hasan's blog

The next version of Flash Player will offer a lot of enhancements to the user experience and it seems Adobe listened to the developer community on a few of the features. Here's one that is sure to be huge:

Thought I'd blog about this since I haven't seen this posted before and it comes up from time to time. With AS3, we got access to a new function parameter, the ...rest parameter, which allows us to pass in a dynamic list of parameters for usage by our functions. Here's an example:

// Method in SomeClass
public function someMethod(...rest):void
{
    for (var i:uint=0; i < rest.length; i++)
    {
        trace(rest[i]);
    }
}

That will trace out each ...rest parameter that you pass to the method call like so:

// Usage from SomeOtherClass

I had a breakthrough recently on several usability bugs that were bothering me. For a habitual work-a-holic like myself, hurdling obstacles makes it all worth the long, sleepless nights. Although it's hard to find time to devote to it because of my official workload, it's still rewarding to see KwikUML grow in spite of my unintentional neglect.

I wanted to spend some time this morning updating my FB3 plugin for Eclipse to the release version and had grown accustomed to the previous upgrade process:

1. Download your DMG
2. Install to /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in
3. Go grab some coffee

So I snuck in some more time early this morning to enable diagrams and exports of MySQL table schemas in KwikUML. I also removed the Print Documentation button until I have time to work on that feature and added a context menu to the canvas that allows you to export code and images, as well as, clear the canvas.

Things have been really busy lately and I haven't had much time to be in the lab. So, I snuck in a couple of minutes today to see if I could get PHP 5 support wired into my UML tool, KwikUML. I thought I had an uphill battle, but I actually had everything wired already and just had to fill in one method body and in minutes I had PHP class and interface stub code exporting.

This is a pretty sweet combination. TextMate has been my favorite text editor on the Mac for a while although I must confess that I hadn't been taking advantage of all it's features. Through "bundles", you can transform TextMate from an ordinary editor into a complete development environment.

After doing an impromptu presentation @ the LAAir meeting last night, it dawned on me that I really needed to get my lab in shape where it's fit for public consumption. Thanks to Drupal, I was able to bang out a decent site in only a few hours. It's nothing award-winning, but it does allow me to house all my existing code and new apps in a more organized fashion. Stay tuned 'cause I'm in the lab everyday...

Mira is a cool little app that extends the usability of your Apple Remote. Just download, install, add your application (pretty much any app), map the remote keys to what you want to happen and you're done. Took about 5 mins to remote enable a custom app that I'm building and that's pretty sweet!!

Ran across this interesting article this morning about human brain capacity and IQ. So, the next time your boss is trying to get you to do a million things @ once just point her to this article...