), or “gskinner lightweight interface components”. My company (gskinner.com) spends a lot of time building rich internet applications, and we grew really tired of working around v2 issues, and explaining major issues like file size and CPU usage to clients, so we finally decided to do something about it, and glic is the result.

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I was just reading about the next generation portable game consoles coming out from Sony and Nintendo via a post on FreakSauce. These units will feature large color screens, 802.11 wireless networking (presumably with internet capabilities), and processing power to spare. The Nintendo even has a touch screen built in.

I sure hope Macromedia is considering deploying a Flash run time environment Flash for these system. There should be a large user base for both of these consoles and there are so many possibilites: occasionally connected apps; apps that communicate with other nearby consoles for community, collaboration or gaming; rich productivity and commerce apps; apps that use the network to synch data between your portable gaming system and your home computer. The idea seems really exciting to me, and I haven’t even had a chance to think them through yet!

Obviously though, this could all be muck, if there are hardware, orlicensing limitations on these systems that would preclude it.

Anyway, I need to get some sleep. Enough ranting.

A couple months ago, Mike Chambers released an EventProxy class, which served to make delegating EventDispatcher events simpler. At the time, I meant to release my own EventProxy class with some extra functionality, but it slipped my mind until today when Phil reminded me of it.

My EventDispatcher works almost exactly the same as Mike’s, with 2 differences:

1. It calls handleEvent on its target, as well as the specified function.


2. It has an enabled property, that lets you temporarily disable the proxy

You can download EventProxy by clicking here. It should be placed in the com.gskinner.events package.

You can see a brief usage example below. For a full description of how to use EventProxy, please see Mike’s post on the subject.

// import the EventProxy so we can refer to it by name:
import com.gskinner.events.EventProxy;
// create an instance of EventProxy, and tell it to call
// doStuff in this scope when triggered:
clickEventProxy:EventProxy = new EventProxy(this,"doStuff");
// register the EventProxy to listen for click events
// from the button:
myPushButton.addEventListener("click",clickEventProxy);
// this function will be called when the button is clicked.
function doStuff(p_evtObj:Object):Void {
trace("button clicked");
// stop it from firing again for now:
clickEventProxy.enabled = false;
}

I recently updated the PathFinder algorithm with the ability to attempt diagonal paths, and ability to make diagonal movements. Diagonal movements approximately doubles the time required to find paths, but that is easily overcome by publishing for Flash Player 7.

As with the original PathFinder (original code can be downloaded by clicking here), this PathFinder is aimed at being a fast and reasonably accurate solution. It runs exponentially faster than an A* solution (the larger the map, the larger the speed gap), but will not always find the best path (sometimes it won’t even find a path). It was also developed to be scaleable, so you can adjust the processor usage for different scenarios. To this end, you can adjust the maximum depth of the path (max length), and the “level” of the search. The level is a value between 0 and 7 that indicates how many different paths the PathFinder will attempt and compare (a level of 7 will check 8 different paths and choose the best). PathFinder will also return a best fail path if it is unable to find a solution, so that you can have agents move towards a goal even if a full path can’t be found.

Once I have a chance to finish the updates to PathFinder, and test it fully, I will release the source code for non-commercial uses. If you’re interested in licensing the code for a commercial project, you can contact me using the contact button at the top of the page.

Read on for demos…

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When I announced that Phil Chung was joining gskinner.com, I said I would post our CVs soon, so that our prospective clients could get an idea of our competencies and experience. Here they are:

Grant Skinner (60kb PDF)

Phil Chung (60kb PDF)

In addition to our core competencies in architecture, development, usability and business logic/strategy, we also work with a number of close partners to offer the full suite of multimedia/ web application service (design, multimedia, video, branding, etc).

If you’re interested in engaging us in a consulting, subcontract or development role, or are interested in more information, please feel free to fire me an email (use the contact button at the top of the page).

There has been a lot of interest in this lately, so I thought I would make a formal announcement (does blogging count as a formal announcement?). I am currently licensing large portions of my code library for commercial use. This includes the full source code for Flash0S2, the source code for gModeler, and the code for the gskinner.com site. This is in addition to the smaller licensable items like Pathfinder, the gesture recognition engine (also serves as a generic pattern recognition engine), XMLQueue, etc.

I’ve had a few companies license the FlashOS2/gModeler combo, and it seems to be working well for them.

There should be a lot more code available for license in the not too distant future, as Phil and I develop our new “top-secret” project, code-named Daedalus.

If you’re interested in licensing any of this code, fire me an email (the contact button at the top of the page).

I recently received confirmation that I will be speaking at FlashForward 2004 in New York City on “Development Process: A Visual Tour”. The session description follows:

A well-executed development process leads to better results, happier clients, higher profits and less headaches for both developers and designers. A visual medium demands a visual process, so this session will take an illustrated tour through the strategies and deliverables that form the basis of a cohesive Flash development process. It will also include tips on how to extract client input, manage expectations, plan a project, promote collaboration and generally keep your boss (or whoever writes the checks) happy.

I’m really looking forwards to the conference, and meeting up with more Flash peeps. It sounds like the FlashForward people are really working hard at making this conference a great one.

Thanks to Phil joining gskinner.com, I finally had enough free time to make a couple of updates to gModeler that I had hoped to get done a long time ago. Firstly, I fixed the issues with Mozilla based browsers displaying the source of the application page, instead of the application. Secondly, I added the capability to export ActionScript 2.0 stub code – it currently dumps all the class code together (so you have to separate it into class files manually), but that’s the limitation of outputting to a dialog box.

Let me know what you think of the code / comments it’s exporting – I’ll tweak it if necessary.

Now to get started on v2.0. 😉