Author Archives: Curtis J. Morley

BRAINhoney Beta @ NECC Conference

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BRAINHoney

We will be presenting the Beta of the next wave in education at the NECC conference in Atlanta Georgia. This educational revolution is called BRAINHoney. We are excited to demo this new online collaborative learning community & the tools that bring rich multimedia lesson development into the hands of everyone, everywhere, at anytime.

If you are at NECC please come see the full demo presentation and sign up to be one of our Beta testers. We are also giving away iPods. BRAINHoney is a product of agilix inc. & can be found in the conference program. If you are not going to be at the conference & would still like to get one of the limited spots on the BRAINHoney Beta team, then please post a comment here & we will contact you.

As always Happy Flashing & Happy Learning.

It’s a Girl (At least it will be in October)

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Well my Beautiful wife Nicole and I found out that we are having a girl and here are some pictures of the pretty princess. I think she has my eyes and Nicole’s lips. It is a great day. Nicole is doing well and is still very skinny for being pregnant. The other kids were very surprised because they all thought it was going to be a girl. All except for the other girl in our family. The due date is October 30th so we are looking for appropriate names. Any suggestions on names please comment here on my blog.

Our baby girl.

Our little girl

Flash CS3 / Flex 2 AS3 Error #1119

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Error #1119:
Access of possibly undefined property buttonText through a reference with static type flash.display:SimpleButton

or

Error #1119: Access of possibly undefined property someProperty through a reference with static type flash.display:DisplayObject.

Description:
This means that you are trying to change dynamic text nested inside a button. This is a simple fix. Just change the button to a movieClip.

Another more prevalent reason that you will get ActionScript Error #1119 is because the the new way Flash/flex handles parent objects has changed. In AS2 parent.myVar would work just fine. In ActionScript3 the compiler doesn’t know what the parent is unless specifically typed or casted instead it chalks everything up to DisplayObjectContainer. This means that it doesn’t know that the ‘parent’ is a MovieClip. The reason for this is because you can now change the object from one displayObject to another easily at compile time. You could change the parent object from a MovieClip to SimpleButton at compile time.

You also want to check your syntax to make sure that you have dynamically targeted an object correctly. For example, if you are trying to use AS3 to target a series of movieClips dynamically and each of the names start with ‘card’ and have a sequential value as well then you must use the code in Fix3 to prevent AS3 Error #1119. Fix #4 is similar to Fix 3 but Fix 4 is specific to the DisplayObject.
Fix 1:
You need to cast the parent as the type that you want or you need.

myTextField.text = MovieClip(this.parent).someVar
or
myTextField.text = (this.parent as MovieClip).someVar

One of the best explanations of casting for this error is written up by Josh Tynjala go visit his blog called “Why doesn’t the ‘parent’ property work the same in ActionScript 3”

.

Fix 2:
Rather than looking outside the movie for the variable you can push the variable into the child movieClip and then access it within itself. For example if I have a movieClip named bob that is inside of a clip named joe then I would have Joe push the variable into bob and bob would access it within himself and not need to ask his parent for the variable because he already has it.

From Joe

bob.someVar = “This is the variable”;

From Bob

myTextField.text = someVar;

Fix 3:

Bad Code:

this.card[i].id = “something”;

Good Code:

this[“card”+i].id = “something;

Fix 4:
The good code below uses a direct reference to the object that holds the property someProperty. Whereas the Bad Code example is trying to access the property through a reference through the displayObject. Because the displayObject doesn’t have the property it cannot change it.

Bad Code:

this.getChildByName(‘card’+_setClicksCounter).someProperty = true;

Good Code:

this[“card”+_setClicksCounter].someProperty = true;

Fix 5:
1119: Access of possibly undefined property nestedMovieClip through a reference with static type Class.
This is easy to fix. It just means that you are trying to access a nested object within the class statement rather than from within the Class. The problem is that the keyword “this” in the first example doesn’t references the Class itself rather the object the Class is linked to.

Bad Code:

package com.cjm.sound
{
public class SoundControl extends MovieClip
{
var _progwidth:uint = this.progBar.width;
public function SoundControl (url=null):void
{
doSomething();
}}}

Good Code:

package com.cjm.sound
{
import flash.display.MovieClip;
public class SoundControl extends MovieClip
{
var _progwidth:uint;
public function SoundControl ():void
{
_progwidth = this.progBar.width;
}}}

Related Errors:
Flash / Flex Error 1056 – You will get AS3 Error 1056 instead of 1119 if you don’t properly type your object before referencing a property on it. For example var s:Sprite = new Sprite(); s._x = 10; will give error 1119 but var s = new Sprite(); s._x = 10; will give Error 1056.

As always – Happy Flashing

Flash CS3 / Flex 2 AS3 Error#1168

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Error #1168: Illegal assignment to function setTextFormat.

