One week in the wild and three minor updates have passed and it’s time to give AILogger some new functionality and a few tweaks. If you’re tired of downloading new versions, you’ll be glad to know that I intend to to start piling the updates with slightly longer intervals from now on.

This time, we reach version 1.1.0 and here are the changes:

• New optional detailed logging via public var detailedLogging
• Option to turn log coloring off via public var coloring
• More robust handling of different message types
• More robust log coloring

Download version 1.1.0 here.

EDIT: Version 1.0.4 available

[1.0.4 - 5.6.2009]
- Better information output from logged events

[1.0.3 - 4.6.2009]
- Added ability to detect logged events
- Logged ErrorEvents are now displayed with event type

[1.0.2 - 2.6.2009]
- Fixed a bug where severity coloring was not applied to the last characted in a log line

Today I was convinced to share a piece of code that has been with me for many years. AILogger is a sophisticated text field on your stage to write stuff into when trying to debug a Flash application that’s online. It has several features lite automatic date/time stamping, severity coloring, repeat detection, password protection, line appending and keyboard scrolling. You can download and read more about it here.

My co-worker Jacob called me up right before 2 pm today to tip me off about a moose swimming in Sandefjord bay. I rushed out with camera in hand and just then it passed me. I was at work and our offices are located right next to the water, and so I snapped this shot.

Now, I didn’t even know these animals could swim, so I was quite surprised. As soon as I got back to my desk I Twittered the incident and uploaded the picture to TwitPic. My Tweet was Re-Tweeted I don’t know how many times, but the picture was viewed by 140 people within the first 15 minutes. And then the Norwegian TV station TV2 called and wanted to interview me and use the picture. The article can be found here.

So I made the news today. Me and a moose.

Download Entonnoir

So after a few headaches I arrived at a thesis (at best): If developing and compiling in Flex Builder, but using a library of assets (in the form of a SWF-file) compiled by the Flash IDE, loading the assets.swf at runtime and embedding are not going to give you equal access the assets and their associated classes. Loading the asset SWF will enable you to use:

loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("MySymbolClass")

That will return a class definition of the library symbol and it’s associated custom class and base class.

However:

[Embed(source="assets.swf", symbol="MySymbol")]
var MySymbolClass:Class;

will yield, put simply, the most descriptive, built-in class able to describe the symbol. But that’s at the discretion of the compiler. So if I have a button with an associated custom class, let’s say FancyButton, in assets.swf, that code will be elegantly ingnored by the Flex compiler and I’m only able to datatype the button as Sprite or MovieClip (if it has more than one frame). So I’m guessing the philosophy behind the embed compiler directive is that it is meant for embedding primitive assets, like bitmaps, sprites, fonts and so on into the class that adds the fancy, custom code, while loading and using getDefinition is the only way that will allow the assets to have custom code associated with them.

As seen in the photo comic above from the 70′, this discussion might have been going on for a while without me knowing it. I think I will be loading my asset SWF at runtime from now on unless someone has a good reason for me not to.

The Old Ship Hotel bar filled to the limit with beer-loving flash developers

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who ran and attended Flash On The Beach ‘08 in Brighton. I had a great time! Here’s a photo I wanted to share. It’s from the Old Ship Hotel bar tuesday night after The Honey Club ran out of beer in just one hour. It was taken with my camera phone, so please excuse the quality.

After the conference I got to kill a few hours in London, so I went to Hamleys to buy the mandatory travel gift for my son. And man do they have some fascinating stuff there. This is a 23 carat gold plated model of a Mercedes SLK which was explicitly stated “Not for sale”. Check it out:

A finger joint is one of the strongest ways to connect two pieces of wood and it requires no screws or nails, only glue. It is very hard to accomplish without a jig specially created for this task, but they are expensive. So this is an attempt to design a DIY finger joint jig that’s as cheap and simple to build as possible. It requires a work table with a gutter in the middle and fixtures for the work piece, this is just an idea for a jig that will control the spacing of the fingers. If you know a thing or two about this kind of thing, I would really like it if you could tell me what you think, or even better; ways to improve it.

Here it are the plans: (download as pdf)

All white elements in the drawing are wood and so are the spacers as they are will have to be made to match the width of the router bit used. There are angle plates at the left side that serve as stops for the spacers and the cradle will be pushed against the spacers.

I have built it and some day, I hope very soon, I will  have the time to try it out. If you give it a shot yourself, please tell me what you think.

EDIT: There is a thread over at Router Forums about this project.