Electric Squirrel

So I was planning on working on TextWorld but as I was going through my documentation I realized that it hadn’t been updated since Flash 11, I was still using the Flash 10 documentation. When I looked up the Flash 11 documentation, I noticed there was a whole new set of libraries called FlashX, so I looked them up.

Well, the official documentation only seems to include the flashx.textLayout class and it’s children, but that was enough to get my attention, since the thing I planned on doing today was making a more usable text area. Of course it also got me thinking that, hey, maybe someone else already made a better text area and published it in an open source library I can use, so there’s all sorts of fun stuff to do.

While I’m at it, I’m updating my version of FlashDevelop, which is currently downloading the latest version of the Flex SDK. I wonder if I even had the right SDK for doing Flash 11?

Anyways the library’s internet is pretty fast, even on a day like today where it’s packed with young people playing web games. So it shouldn’t take too long for that to come down. Then I’m going to try out some libraries.

Hmm, after reading some more, it looks like the flashx I looked up was just something called flashx and not the one that’s in the documentation.

It’s frustrating and notable that the documentation for this flashx package is incomplete and not helpful compared to the rest of the really nice flash documentation.

Looking through the documentation some more, I see that they also added some more text components to the base flash package, like flash.text.engine and flash.text.ime

Hmm, I’m going through this stuff too fast and suffering from information overload. Yeah there are a hell of a lot of libraries out there.

You can really see the reasoning behind deciding to reinvent the wheel when you realize there’s a thousand different implementations of the wheel concept and you never know which one has special requirements or elements you don’t want untill it’s too late.

*takes a break*

Hokay, new version of FlashDevelop is all downloadified and installulated, and I spent a while checking out Reddit and Twitter. I’m feeling a bit more relaxed now.

Still got no autocomplete for this flashx package. Still not sure how it even works.

Hmm… The more I go over this the less important it seems for my purposes. While it might be nice to have more advanced text display, it doesn’t seem to solve my basic problem of incorporating a scroll bar into the textField object.

I guess I let myself get caught up in nothing much at all.

Before I get back to my own project instead of screwing around with libraries, I’m going to screw around with libraries more. There were a couple of bits that caught my eye in that info overload earlier and I want to check them out. I’ll try to be more careful this time!

*does so* Okay yeah, this library seems to have had a year or so since it was last tended to, and if it has any documentation I’m not seeing it. I think it might be meant for use with the Flex Builder IDE too.

One last thing to do before I get back to work… *googles as3 textfield with scrollbar* Oh, geez, it was already going to autocomplete the word scrollbar. I guess this is something people search for a lot. Second link is a question on StackOverflow specifically refering to my exact situation. First link is a blog entry where someone explains how they included the UIScrollbar component in a TextField in pure AS3.

The StackOverflow question doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. The blog post is about developing in the Flash IDE where it’s easy to just grab the UI element. Bleh.

I did some more Google-Fu but the more I read the more obvious it is that it would be easier to reinvent the wheel than to keep looking for the right wheel for me. The good news for you guys is once I make this thing, I’m going to publish the source so you kids at home don’t have to go through with this crap.

There is a problem, though. textField isn’t a displayObjectContainer so I can’t put the scrollbar inside of it. I could either put the textField inside of a parent object with a scroll bar, or I could make the scroll bar and textField unrelated, only connected by function calls.

Ideally I want to stay away from the traditional form of a scrollbar, so I don’t want to use any default UI elements even if I could. I don’t want them to look like default UI elements either. Since I’ve already got this nice texty looking page format, I want to keep it texty looking.

Anyways now that I’ve convicted myself to making my own scrollbar, I’m going to close up this blog entry and start another one specifically about that.