Fundamental to giving someone respect is setting your attention on them rather than posturing yourself. If your tendency is to think more about showing your new acquaintance all the coolness that is you, perhaps this is the right exercise for you. Give some respect on credit and probe for what is unique and valuable about them to warrant such respect.

My bet is you’ll find something, and you won’t make a fool of yourself in the process.

Ready: The XML

The structures doesn’t matter much overall until you define the loader elements. You can add anything LoaderMax supports. I’m just loading some images.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest>
	<images>
		<ImageLoader name="largeMap" url="assets/images/bg_largeMap.png" estimatedBytes="3300" load="true" />
		<ImageLoader name="shortMap" url="assets/images/bg_shortMap.png" estimatedBytes="6600" load="true" />
	</images>
</manifest>

Set: Loading

First you need to activate the loaders you’re going to use. Then fire up XMLLoader and load the xml document. XMLLoader will sniff out any known and activated loader and process it according to the rules you define in the xml.

LoaderMax.activate([ImageLoader]); 
 
var loader:XMLLoader = new XMLLoader("assets/xml/artworkManifest.xml", {name:"xmlDoc", onComplete:onReady});
loader.load();
 
private function onReady(e:LoaderEvent) : void {			
	// finish up or whatever
}

GO!

You’ll call a static function to retrieve the asset.

// when the asset is needed
var staticMap:Sprite = Sprite( LoaderMax.getContent("shortMap") );
addChild(staticMap);

You’ll also want error handling and display progress, etc. Hit the docs for more details about that.

As a freelancer, you sell not only your technical or creative capabilities. You for sure sure don’t sell hours of time. You sell your personal brand, your relationship, and your experience. You sell your reputation to deliver on time and within budget. You sell what makes you valuable and unique.

Is anyone buying? If not, then there may be some hard questions ahead, but the good news is that most of this will be within your control to remedy.

Some of the best advice I was ever given about selling myself came from my first creative director. He told me “if you take care of your portfolio, your portfolio will take care of you.” That advice extends beyond having a sweet set of projects to show. It is also making sure you take care of your name and reputation. It is making sure that your portfolio of clients and partners speak nothing but resounding praise about you.

Now that’ll sell.

[ I’m presenting on these topics and more at 360|Flex Sept.18-23 in DC. 360|Flex is one of the community’s most beloved Flash Platform developer conferences. If you’re attending, I hope you’ll join one or both of my sessions. Register here. ]

Rather than asking, “how do I fit?”, which is the me-centric approach of an employee, we might ask “what can I do to help this team?” Sniff out opportunities to be helpful. To everyone from the decision maker all the way down to the developer sitting in his cube with a furrowed brow, we should be on the lookout for ways to make ourselves valuable. The next thing you know, by serving our adopted team, we fit in.

We bring so much more to our clients than the hours we render in their service. One of my favorite things to hear from a client is that I made them better at their job. That right there is gold.

[ I’m presenting on these topics and more at 360|Flex Sept.18-23 in DC. 360|Flex is one of the community’s most beloved Flash Platform developer conferences. If you’re attending, I hope you’ll join one or both of my sessions. Register here. ]

I absolutely love what I do as a freelancer and Flash Platform designer/developer, so I chose topics about which I’m extremely passionate.

How to Scale Your Freelance Business and Maximize Your Profit.

Admit it, you are running a business even if it’s just you. What’s next? Nobody likes to say no to work, but at some point you have to find a way to deliver on your abundance of commitments that doesn’t involve deploying at 4am after 56 hrs of no sleep. What can you do but work hard and longer? This session will discuss options and how to best ascertain the route you should take.

Topics we’ll (likely) touch on
Identifying profitability in your market and skill set
Qualifying opportunities
Subcontracting - interviewing and contracting
Working with and managing a virtual team
Looking outside your world for strategy and inspiration

The Invaluable Freelance Flasher

Value is a word I probably use too much, but there’s just so much more to being a freelancer than writing code and charging an hourly rate. It is our ability to recognize and appreciate those qualities in ourselves that will empower us to become invaluable to our clients. In this session we will discuss practical principles learned in the real world of freelancing that can help us excel to the next level.

