Archive for October, 2006

Oct200622

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Actionscript 2 and Recursion

I stumbled upon a little limit in Flash today….. If you decide to use recursion as a means to tackle a problem in Flash, you had better be sure that under no circumstances the function recurse more than 256 times. If your function recurses 256 times the movie will crash completely and all ActionScript will stop executing. As usual this failure is silent, so be extremely careful if you do decide to use recursion. Keep in mind that this limitation isn’t function specific. For example, if you’re doing recursion with multiple functions you will reach the limit as soon as the Flash application gets 256 levels deep.

Now, on the surface most programmers would say that any function that needs to recurse more than 256 times is simply bad code. Generally I agree with this, although I’m sure you can find an exception if you look hard enough.

Oct200621

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Adobe Acquires Serious Magic

For anyone who doesn’t yet know, Adobe recently acquired Serious Magic. The press release can be read here. So why did Adobe buy Serious Magic? The first reason that comes to my mind is the lack of FLV capable encoders and editors available to non professional creators. One of the most overlooked effects of sites like YouTube is the overnight creation of a multitude of amateur video editors. Now that Flash video has completely taken over the delivery side of the web video industry, Adobe must offer tools to non professional video editors. This seems to be directly aimed at the YouTube and MySpace crowd, and since those two sites alone form the largest userbase of Flash Video by an enormous margin, Adobe sees profit potential in that untapped market and has acquired a company that creates “easy” video editing software.