Gareth Shapiro | London Based Flex / Air / Actionscript Freelance Developer & Trainer

We've all been in this situation. You have developed a mobile app, or desktop application. It has been accepted to the Android Marketplace / Apple's App Store, or you have uploaded it onto your website or intranet for distribution. People have installed it and are using it.

It's time for version 2 and you make the inevitable changes to the database. You have to write code, in the model of your MVC pattern usually, that copes both with a upgrading the database from version 1 and creating a database from scratch for a user who is using your application for the first time at version 2.

And so the pattern continues, and the problem grows, for each version. In version 3 you have to write code that handles people upgrading from version 2 to version 3, version 1 to version 3 and people installing the app for the first time.

What a pain! Not anymore …

All AS3 programmers have had to cope with situations where what they can see on the screen is different to what their code is telling them. Within Air, Flex and Flash applications the two main contributors to this are; the Flash Player is single threaded, apart from a few exceptions in Air, and internally is based around a frame rate.

Have you ever tried to measure something you have just added to the Display List and even though you can see it on the screen your measurement, something like width or height, is coming back as 0? How about when you are preloading, does your preloader get stuck at 10% and then jump to 100% at the end?

At the end of 2008 I worked on a Flash project for The Economist called 'The World in 2009'. There was a graphic designer who was responsible for producing a world map vector and I wired it all up.

As you can imagine this artwork was intricate. Each country had a border and a background colour that were separate objects, some text fields for labels, and as you would expect also grouped into continents. The designer was using Adobe Illustrator to create the vector shapes and importing these into Flash and sending me the .fla

The process was not very smooth. There were changes to the artwork of course, Illustrator does not create MovieClips in the same way that you would manually and also when dealing with such an complex piece, old fashioned user error creeps in.

I have been using Google's excellent free Webmaster Tools to make sure that this blog is in good shape as far as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is concerned. One of the things I needed to improve were the description meta tags on each page but I could not find a plug in that would help me achieve this. So I wrote one myself and it is free for anyone who uses the Nucleus blogging system to use.