Topics we’ll (likely) touch on:
What a freelancer provides
It’s NOT about the code
How to estimate
How to communicate an estimate
How to integrate and work with a team
How to invoice and get paid
How to manage time
How to talk to clients and client’s clients
Realizing your value to clients

If these topics sound interesting to you, I hope you’ll join me in DC. Register here. We are going to have an absolute blast, and all come away richer for it.

From every 360|Flex conference I’ve attended, I can point to 2 or 3 conversations and several relationships that have fundamentally impacted my life and business for the better. You can expect to meet some of the brightest developers in the world, hear from the top talent in our field, and hang out with what I feel is one of the best communities on any platform.

I had a little trouble getting this done, but in the end it’s REALLY easy.

4.0 introduces a new project property in the info.plist called UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend. The default value for this boolean property is false. All you may need to do is recompile your application and check it out on an iOS 4 device.

If you find it’s not working, confirm the SDK settings both at the project level and at the target level. Your base SDK should be 4.0, and your target SDK should be whatever your lowest target device is. Of course, lower versions of the OS that don’t support multitasking will simply ignore this setting.

Also make sure your SDK settings are consistent between the project and the target settings.

To take multitasking even further, there are additional methods available where we should put any code we want to execute when the app goes into the background or returns to an active state, such as:

- store/restore state
- start/stop background processes

Check out:

https://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/BackgroundExecution/BackgroundExecution.html

application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions
applicationDidBecomeActive
applicationWillResignActive
applicationDidEnterBackground
applicationWillEnterForeground
applicationWillTerminate

The problem is initially that the fixed DisplayObject not being moved is irregular in shape. This becomes apparent when trying to drag, scale, or rotate the square. If my drag restricts the drag area to the bounds of the fixed DisplayObject, this is great until I rotate the other DisplayObject which then invalidates the drag bounds and you can see below that a corner is uncovered.

What I need to do is detect if the transform move would result in uncovering the fixed DisplayObject and thus not allow it. If both items where rectangles and not being rotated we could use something like the following to detect the total overlap:

boxA.transform.pixelBounds.containsRect(boxB.transform.pixelBounds);

This provides a very nice boolean result, and in my test kinda worked. It just wasn’t 100%.

However, between considering that solution and considering hitTest, and then being reminded of Grant Skinner’s AS2 pixel perfect collision detection, I realized how I could do this.

The collision detection code, upgraded and improved by Troy Gilbert (code and article here) to AS3 provided the key. First, it provides great detection. Then I realized that the method returns a rectangle that represents the overlap of my two DisplayObjects.

If I compare the overlap rectangle to the fixed position DisplayObject rectangle, and make sure it’s not smaller, then I know the object being transformed is fully covering it. Rotate, scale, drag, scale some more, drag, rotate a little, drag, and it locks in step never uncovering the fixed position DisplayObject (which btw is a mask).

Once I get a little breathing room I’ll put up a Flash demo and my code for how I’m using it. Hopefully my hurried explanation here makes some sense. I’m just jazzed I got it working, and all the help I received via Twitter contributed to the final solution.

If I can get the comments from EE easily ported to Disqus I’ll do so. There’s a Ruby script (http://gist.github.com/202802) that may handle this conversion.

However, if it’s a hassle to bring those comments over, I’m just going to bail on it.

Please don’t take this personally if you have commented on previous posts. It’s not you, it’s me.

There are a great many fantastic Bible applications in the App Store today. What makes WPB unique is the manner in which it allows you to distill and consume your A-List scriptures that are powerful for the exact moment you are in, not matter where you are. It is at once your Topical Bible and God’s Promises scriptures on the go.

With WPB you choose from an ever growing collection of topical scripture lists, or you make your own. As you discover new verses that speak directly to you, then add them to your paper no matter wherever you are.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, or if you just want to do me a solid and spread the word, please check it out. I’m very satisfied to have come this far, and look forward to many future releases of this product.

White Paper Bible

http://www.whitepaperbible.org

White Paper Bible iPhone App

app.whitepaperbible.org

White Paper Bible on Twitter

twitter.com/whitepaperbible

White Paper Bible on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/White-Paper-Bible/128636440822