Meet Saffron, UML Modeling tool for Actionscript built on AIR

I'm currently working on a desktop media application that is growing out of control, both in scope and in class structure. What I thought was going to be a breeze, is quickly turning into a nightmare. Large portions of the application will need to be rewritten because of the last minute features that have to be added. (Gotta love clients who can't see more than 2 feet in front of them!)

So to organize myself and try to get a picture of the task at hand, I began searching the net for a UML modeler for ActionScript. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking, "Why didn't you start with one before you even wrote one line of code?" Well, my project scope doc, if you could even call it that, was only a page and a half. So, I didn't have much details from the client to work with from the beginning. So now, after working hard to create what the client wanted, they see the result and realize they wanted something different, something bigger, something more. So, it has become a highly funded and poorly thought out app, that has caused me much frustration, but I vent.

Out of my UML modeler search results, I found very little. But, I did find one under development that looks very, very promising, Saffron. Here are a few of its features:

• Wireframe editor allows both developers and/or designers to create wireframes for their projects.
• Allows for Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, PHP4 and Java Code generation directly from the app.
• Sports an entirely customizable UI which contains several dock-able panels that can be placed anywhere by the user.
• Enterprise level capability having the ability to support models with hundreds of classes without performance degradation.
• Beautiful UI.
• Integrated Version Control.
• Sophisticated printing options give you complete control over how your diagram is printed
• Cross Platform on both OS X and Windows.
• Full round trip support for both AS2 and AS3 (Java will soon follow), always keeping your model and code in synch every step of the way.

Can't wait to get my hands on this and try it out. But for now, I'll use the good old gModeler I've used for years, thanks Grant.

Simple FullBrowser Class in ActionScript 2.0

You know those code snippets you use every few months or so, and you have to re-teach yourself how to use it every time? I had the same problem recently with full browser Flash apps, especially in Zinc. I needed to create an application that maintained a constant background, even if the window was resized to whatever the resolution could be. We've all learned how to do it, it was just one of those things that I got sick of relearning every time.
I wrote a simple class to handle a few different types of full screen/browser applications called FullBrowser. To use it, you initialize the class, pass in the reference to the stage and whatever content you want centered, and then call the setFill method, which allows you to pass either "Solid" (followed by a color [ex: "0x335599"]), "Gradient" (followed by two colors [ex: "0x000000", "0x220033"]), or "Bitmap" (followed by the linkage id to the bitmap in the library).

Go ahead and use it if you'd like. Any comments or feedback are appreciated!

Also, the zip includes an example .fla and the filed background was taken from Squidfingers.