I can’t begin to tell you how many projects I have worked on where there is literally NO documentation what-so-ever. And I am not without blame myself. Personally I try to avoid writting comments mixed in with my code and substitute comments with good, self explanatory naming conventions and clean code. This is good for me but someone else may not understand my code in detail. I have always liked the javadoc commenting style and even more importantly I have always been impressed with javadoc document generation.

So I did a quick search for ActionScript JavaDoc generators and found “Zen Doc”, an awesome JavaDoc Generator for ActionScript. I will begin using this personally and professionally and may possibly make it a standard for all codebase members.

Check it out at:
http://www.senocular.com/

Check out the Demo;
http://www.senocular.com/projects/ZenDoc/index.php

I used to build lots of .swf’s embedded in html pages and set the html page as my desktop as oppossed to just having an image set as my desktop. This was cool because the swf would read from an xml file and add links that I can access directly from my desktop. I also had various effects and what not as well as news aggregators, clocks and an mp3 player. The only problem that I couldn’t seem to solve is that when I would try to make a selection on my desktop focus was on the .swf and not the desktop. So this was a problem.

My solution was to do the same exact thing but in AJAX rather than flash this way focus would remain on the desktop. Below is a link to the working sample as well as a link to the source files for you to use as you wish. Simply add all of your favorite images in the images folder and then modify the ajax-desktop.js file and add your images as indexes of the ‘imagesArray’. Everytime you boot up you will have a different image load randomly as your desktop. You can add links to your executables allowing you to rid yourself of desktop icons as well as links to your favorite sites.

Sample:
ajax-desktop.html

Download Source code:
ajax-desktop.zip

I heard about this a while ago but haven’t had any time to dig in just yet. If you haven’t checked out flickr than you definitely should because it’s basically a free getty images and best off all Adobe caught on and developed an entire API to interface with flickr for ActionScript 3.0.

Docs:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/as_libraries/docs/flickr/

Source:
http://gsolo.com/temp/macromedia/flex/beta/FlickrService/

Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/

I recently have been receiving numerous requests from around the world to join the codebase and I am really impressed by the interest that has been generated throughout the community.

The codebase is currently under construction as I simply have not had the time to fully implement all of the functionality that will be required such as the CMS.

For those of you who are not familiar with the codebase it is an open source ActionScript code repository whereas registered users can upload ActionScript classes as well as download other users classes and both use and extend each others classes. At the moment the codebase is in read-only mode and I still have over 1,000 classes to add to the repository.

I will keep everyone up-to-date as to the status of the codebase on my blog while it is in development, afterwhich I will continue to write posts relating to new developments of the codebase.

If you would like to join the codebase just send me an email with the following information and I will set you up with an account.
Name.
E-mail Adress.
Location.
Language.
URL.
Industry.

You can visit the codebase in at http://code.ericfeminella.com