Control Option Command

Scenario: You’re working with the Flex SDK and you’re tracing messages to the Terminal via flashlog.txt. The damn logfile has heaps of clutter in it from the last project you were working on, and you want to clean it up.

Solution: Save this snippet and assign it a Quicksilver hotkey:

Result: You are happy. Go drink beer.

A fairly common task in ActionScript projects is to deal with URLs in dynamically loaded text. Whenever I faced this prospect I usually ended up with some half-assed searching for “http://” and then indexOf(” “) to determine when the URL had ended and then smacked a <a href> on either side. Which pretty much meant that “http://___||/**.tasty_cheese_omelete” would be acceptable while “google.com” would not.

Hence I always promised myself that next time I’d write a proper class to deal with URLs so that this bullshit wouldn’t pass anymore.

Regular Expressions have always scared the bejeezus out of me, but I realized there was probably no other option when looking for something that has a valid URL structure. It was surprisingly easy to find some fairly good examples for what I wanted to achieve, and surprisingly difficult to get any of them to work in ActionScript. I’m blaming it on the AS implementation of RegExp, and I’m sure ActionScript is blaming it on my implementation of dumb.

After some swearing though I managed to determine whather a string had the proper structure of a URL but it still wasn’t perfect. I wanted my class to be intelligent enough to accept all valid Top Level Domains (there’s 267 in use) but reject any invalid attempt to pass as a valid TLD. IE: egypt.eg should pass, but breakfast.egg should not. The solution ended up being storing all the TLDs in a Vector and parsing through them to check if the domain was valid.

All in all the class now does a pretty good job, although there are probably still holes in it (let me know about them when you find them).

Check it out and grab it below, and then post a comment explaining to me slowly and carefully that I can achieve this exact functionality with the

method or something similar, which I’m sure is what will happen. ;)

The code is freely available here. I would appreciate any credit and that you share whatever improvements you make with me and the rest of the world, but I have neither time nor energy surplus to actually do any enforcing, so knock yourself out.

Scenario: You are browsing in Safari (because it’s speedier than Firefox) and feel the urge to inspect the site in Firebug or the Web Dev Toolbar.
Solution: Save this script and activate it from QuickSilver.

Result: You are happy. Have a coffee.

I use a 15″ MacBook Pro that I carry between work and home. At work I have a 30″ Cinema Display which means I can actually have half of the Flash IDE showing at once. Mostly it’s plug and play but every once in a while some app just doesn’t realize that I’ve unplugged the huge display and some window ends up at some awkward position where I have to drag it out and resize it, or even worse; It ends up outside the boundaries of the laptop screen altogether.

AppleScript to the rescue. Copy this script and save it into your AppleScripts folder. You can assign it to a Quicksilver hotkey if you’d like, but I find it’s convenient enough to just launch it from Quicksilver in the usual manner.

What it does is simply resizing the window and centering it on the display. There are more elegant ways to do this, but this one works even with apps that have little or no support for AppleScript at all. You can adjust the lines:

to fit your screen real estate as those values are set to center on a 1440 / 900 display.

TextMate TextMate TextMate. I might as well make this a pure TextMate blog soon, but I can’t help it. My love for this app is overwhelming.

I spend a lot of my time writing ActionScript, and one thing I’ve always envied users of Flex Builder (Which I avoid if I can) and FlashDevelop (which isn’t available on the Mac) is the auto-importing of classes, I.E. when you type

the IDE checks whether that class is already imported, and if not imports it.

Now, what I’ve managed to do still isn’t even close to that functionality and let me say right away that the meat of this trick is the excellent work by the creator of the ActionScript 3 bundle for TextMate; Simon Gregory et al.

Simon has in his bundle included a ‘Auto complete imports’ command which searches both the packages in your project and the packages included from Adobe (flash.*) which makes it easy to get completion for any class you’d want to import.

Like so:

• You want to import the

  1	flash.net.URLLoaderDataFormat;

  class, which is a long-ass line to type out.

• Instead you type ‘URL’ and trigger the auto-complete command. You’ll get a drop-down with all classes starting with “URL” and then choose the proper one.

• 1	import flash.net.URLLoaderDataFormat;

  is typed out for you. Yay!

However, now you have to copy that text, move on up to your import statements, paste it and then find your way back to where you were.

Boy do I wish I knew Ruby well enough to actually just augment that command to make it obey my wishes, but alas; My ruby-Fu is weak and so I turned to the weapon of the feeble TextMate hacker; Macros.

Basically the workflow now is:

• Perform the steps as mentioned above to get the completion for your import. However; This time the output would be

  1	import flash.net.URLLoaderDataFormat; move

  . The ‘move’ at the end there will work as a tab trigger for the macro, so the next step is to press tab, and then (hopefully) the import statement is moved up to it’s brethren, and you end up back where you were. Here’s how it works.

• When you press tab you trigger the macro which will perform the following steps:
• Select the line with the import and cut it.
• Enter the word ‘asdf’ in place of the import statement.
• Search for the last occurrence of the word ‘import’ in the document.
• Move to the line below said last import.
• Paste the import statement from the clipboard and indent it properly.
• Search for ‘asdf’ in the document and delete it, leaving the caret at the position it was when you launched the macro.

Like I said; It’s more of a hack than anything else and if someone comes up with a proper solution please let me know. The main weaknesses here are:

• You can’t just hit the combo in the process of typing out a statement. If you trigger the auto completion at the word ‘Sprite’ in

  1	var s:Sprite = new Sprite();

  The line

  1	import flash.display.Sprite;

  will end up in the middle of the statement. Likewise if you trigger the combo on the same line as any other code, that code will end up with the imports. The command must be triggered on a line of it’s own.

• Dependencies: If you want to change the tab trigger to something else than ‘move’ you’ll have to change the output from the auto-complete as well.
• Not really all that elegant. Having to do two actions (even though one is just pressing tab) seems a hassle.

With all that out of the way: Grab it if you want it!
Zip here.
Please note: I didn’t really want to distribute a modified version of Simons work, so if you want to output the ‘move’ keyword for the tab trigger you need to go into the ‘Auto Complete Imports’ command of the ActionScript 3 bundle in the Bundle Editor and make a miniscule edit at the bottom of the code.

That’s all folks.