Open Knowledge Conference 2009
A few weekends ago I gave a short talk about The Computus Engine at the Open Knowledge Conference in London. It was interesting to attend a con outside of the usual Flash circuit, and with Open Knowledge being so 'em... open, it meant there was a wide range of topics under discussion. I missed the first part of the day but in the afternoon we were treated to everything from open source fashion (image below), to aid work in Africa, to the intricacies of semantic markup.

The open philosophy is applied to the con as well as the subject matter. Much like BarCamp, speaking slots can be added to the schedule by audience members. Fitting everything in meant I rattled through mine at breakneck pace but I think I got my points across. I've submitted the slides to Jonathan Gray at The Open Knowledge Foundation and I'm told they have audio as well. If they put them up online I'll post a link.

New class documentation
I finally got round to configuring ASDoc (the Actionscript class documentation generator) in FlexBuilder. It's notoriously painful to configure but thanks to my friend Seb for publishing his efforts it gave me enough clues to get mine up and running. Since then I've worked my way through the current set of classes and marked them all up. Taking another tip from the PV3D team I'm checking the docs into the repo alongside the code so they'll always be in sync with the codebase.

GoogleCode repo updates
Yesterday I checked in a stack of updates to the Computus Engine repo on GoogleCode. In addition to the ASDoc markup and docs directory you'll also find updated examples for the Animated Main Preloader and the Timekeeper. The preloader now has a fix to resolve the problem of it stalling if the SWF is already cached.

More importantly I've made a change to the Timekeeper API. I've replaced a number of methods with single properties to reduce the complexity of the API. The affected methods are:

value:Number replaces getValue() and setValue()

tickDuration:Number replaces getTickDuration() and setTickDuration()

tickFrequency:int replaces getTickFrequency() and setTickFrequency()

I don't like changing a live API but I think these changes are sensible and greatly simplify things. The Timekeeper test example has been updated to use the new API.

A S.T.A.R. is born
Eagle eyed visitors will also spot a new set of unit tests and util directory called star. More about this in a forthcoming post!