... .  .    .       .joeberkovitz.com

“Flash Bang”: upcoming talk on Flash audio synthesis

This Wednesday evening (5/28), I am giving a talk on bleeding-edge Flash audio and music synthesis at the Boston Flash Platform Users Group . Jeez Louise, I must be about the worst self-publicist ever… I’ve been so busy that I forgot to blog my own speaking event. Anyway, the meeting is at the NEIA Annex building, 303 Boylston Street, Brookline MA at 7 pm.

I think this will be a fun one — my computer will be making a lot of noise and playing some tunes. Some of the highlights include:

• The strange and scary things you have to do to synthesize audio in Flash 9
• The big audio improvements in Flash 10 (code and demos will be shown!)
• Architectural approaches to dealing with latency and synchronization
• Adding simulated sound to a physics engine
• The brave new world of Flash applications for creating music, not just playing it back

Hope you can make it!

2 Comments

Flexcover 0.50 released on Google Code

Flexcover 0.50 is now available on Google Code. This version is a lot better than the previous release, which we called “experimental” for a reason!

There are two really enormous improvements in Flexcover 0.50:

Branch (or path) coverage: the new Flexcover compiler tracks all the conditions in your code that affect control flow, and counts how many times each condition has evaluated true or false. This is an extremely powerful feature, because it looks not only at what parts of your code run, but at why and how they run. It’s fair to say that without it, we wouldn’t have considered Flexcover to be a worthy coverage tool.

Simpler build process: Flexcover 0.11’s Ant-based build/launch process gave a lot of people a hard time. It’s been scrapped and the new approach is very simple: whenever you use the Flexcover modified SDK instead of a standard one, you automatically get coverage instrumentation and metadata. No Ant needed, and no special compiler options needed either. Finally, the Coverage Viewer is an installable AIR application that launches whenever you open a coverage metadata or report file.

Check out the release notes on Google code for all the gory details.

8 Comments

Flexcover Branches Out

Just dropping a quick note to followers of Flexcover and the ongoing AS3 code coverage adventure. It’s been a super busy time at work for me, but I’ve found enough spare cycles to put together a working branch coverage feature. It’s pretty cool: instead of toting up the number of lines that were executed (and highlighting lines that didn’t run in the source view), it counts “branches” that were executed: every conditional that affects program flow is tracked to count whether it has evaluated false or true, and how many times. In other words, if (a == 1) {...} else {...} counts as two different branches, one for the if clause and one for the else clause. Even better, if (a == 1) {...} also counts as two branches: you will be able to tell if the if clause ever got skipped because a was equal to 1. Try doing that with line coverage! [Continued...]

1 Comment

David Coletta at Boston Flex Users Group 5/13

The informative, articulate and personable David Coletta will be speaking about Buzzword’s testing approach at the upcoming Boston Flex Users Group meeting on Tuesday, 5/13 at Adobe Newton’s offices. If you haven’t checked out David’s blog, The Joy Of Flex, well, you really should! He is a great developer and also a great speaker, and this meeting will be one worth attending for sure. You should let the users group know you’re coming by registering at http://bostonfug.eventbrite.com/, so that there will be a slice of hot pizza waiting for you.

No Comments