In ActionsScript 3.0, to get the height of the stage you’d use ’stage.stageHeight.’ In my case, I was working with a 600 x 400 Flash file with movieclips that needed to be vertically centered. After publishing, the vertically centered elements were not centered properly. This led me to re-examine my code and math quite heavily. Nothing appeared to be in error. Tracing out ’stage.stageHeight’ reported back a height of 300. This was obviously wrong since my project was 400 pixels tall. Resizing the stage to 300 made my trace report back a height of 200. I reset my stage to 400 tall and thought about the problem. So everything was off vertically by 100 pixels. Odd.

On a whim I did a test movie.  I then, ever-so-slightly, resized the preview window and hit the ‘test movie’ hot key again. A had adjusted the window only a few pixels. Instead of reporting back, say, 303 pixels it was now reporting 403 pixels. Ah-hah! Now I had an idea what was wrong: Flash was being a pain in the butt. Continuing my whim, I turned off the bandwidth profiler I often leave open and recompiled . . . 400! Stupid Flash! The bandwidth profiler seems to have an issue eating up vertical pixels.  Bad Flash.  Very, very bad.

Immediately I was struck by the title Flash & Flex; two of my favorite development platforms.  At first I balked at the price of $14.99, but then I saw some articles on interesting looking technologies I only new of by name. There were also a couple of articles that would be great to pass on to my fellow workers who are ActionScript 3.0 initiates.  I was sold and slapped down the money for the magazine.

Being a busy man at work the magazine sat on my desk for a weekend and a day before I had a chance to look it over.  Really, I didn’t have the time, but I wanted a diversion at that moment.  I decided to look over the article on building a Pong game in ActionScript 3.0 for Flash.

Going straight to the code in the Pong tutorial, I saw a few things I would have done differently, but I was struck by the lack of professional coding style.  For a magazine that’s going to be sold to the masses, you’d want to pass along clean and standardized code.  None of that here.  I was also struck by the horrible job on formatting.  The code examples are overly deep in their indentation and the white spacing is inconsistent.  Don’t even get me started on the coding convention (not that any was used).

There must have been no proof checking of the articles or examples.  The Pong game example has three class files.  Mistakenly, Listing 2 is titled ‘Ball class’ when it’s the ‘Paddle class’ and Listing 3 is called ‘Paddle class’ when it is indeed the ‘Ball class.’

Even the main article text has issues.  For example, right away in the first paragraph you have a parenthetical statement that says:

(www.mochiads.com who is great for all kind of development skills)

Yikes.  Now, I’m not the best person to be talking about syntax, grammar, punctuation or anything English related. At the same time I’m not attempting to produce a professional magazine for developers.  Put some polish on it or readers aren’t going to take you seriously.

Needless to say, my hope for this magazine had dropped severely and I could feel the fact that my wallet was now $14.99 lighter.  Moving on to other articles I found similar issues.  The article on creating a banner was so simplistic for a magazine that claims to be a developer’s magazine as to be ridiculous.

On my last look at the magazine, I saw an article on Flash remoting with WebOrb. I’m very familiar with this topic and I’ll just say this: check online for some tutorials. You’ll find more useful advice and better thought-out assistance.

Instead of continuing to beat this dead horse, let me sum up the magazine for you. It’s not dead on arrival, but it’s close. It just doesn’t have the professionalism to be taken seriously and it’s tutorials and advice are too simplistic. Hopefully we’ll see better in the future.