This is another easy one. It just means that you assign the format within parenthesis rather than after the “=” sign.
Bad Code:

var myText:TextField = new TextField();
var myFrmt:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
myFrmt.color = 0x336699;
myFrmt.font = “Franklin Gothic Book”;
myText.text = “Flash is fun – Happy Flashing Everyone”;
myText.border =true;
myText.wordWrap = true;
myText.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.CENTER;
myText.setTextFormat = myFrmt;
this.addChild(myText);

Good Code:

var myText:TextField = new TextField();
var myFrmt:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
myFrmt.color = 0x336699;
myFrmt.font = “Franklin Gothic Book”;
myText.text = “Flash is fun – Happy Flashing Everyone”;
myText.border =true;
myText.wordWrap = true;
myText.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.CENTER;
myText.setTextFormat(myFrmt);
this.addChild(myText);

And this is how you resolve Error #1168: Illegal assignment to function setTextFormat.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego, Jared Kroff, and Adam Devincent

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So I noticed that a lot of people are looking for my former students and Flash geniuses Jared Kroff and Adam DeVincent. Through my good friend Gordon Peterson I found that Jared Kroff and Adam DeVincent are now with a company called Red Interactive Agency. According to Gordon Funktion12 was acquired or something by this agency after sweeping the FITC Awards. Whatever they payed for www.Funktion12.com they got a good deal. Jared and Adam are amazing.

So to contact them you can call or mail the Salt Lake city office of Red Interactive Agency at:
Phone 801.355.4900
Fax 801.355.4901

Mailing Address:
230 S. 500 W.
Salt Lake City, UT 84101

So for all you googlers that are looking for Jared Kroff and Adam Devincent this may help. If nothing else you should check out Red Interactive Agency it just won the FWA Site of the Month and is amazing.

Curtis J. Morley will present at TTIX conference

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I will be speaking at the “Teaching with Technology Information Exchange” conference this year which will be held at Utah Valley State College (soon to be Utah Valley University) on June 7th and 8th. The conference will be held in the Student Center and my session will be in room SC 206 A on Thursday at 10 – 10:50 AM and room SC 115 on Friday at 10 – 10:50 AM. I will be presenting with Dr. Clint Rogers (Research Associate – Faculty at BYU), Dr. Steve Liddle (Director, Rollins Center for e-Business and Associate Professor, Information Systems), and Kyle Mathews (a BYU student) on the topic of “The Present and Future of Web 2.0 Technologies in Teaching and Learning”. Check back after the conference for presentation notes, links, and downloads. You will find the conference fascinating and as always the conference has free registration.

The abstract is below:

Teaching with Technology Information Exchange Conference (TTIX)(June 7-8 at UVSC)

http://www.ttix.org
June 7 – SC 206 A (10 – 10:50 AM)
June 8 – SC 115 (10 – 10:50 AM)

The Present and Future of Web 2.0 Technologies in Teaching and Learning

Information technology continues to challenge educational paradigms (Brown, 2000; Schank, 2002). Keeping up-to-date with the most current trends and technologies that are capturing the minds and imaginations of youth is central to knowing how to structure e-learning experiences in the coming decade. Most of the existing e-learning that has been produced is dry and boring. Current learning management systems are not generally used for learner customization, feedback, or collaboration with other learners and teachers (Rogers, Liddle, Chan, Isom, Doxey, 2007). Additionally, high-quality content that is interactive, novel, and engaging is often “trapped” in a specialized format that is not interoperable, making it difficult to transfer to another technology or purpose.

The objectives of this presentation are to provide alternative mental-models that help teachers integrate Web 2.0 technologies and interactions into current educational practice, show examples of what currently exists, and demo (on day two will give hands-on experience with) a cutting-edge global community learning platform.

In the Web 2.0 era, web users expect the opportunity to interact with one another and to contribute in a participatory, continually evolving, dynamic web. Examples of this phenomenon include Wikipedia (wikipedia.org), a reader-created and -maintained encyclopedia, web logs or blogs (e.g., see blogger.com), and YouTube (youtube.com), which was recently bought by Google for more than $1.6 billion. Although there have been several efforts from institutions like MIT to make available huge amounts of digital content, the usefulness of these materials have been met with mixed results (Hylen, 2006; Terkla & O’Leary, 2006). Most of these online approaches are similar to the enterprise learning management systems (WebCT, Blackboard, etc.) in that they typically have the “course” as the basic unit of organization and they model traditional university courses in being “led by an instructor, following a specified curriculum to be completed at a predetermined pace” (Downes, 2005). They are still focused on content delivery and creation from teachers to learners.

The move itself, however, towards digitization and open sharing of content indicates that the value is not as much the content transfer only, but rather in the learning community, and the use of the content in interactive, creative, and meaningful ways. As the web and learners themselves are changing, online learning invites Web 2.0 platforms that focus more on ongoing content creation and collaboration in communities of people that are both teachers and learners. This presentation will demo and day two will give hands-on experience with a learning system that is being developed to support uploading, reorganizing, ranking, sharing and reusing rich content, assignments, and assessments in a global learning community, using a Web 2.0-style of interaction.

Flash CS3 / Flex Error Messages – Error #1063:

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ArgumentError: Error #1063: Argument count mismatch on com.cjm::DrawLines/::onEnterFrame(). Expected 0, got 1.

This is an easy one it means that you got an argument passed to your function yet you did not specify that one was coming. So you did this “function Bob ()” instead of “function Bob (myEvent:Event)” This error is common when dealing with Events.

