Alchemy installation problems under OSX

I’m writing this little issue I discovered today in the alchemy installation under OSX, in case someone else is having the same problem…

In fact, today I decided to makes a little swc library for an actionscript project using alchemy ( because of the lacks of union in flash ), so I downloaded the alchemy toolkit for OSX.


I spent a couple of hours trying to make it working on my Snow Leopard and because I’m not a shell and perl expert I finally moved to the linux toolkit under ubuntu ( even if on linux the Flex builder is really far to be usable!)
Anyway, this evening I decided to spend some more time trying to understand why when I was trying to execute the alchemy “gcc” script ( the ones inside the achacks folder, which is a perl script) nothing happened.
After long time with old style “print” debugging strategy, at the end I discovered an error in the “config” script in the main alchemy installation folder.
At this line (line 33):
if echo $MACHTYPE | grep darwin &> /dev/null; then
I had to modify it into:
if echo $MACHTYPE | grep -i darwin &> /dev/null; then
because the command “echo $MACHTYPE” outputs “x86_64-Apple-Darwin“, with the uppercase “D”.
In fact, after that modification everything finally worked!

Flex 3 Tree double-click to edit

Some people asked about changing the default editing behavior of a Flex 3 Tree control so  that item editing starts on a double-click event instead of the default single click.

Indeed it has been covered several times on forums or mailing list, but it’s faster to create a simple script than search for it sometimes.

Here’s the files:
Here’s the live demo:

Flash Player 10.1 and global error handling

Well, it seems that the upcoming flashplayer 10.1 (first half of 2010?) has been completely designed to fill the gap that the current flashplayer has with the smartphones world (multitouch, accelerometer, screen orientation, sleep mode, out-of-memory management, etc..).

There will be a lot of new useful features, if you look at the release note pdf: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf
But the most important feature, for me (as I asked a little time ago), is indeed the global error handling!
Unfortunately the global error handling feature hasn’t been already implemented in the current prerelease public version. I hope they will enable this feature soon, I really miss this option!


Apple is evil and developers are not stupid

If you’re an iPhone developer probably you have been involved in the messy App Store publishing process.
Here there is a very interesting post about the Apple’s mistakes: http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html
More or less I’m completely agree with the author, especially about the app store policies, because I tested in first person. There would be dozen of other topics I can found about it, but the app store is the perfect example.
But yesterday I discovered this post: “Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid“.
After reading that post I realized that developers are stupid because they pretend to publish their applications on the App Store! Wow, I never thought about this! When I signed the iphone sdk I didn’t read anywhere that I should publish my applications on the web because the app store is a mess!
I don’t question the fact that many applications could be published on the web, but that’s is another thing. The point is: I have the choice and I want to choose.
So the conclusion is that we are stupid because we don’t understand how much Apple is evil and we don’t publish applications on the web instead of trying to publish them on the App Store!
The assumption is that I have an application that could be either published on the app store as standalone application and on the web, and is my mistake if I want to publish on the app store.
So why apple simply doesn’t close the App Store for us poor developers and keeps it only for the big companies which pay in order to be in the front page?

Thoughts about flash on the iPhone

I didn’t have the chance yet to try out Flash CS5, but I’m still a bit concerned about the new feature that makes users able to compile their own application into valid iPhone apps.

Things look really good if you look at the examples and if you talk with the people that already had the chance to try this feature out. But I must remember that usually the excitement for a new – and let’s say outstanding – feature usually cannot guarantee the final result to be acceptable. I fear that this feature might evolve the same – bad – way as Alchemy did: they started with a promising project that then felt down to a side project because many users shown that it was possible to achieve the same or better results by just using plain AS.

A few weeks ago I started spending my free time on experimenting with generating a valid iPhone app from a SWF file. I didn’t know anything about the fact that the Adobe would have put the same feature in Flash CS5.
My approach wasn’t too sophisticated: basically, as long as I didn’t have so much time to spend on writing a full binary converter, I was parsing the SWF and then generating static Objective-C/C++ (well mostly C++ and I’ve used Objective-C as glue where strictly required) code that then was compiled by Xcode to a working iPhone application.

