Mike Orth – Booya!

If you’re like me, and always get really wrapped up in your work, then you should check out Tiny Alarm for Mac. It’s a great little app that lives in your menu bar and is a snap to use. Just click the alarm clock to set the time and it gives you a few short beeps (or other sounds) when the time comes and subtly flashes. You can ignore it and it’ll beep again every minute. Clicking it again will turn it off or snooze depending on preference.I use it to remind myself to get up and stretch or to move on to working on something else. I just got the new version which has cool features to gives you notes on why you decided to set the alarm in the first place. Now if it only made me get up instead of ignoring it or hitting snooze 8 times….More info on Tiny Alarm here

The “Number” data type in Flex is used for floating-point numbers (i.e. decimals like 42.11). It is usually the default type when using numerical values, even though Flash Player handles int and uint more effeciently. The Number class uses the IEEE 754 standard which gives you values up to 53 bits (highest of which is approx. 1.79e+308).

When doing calculations involving Numbers, calculations are done using binary addition. This can really throw you off course in a few rare instances if you’re not careful! Take the following example:

b = .3, right? Right.. only, not. The value comes out to 0.30000000000000004 instead. Ok, not too far off, but imagine making several calculations on the result and you can start to sway off course. The following example is a watered-down version of what I encountered lately. I knew about this type of discrepancy, but it took me a couple of days to figure out where things were going wrong because I didn’t assume that something was failing at such a base level; you typically expect things like subtraction to work correctly.

Whoa. Things start getting funky (btw, in case you’re not familiar with the notation, that second to last one is 5 with 17 decimal places, “.00000000000000005″). Why the discrepancy? Again, it has to do with converting the numbers to binary and evalutating them. You can read more on the IEEE 754 standard here. This is typically not something you will have to deal with, but when you do encounter it, you can spin your wheels for a while.

Try it for yourself here.
Demo application that adds/subtracts and includes some default cases.

I’ve been fielding questions about fading audio in Flex lately and decided to package up my FadingSound. I worked on this about a year ago and then threw it on the shelf, so I’ve begun cleaning it up and wanted to release a prototype as a proof of concept. This class creates the Sound and SoundChannel objects for you and fades in and out each song in a playlist. It’s so simple, all you have to do is create an instance say:

where “playlist” is an ArrayCollection of URLs. If you just want to have 1 song fade in or out, only put 1 URL in the array. Optional params specify the length of fades and the duration of the songs (if you want to scan through 10 second clips for example). See it in action here.

Fading 1 song in was the easy part – the hurlde was to have 2 channels playing at the same time and control their fades to give the illusion of concurrecny. There are still some bugs in it with buffering songs and fading out at the right time with dynamic tracks which is why the example only plays short clips rather than full songs. I’m in the process of cleaning that up and will update things when I get time. Also I’m going to have an mp3 player that utilizes this where you can create XML playlists to feed it. Feel free to drop me line with features you’d like or any comments on the FadingSound.

Application demoing the Prototype