Announcing as3-karaoke-player, my first open library

Today I’m very excited to announce my first open source library: as3-karaoke-player. It comes from a request to make a small karaoke website. The idea is that karaoke is a popular kind of entertainment in Vietnam so I thought I would make the core rendering engine open source so that everyone especially my fellow developers can make and/or enjoy karaoke online. (About the said karaoke site, of course I only charged the GUI customization and the Red5 recorder)

You can check out or download the source at Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/as3-karaoke-player/. This library is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Here's the sample player:

(The background photo is taken by me :P )

as3signals: new approach for AS3 Events

There are times you may find that the built-in events of AS3 are limited and even troublesome. Here are some circumstances that EventDispatchers turn against developers:

1. Objects MUST extend EventDispatcher in order to be able to dispatch events. Implementing IEventDispatcher alone is impossible because the event target is read-only and you cannot change it from outside of EventDispatcher.
2. It’s difficult to manage events. There’s no way you can remove all event handlers attached to an event dispatcher at once. So in some cases, you don’t remove them properly and they start causing bugs. (BTW, using weak references is not reliable and not recommended.)
3. You cannot pass extra data to you listener unless you extends a new Event object
4. You cannot set up your interface in a way that it can enforce implementing classes to dispatch the required events.
5. On performance perspective, creating objects is one of the most evil things. That’s why any advanced programmers must know and practically use objects pool. However, we are still wasting a lot of resources creating event objects, especially repetitive events like mouse move or enter frame.
6. Read here for more critiques on AS3 events

So in order to address those issues, Robert Penner has adopted an alternative to AS3 events namely as3signals. (Follow the link for more info and get the library)

OpenZoom library & SDK

I intended to note this on twitter but afraid that it will be washed away by other tweets. So I decided to bookmark any interesting ActionScript library here in a special category: ‘libraries’

Here’s the first:

“OpenZoom SDK

The open source OpenZoom SDK is a toolkit for the Adobe Flash Platform that enables you to easily build powerful applications, beautiful sites and stunning maps which use a zooming metaphor and high-resolution images. It is freely available under the MPL/GPL/LGPL trilicense.”

Main site: http://openzoom.org/
Code: http://openzoom.org/go/code
Document API: http://docs.openzoom.org/sdk
Author’s blog: http://gasi.ch/blog

Checkout this example. (Try: + – W A S D click wheel drag)
Interestingly, there is a Vietnamese showcase: http://www.albawater.com.vn/