The Rubik’s Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. My latest project was to create a 3D engine (I have used papervision) based on this logic + integrate with facebook. Finally, the game is ready and you can play s.Oliver ‘s Cube on Facebook.
In computing, a quine is a computer program which produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. For amusement, programmers sometimes attempt to develop the shortest possible quine in any given programming language.
While playing with wonderfl I have found a nice ActionScript quine solution from yonatan, which I decided to shorten. It would be shorter code using trace() but than you won’t be able to log/see output on wonderfl, thats why TextField is used.
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton. The “game” is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input from humans. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.
Code shortening can make your code more readable as well as more unreadable 
. While it is recommend to use coding conventions and standards, in some cases you can spare a lot of lines using some shortening. In fact there must not be a conflict between using convetion vs. using shortening, and soon after you get used to some “shortcuts”, your code may be reduced in reasonable amount of lines. Some reading about code optimization can be found here, this article extends optimizations.
At last, I managed to work youtube videos on my blog using Embedded Video plugin. Watch this youtube screencast video about how to make facebook video calls with onConference application:
RatingButtonBar class extends ButtonBar and is meant to be used for ratings. Just like common star ratings all over the internet. Based on ButtonBar it makes it easy skinable for developers. Use bindable selectedIndex to get index of selected rating (zero based).
This article extends “Embedding fonts bold vs. black” post. Sometimes it may be tricky to guess correct fontName with your font. Compilator works with different fontNames than what Flash IDE shows you. Lets say you want to embed fonts from .swf (library) file into .css file. In Flash IDE, properties panel for TextInput, character Family and Style stand for something totaly different that what you gonna need with correct fontName value later in .css file. In fact solution is very easy.
Those are hard times. Facebook discontinued support for Notifications.send method March 1, 2010. Calling this method returns error code 3 (Unknown method). Instead, developers are directed to use other communication channels. From those some are not yet even a part of facebook-actionscript-api yet (dashboard) other not published from facebook (invites) and those that may work via api are experimental and may change any day (activities).
Excluding streams as communication channel, the only usable way, these days, to acquire some new facebook application users is using <Fb:request-form> (part of FBML). When your application is IFrame, you may find interesting that you are able to use FBML within your HTML files. In order to make this happen, you have to use <Fb:serverFbml> (renders the FBML on a Facebook server inside an iframe). Now, lets see how to open request form in your Facebook Iframe application:
It may be very tricky thing to get papervision 3d scene rendered correctly event for the simpliest objects. In my case, I have created simple 3d scene with few primitive objects (8 cubes). Cubes are positioned close to each other to create shape of bigger cube + some small space between. Cubes are added into wrapping DisplayObject3D, later wrapper is added to scene in order to make it easy to rotate cubes as a group. Camera targets the center of the scene. In the demo, there are 3 sliders to rotate wrapping object in each x, y, z axis + two buttons that rotates wrapper in the problematic possition (based on z-sorting fix approach). Finally I managet it to work, you can follow my approaches below. Notice the changes are not cummulative, each approach comes from original Application.mxml. All of the ideas collected online from blogs, forums etc.
