Good advice, all of it. Just a couple additions...
* Don't paint yourself into corners - Make sure what you do is flexible
enough so that the client spec has some lebensraum
Huhu! Ihr Deutscher stellt dar...
On the subject of reusable code, yes, whenever possible. AS2 and OOP
really brings this to the forefront. An example is a simple static class i
wrote that does tooltipping. Whenever i need a tooltip on mouseOver right
now, i'll drop ToolTip.
display("This is the friendly assisting text"); in the onRollOver and
ToolTip.remove onRollOut etc. Since writing that stupid little class, i've
used it on 3 apps, and i've felt a warm fuzziness every time it just
worked without screwing with the rest of the application.
I wrote a similar drawing class, called UIPlate. It basically draws
rounded rectangles, but it reads CSS so I can just assign a classname to the
object and it takes in all the settings from the style. I can set size,
shape, gradients, stroke settings, text alignment, font, text color, etc all
from a style sheet, so that when they change their minds about the font and
text color (and they *always* do), it's as easy as changing the style sheet,
no recompile necessary. I've used it in a dozen large applications, and
several dozen small, one off apps, because instead of having to draw
something or import artwork, I can just build a style sheet. Instead of
creating rollover states, I can just do this:
function onRollover(){ this.setStyle("styleName","buttonover"); }
function onRollout(){ this.setStyle("styleName","buttonout"); }
It makes it insanely fast to create mockups and the like, and since the
majority of UI elements are rectangles anyway, it makes it very easy to
quickly create those kinds of elements even without knowing what they will
eventually look like, and they are easy to change later.
Declare depth variables such as backgroundDepth, cloudsDepth, UIDepth,
horseDepth (i had to), and explicitly set them. Referring to depths by
names like this is just a nice little cushion that reads better.
I often go a step further and declare a bunch of constants in my main
class, things like defualt padding between objects, default
fonts/sizes/colors, etc, that way they can all be changed from one place and
used throughout the app. For scaling apps, I will often get
Stage.width/height either right at the beginning or at the top of the redraw
function, that way I'm calling the same variable and I don't have problems
with the stage size changing while I'm in the middle of drawing, and it
doesn't have to look it up repeatedly.
Another little bit of advice you may find useful, don't put depths right
next to each other, leave room between them. When developing a UI, I often
put them 10 depths apart, as in navigation container at 10, content
container at 20, footer container at 30, etc, instead of at 1, 2, and 3.
That way, if I need to add a new section, or if I need to drop in additional
elements like a scrollbar, etc, I have a depth available without having to
go through the code and increment all the subsequent depths. Since there are
65k depths available and I rarely use more than a dozen on any given
timeline, I figure spacing them out is safer than putting them right next to
each other.
ryanm
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