Flash CS3 / Flex Error Messages #1010:

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So that you don’t have to figure out all the cryptic error messages that are being thrown from Flash 9 and Flex I have decided to compile a list of error messages and what they mean in a practical sense.

TypeError: Error #1010: A term is undefined and has no properties.

What this error means is that you are trying to access a property of an object that isn’t there. This is very common when using Arrays. This error will also pop-up if you are trying to access a property of an Object that has not been assigned/created.
Bad Example 1:

for (var i:uint=0; i<=internalArray.length; i++) {
if (internalArray[i].length > 10){
trace(internalArray[i].length);
}
}

Good Example 1:

The above example will throw the error because you are trying to access 1 extra element on the end of your array. Just remove the final loop by removing the “=” sign in the comparison. Because Arrays are “0 based” i<=internalArray.length will take you beyond the last index of the array and try and evaluate for a value that is not there. For example var newArray:Array = [“Bob”, “Joe”, “Jim”]; has a length of 3 but Jim has an index of 2.

for (var i:uint=0; i<internalArray.length; i++) {
if (internalArray[i].length > 10){
trace(internalArray[i].length);
}
}

Bad Example 2:

for (var i:uint=0; i 10){
trace(internalArray[i].bob);
}
}

Good Example 2:

The above example will not work because the property bob has not been defined anywhere in the code. You can remedy this by removing the reference to “bob” or by declaring what the “bob” property for each item in the array.

for (var i:uint=0; i 10){
trace(internalArray[i]);
}
}

Bad Example 3:

This example tries to access a property that is created(instantiated) a few lines down.

for (var i:uint=0; i 10){
trace(internalArray[i]);
}
}

var internalArray:Array = [“bob”,”jim”,”joe”];

Good Example 3:

The order of operation is important because even though Flash/Flex does some “hoisting” you will still get errors if you don’t order things properly.

var internalArray:Array = [“bob”,”jim”,”joe”];

for (var i:uint=0; i
if (internalArray[i].length > 10){
trace(internalArray[i]);
}
}

As always – Happy Flashing

Flex2 Builder not installing on Vista

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So for all you people that jumped on the Windows Vista bandwagon you may be experiencing difficulty running Flex2 Builder after you have installed it.

This is the error that I was getting:

!SESSION 2007-05-11 20:10:31.205 ———————————————–
eclipse.buildId=unknown
java.version=1.4.2_12
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
BootLoader constants: OS=win32, ARCH=x86, WS=win32, NL=en_US
Command-line arguments: -os win32 -ws win32 -arch x86

!ENTRY org.eclipse.update.configurator 2007-05-11 20:10:31.696
!MESSAGE Cannot backup current configuration

!ENTRY org.eclipse.update.configurator 2007-05-11 20:10:31.727
!MESSAGE Could not rename configuration temp file

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2007-05-11 20:10:32.644
!MESSAGE Application error
!STACK 1
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no swt-win32-3139 in java.library.path
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java:123)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.win32.OS.(OS.java:18)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.(Display.java:125)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createDisplay(Workbench.java:381)
at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createDisplay(PlatformUI.java:155)
at com.adobe.flexbuilder.standalone.FlexBuilderApplication.run(FlexBuilderApplication.java:45)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.PlatformActivator$1.run(PlatformActivator.java:226)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:376)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:163)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:334)
at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:278)
at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:973)
at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:948)

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2007-05-11 20:10:32.647
!MESSAGE Bundle update@plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e32_2.0.155577/ [70] was not resolved.
!SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.osgi 2007-05-11 20:10:32.647
!MESSAGE Missing required bundle org.eclipse.debug.ui_[3.2.0,99.0.0).

And this is how to resolve it:

I experienced the same issue when I tried to install Flex on a new Vista system. Here’s how I corrected it:

1) Navigate to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 2\plugins

2) Look for the file “org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_3.1.2.jar”. You will need to open this in a file compression program such as WinAce, WinRar or WinZip. If you don’t have such a program you can try:

2a) Copy (make sure you COPY, not MOVE) the file to another location, such as your desktop.

2b) Rename the file with a “.zip” extension (i.e. change “.jar” to “.zip”). NOTE: You will not see the file extension if your system is configured to hide extensions. In this case, open a Windows Explorer window (“My Computer”, etc.) and press the “Alt” key. A menu bar will appear. Select “Tools -> Folder Options”. Select the “View” tab, and look for “Hide extensions for known file types”. Uncheck the box, then click OK.

2c) You should now be able to right-click the file and use Vista’s built-in .zip extraction to extract the contents to a folder.

3) Within the org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_3.1.2.jar file is a file called “swt-win32-3139.dll”. Copy this file to C:\Windows\System32\ (You will be asked for a confirmation when you do this).

Once that is done, Flex should run correctly. You can now delete the copy of the .jar file that you made, as well as the folder created by Vista’s .zip extraction (if applicable).

Hope this helps!

The above excerpt was taken from the following website at Adobe

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/rss.cfm?forumid=60&catid=539

As always Happy Flashing/Flexing