Alright so I have been doing a lot of research on frameworks and structures for building out some classes of my own at work. We have a lot of code we share between developers and its finally time to move things into a bit more of a structured framework and leverage some of our reusable code. The first hill I had to climb was events. In AS3 events are really our communication pipeline. We use events to talk between objects while still keeping a nice Object Oriented independent structure. Events have there flaws though. The biggest of which, for me, is the lack of a real world usable way to outline for other developers when to use events in an interface. It is currently not possible in AS3 for an interface to dictate what events should be dispatched. Yes I have seen workarounds and even though they do fix the problem they also create more work then needed. This is where Signals comes into play.

As3 Signals is a library for dispatching events through composition instead of inheritance. A class does not need to extend EventDispatcher to use a signal and with that comes the ability to control the listeners to your signal. You can clear out everyone listening, add a listener only one time, and a lot of other neat features. The big deal though is performance. Is it faster? Well I threw together a little experiment using gSkinners Performance Harness to test dispatching 100000 events using a Event Dispatcher and then again using a Signal. The Tests start with 0 listeners to the signal and the event dispatcher and move up to 5. You can see the Performance Tests Here and if your interested in running this yourself feel free to download the code.

If your not interested in looking at all, let me just tell you signals is faster, though oddly enough when there are 0 listeners event dispatching is faster. Honestly I can’t imagine this happens very often though! Hope this helps some people out. Maybe in the near future I will pump out a small signals tutorial for those interested, doubtful though as I don’t think I could any better then this John Lindquist Signals Tutorial. Check it out!

Signals vs Events Performance

Hello again, in this tutorial I am going to go over Multitouch, IntelliJ, and Air 2.0 beta 2, along with SimTouch and the MSA Remote for the iPhone . We will be looking at how to setup IntelliJ to compile and run a Air 2 beta 2 project, inside this project we will add Multitouch events and use the iPhone to send those events to the air app. The iPhone will act as a simulator for a touch screen. Currently the SimConnect class we will be using only supports TOUCH_BEGIN, TOUCH_MOVE, and TOUCH_END events, thought hopefully we will see this extend out into gesture support. This tutorial is a bit long, and kinda advanced you should have an idea on how to create a Air app in Flex/Flash Builder already and be somewhat familiar with the IntelliJ IDE. Below are all the links I use in the tutorial, hopefully this saves you all time. Thanks again for stopping in, I will keep trying to push out tutorials as much as I can!

Tutorial Links

• Flex 4 SDK
• Adobe Air 2.0b2 SDK
• SimTouch Google Code Project
• MSA Remote iPhone App

In this tutorial I will be going over how to get IntelliJ working with the Flash IDE. We will look at configuring a Actionscript only project in IntelliJ and then running a Bash Script to call the Flash IDE. We will be using a shell script I have ported over from my TextMate Bundle you can download that below. For those just getting started with IntelliJ I recommend read Jesse Freeman’s IntelliJ Workflow Tutorial before you start into this.

For Windows Users the process is very similar except you cannot use the Bash Support Plugin you need to use the Batch Plugin. Sadly at the time of writing this the Batch Plugin in the “available plugins” section of intelliJ does not work so you need to download the Lastest  Batch Plugin from Google Code. Once you download this simply place the jar file it in your “C:\Users\{username}\.IntelliJIdea90\config\plugins” folder and restart IntelliJ. You will want to confirm it installed correctly by going to your IntelliJ Settings Panel and looking under IDE Settings -> Plugins to confirm that under the Installed  tab y0u see Batch Scripts Support with a check mark to the left.  Now when you edit your configuration instead of choosing Bash choose Batch and point it at the .bat file you download from this site. A quick warning the Batch Plugin does not seem to support folders with spaces in them, so you will need to be aware of that when you place your .BAT file, do not nest it inside any folders with spaces.

Hopefully this will help some more people feel comfortable moving over into the IntelliJ environment. Trust me you won’t regret it, especially if you are a Mac users looking for a good Actionscript coding environment. Thanks for stopping by! check back for more tutorials soon!

Download the: “Publish in Flash IDE” Shell Script For Mac

Download the: “Publish in Flash IDE” Shell Script For Windows