I stopped once I figured out that Adobe was going to promote a similar thing (even if their approach is better and probably more powerful), but I had time to figure out a few issues that they may encounter (or maybe they already encountered):

  • Generated applications are really big in size, mostly because there is a lot of glue code generated and because you need to replicate the FPL API in C++ to be able to easilly convert the SWF into an iPhone app;
  • ActionScript is a dynamic language, and this dynamicity must be taken into account when generating binary code (or source code in my situation). Even if using LLVM probably helped with this, you will always need to generate additional dynamic checks that slow down a lot the execution;
  • The FPL doesn’t support (yet) threading API, nor the AIR version does. So, if they want to preserve the portability of a flash game so it can be run with AIR or on the iPhone without any change, they are limiting the developers on building just quite simple games;
  • The same can be said for all the other native APIs. AIR for instance has multitouch API, which are however at a lower level then the ones provided by the iPhone;
  • The other big issue is rendering performance. When I was working on my project, I’ve tried many different approaches to figure out which one was the best to render decent vector graphics with a good framerate on the iPhone. Core Graphics is not an option, as long as it is as slow as hell. Using OpenGL to render the graphics increases a lot the performances, but adds a few limits to the rendering quality. The best approach I found was to mix caching and OpenGL rendering together, but that was not working fine with rapidly changing graphics. But I must say I didn’t have the same knowledge as the FPL developers on this topic and I didn’t have months to work on that too …
  • iPhone developers must take special care for memory and resource management; probably having a huge bootstrapping code and transition structures won’t help.

What I fear most actually is that they’ll be able sooner or later to solve all the issues and create a good product, but probably that product won’t be suitable for complex applications, that will be always developed directly using XCode.

That said, I think that probably a better approach would have been to figure out a way for Adobe to include the Flash Player on the iPhone. It’s already ready and I really can’t understand why they don’t release it (it must be Apple, and probably because having a Virtual Machine on the system will break the basis the App Store has been built over).
Having the FPL on the iPhone will still limit us, but it will open up a brighter future for AS developers who want to release apps that runs on the iPhone too (Did you ever heard about compile once, run everywhere?).

So let’s wait and see what happens. What I’ve seen so far on the app store are really simple games that don’t use so much resources, so I can’t really say yet if they did a great job or not …

Flash for iPhone!

Well, it’s not true at all, but it’s something like that ( they enabled this by using the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure).

With the upcoming Flash CS5 we will able to create iPhone applications using Actionscript 3 and the Flash IDE (Flash CS5)!
It also seems that in the future it will be possible to compile iPhone apps using the free flash compiler.
We won’t have flash iphone apps, but native iphone applications:


iPhone applications built with Flash Platform tools are compiled into standard, native iPhone executable packages and there is no runtime interpreter that could be used to run Flash byte-code within the application.

Most of the Flash Player 10 and AIR 2.0 APIs will be available, so for instance: pixel Bender filters and also dynamically loading SWFs that contain ActionScript (but the Actionscript will be ignored since there’s no flash VM in the iphone).


The Cons.

We won’t be able to test our apps using the Mac iPhone simulator.  And we cannot use the iPhone controls with actionscript.

Read original entry here:
Read the developers’ FAQ:

Add system excepthook in actionscript!

Imagine you’ve made a very huge flash application and many users will play with it every day.

Imagine they don’t have the flashplayer debug installed and at certain points they fall into undiscovered application bugs ( it’s impossible to have a real bug free application, we know this ).
Then, what happens? With the flashplayer debug installed you can see the traceback and you can also continue or dismiss the code execution. But without the debug player? The code will try to continue but probably at that point your application is broken and users will feel it more and more uncomfortable with it.
What I would like to have in flash, and probably you too, is a global system exception handling for those unhandled exception.
In this way you can both present the problem to your users and then also create a report system which will help you to improve and fix your own application!
Something like I did with SEPY years ago using the sys.excepthook of python:
When an exception is raised and uncaught, the interpreter calls sys.excepthook with three arguments, the exception class, exception instance, and a traceback object. In an interactive session this happens just before control is returned to the prompt; in a Python program this happens just before the program exits. The handling of such top-level exceptions can be customized by assigning another three-argument function to sys.excepthook.