Manlio Rules

the new york times has an interesting game which attempts to demonstrate how difficult it can be to focus on two different things at once, in this case, driving and text messaging. I played the game a few times and here are my initial thoughts:

1. i like how they force the use of the actual number keys instead of the number pad, it simulates having to take one hand off the wheel in order to use the phone.

2. the second time i played, i got noticibly better at the game mechanic, to the point where the only gates i missed were when i wasn’t trying to text message. i’m not sure what this says about my driving skills.

3. the change of focus is one thing that’s hard to simulate in the game, since when driving i’m usually focused about 3-4 cars ahead of me, and the phone is much closer to my face. they do a pretty good job of simulating the different places one has to look in order to successfully navigate the road.

4. it would have been nice to see a few other cars on the road. not sure it would necessarily have added to the playability (certainly would have made it harder) but the lane changing gets a bit bland.

5. Overall i really liked it. a quick, 2-3 minute interaction that’s easy to learn, somewhat fun to repeat, and educational.

i spent most of the afternoon working with this stuff so i figured i would document my resources for learning how to create custom skins for different components in Flex. because i’m sure in a few weeks i’ll want to do this again and i’ll forget. this is assuming you want to do the skin authoring in Flash CS4.

step 1:

read this article

step 2:

once you’ve done that, you’ll know how to create individual skins for flex components (ta da!). the trick to doing multiple skins of the same type of component is basically here:


Button
{
skin: Embed(skinClass="Button_skin");
}


.otherButton
{
skin: Embed(skinClass="Button_skin2");
}


so my default buttons would be skinned with the “Button_skin” file, and i could choose a “otherButton” style that would have it be skinned differently.

each skinClass is a separately published .swc file. the best way to separate naming conventions will be in the particular .fla’s, you’ll have to rename the master export class, but since it’s all inheiriting from mx.flash.UIMovieClip the name doesn’t really matter. then create a separate style (make sure you use the “.” notation for a new class, i screwed that up at first)

and that’s about it.

mach zehnder modulator