Web New Media notes and ramblings

Identifiers are the names that you invent to represent or identify elements in the program. Identifiers can be used to name MovieClip instances, Classes, Variables and Functions.

The program comes with many built elements that already have names. These are things like MovieClip methods like gotoAndStop() etc. You should avoid using these names as names for your own elements.

When creating Identifier names you should follow the following rules.

• Names must begin with a letter (a,b,c etc) the underscore (_) or the dollar sign ($).
• Names can contain any combination of letters, numbers and the underscore and dollar sign.
• Avoid using names have already been used by the program.

Conventions

Identifiers are used fro various purposes. Following conventions while creating identifier names will help you keep them all straight.

In general identifiers should be kept lower case.

Class names: Class names always begin with an upper case letter. All of the built in classes follow this convention. For example MovieClip, Sprite and EventDispatcher all start with an uppercase letter.

Private Properties: A common convention is to start private properties with an underscore. For example: _index, _width, _height etc. The definitions for these might look like:

private var _index:uint;
private var _width:Number;
private var _height:Number;

What are Identifiers?

When you are writing your code many of the elements are predefined. That is the words you are using have already been defined. Other elements you must create are defined by you. That is you get to make up the name assigned to these elements. Movieclip Instance names, Function names, Class names and Variable names are defined by you. That is you make up the names for yourself. All of these names are Identifiers.

When naming an Identifier you must follow a few simple rules.

• The name must begin with a non numeric character
• The name can not contain spaces or special characters. The _ (underscore) and $ (dollar sign) are exceptions to this rule

Foe example the following names work as identifiers:

• _index
• gallery
• gallery_mc
• ButtonAnimator

The following would not work as identifiers for various reasons:

• 5_button – begins with a number
• button 5 – contains a space
• button*5 – contains a special character (*)

Descriptive names

Using names that describe the use of the element being named is a good idea. This creates code that reads well comments itself.

Good naming should be balanced by creating names that are not too long and don’t encourage spelling errors.

Name Extensions

Adobe suggests the use of extensions at the end of Identifier names. These extensions help label your Identifiers as being of a particular type. They also work with the code editor in Flash to give targeted code hints. All of the extensions begin with the _ followed by a few letters. Here’s a list of extensions, each is followed by the type it represents:

• _mc – MovieClip
• _sprite – Sprite
• _txt – TextField
• _str – String
• _array – Array

Example Identifiers

Here are a few names that might used for identifiers:

• home_mc – instance of a movie clip on the stage, maybe the button labeled Home
• icons_sprite – instance name of a sprite containing icons
• button_array – an array containing a list of buttons

This looks like a pretty interesting alternative method to get Flash on the iPhone and iPad. From what I have read it sounds like it’s slower that regular Flash especially when it comes to interactive stuff like games. At this point it’s probably good for ads.

Smokescreen seems to take an SWF and convert into an SVG file and ad some javascript, so the end results are compatible with iPhone and and iPad.

http://smokescreen.us/

Thanks to Karaminder for pointing me to this.