Portfolio time!

Last week I finally got the chance to start developing my portfolio. It’s very nice to start seeing the design coming to life. I’m particularly excited about this portfolio, just because it’s a concept that very much shows who I am personally and at the same time is ment to show my work. I like the mixture.

We’ll see what the result will be in the end. I bet Mr. Personal-criticism will come along and kick me in the ass eventually. But until then I will enjoy my time with Ms. Narcissism!

Reading books, eh?

I have started reading Code Complete 2nd edition. Even though I have read about 4,5% of the book I must say that I have learnt a lot and have gotten super inspired. I’m now trying to make more pre-work before sitting down coding as a result of reading this book; Acknowledging the potential problems, taking on a architectural role and plan my time better. My workflow before was that I sat down started coding the first thing I did. All problems and planning came along as I was coding. I must say that this new way has made me develop better software with less errors in less time.

What next?

As of now I’m working on 3 sites at the same time during a period of 2 weeks. In reality I need 4 weeks, got to love this industry. A good thing is that I might be doing a very large flash site after these 2 weeks. Which is just perfect since I have started reading the book I was telling you about before to help me develop larger sites and work more efficient.

Well I have train to catch, I’m going to Stockholm for a meeting. Hopefully I will be able to launch my portfolio soon.

Thanks for reading
Richard Zetterberg

The books

The first book I bought was Code Complete 2nd edition which is a book about best practises and techniques written by Steve McConnell. In my opinion these subjects are something which is always good to read about, even if you are well experienced.

The second book I bought was Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software written by the GOF. Don’t worry, I’m not going to become a design pattern zealot! I think that design patterns are powerful tools, when used when they are needed, and not always.

The third book I bought was The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography written by Simon Singh. Even though this book might not be a hundred percent directed to programming I think that cryptography is very interesting and good to learn. Especially when you aren’t working with it mainly on a daily basis. I think that when you do different things from what you usually do, that’s when you learn new useful things.

Soon!

I’m looking forward until I get a text saying that the package with the books have been delivered. After I have read all the books I will probably give a quick review of the books, which you can look forward to.

Until then – Cheers
Richard Zetterberg

I’m actually quite enjoying it. Just because I am able to take all the time I need to think and experiment with it. And the fact that I can really develop the concept.

So what’s the concept like? Well, imagine steam punk mixed with an old linux console, grunge, gaming, heavy metal, riddles and lots of easter eggs. I can’t really explain it in words. I’ll let the images speak for themselves:

Loading screen:

Showcase screen:

About me screen:

Obviously I don’t want to show you too much. But that should be enough to make you interested.

Cheers
Richard Zetterberg

Why?

This is useful when you want to have a class which all classes can listen to events for. For example you have a class which loads some type of assets and you want to be able to know in multiple classes when that class has finished loading. This way you don’t have to pass around the instance for that loader class to all classes who needs to know when you have finished loading.

Let’s look at some code

Since the addEventListener and removeEventListener aren’t static methods we have to create them ourselves. But which object will recieve the event listener? It can’t be the class itself because then we have to instantiate it. Instead we add a dispatcher as a variable in the class. Like this:

package{
    public class StaticDispatcher{

        private static var eventDispatcher:EventDispatcher = new EventDispatcher();

        public static function addEventListener(type:String, callback:Function):void{
            eventDispatcher.addEventListener(type, callback);
        }

        public static function removeEventListener(type:String, callback:Function):void{
            eventDispatcher.removeEventListener(type, callback);
        }
    }
}

Conclusion

Very easy, but really powerful. I used this in a loader class which had multiple loaders, to be able to know when all the loaders where finished.

I guess it’s another way of using that class as a singleton. Usually you instantiate the class and then add code so that you can only do it once, and then make that instance globally accessable. But this way works really good. I hope someone will find this useful.

Richard Zetterberg