Back when Twitter was called FlashCoders, there was a ragtag bunch of rebels who refused to bow to the Empire.

The Rebel Alliance had mastered the ancient art of wielding the __proto__, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Its sharp underscores could slice through any object. So cleanly, in fact, that members could be attached to new objects and stay alive.

The Empire loved to twist the Prototype in unnatural ways. But the Alliance refused to turn to the Dark Side.

“A Jedi’s strength flows from the Prototype,” said Obiyang. He was the wise mentor of the Alliance, preserving the Old Ways in his quantum archives. Obiyang was the first to achieve MovieClip fusion by plunging his __proto__ deep into the Prototype.

Count Moockoo was a double agent. He maintained a cozy relationship with the Empire whilst feeding information to the Rebels.

Skypenner developed an unhealthy obsession with parenting issues. He challenged Jabba Grossman to a duel in the Beta quadrant, brandishing an ECMA-262 spec-tronator. But Grossman laughed at Skypenner and returned to eating frogs.

(by Robert Penner on the Grumpy Old Flashers mailinglist)

I have been inbetween projects the last weeks and thought i could do something productive while i’m idle, so i created as3swf, a low level Actionscript 3 library to parse, create, modify and publish SWF files.

At the same time i experimented with iPhone development, as we at côdeazur have some commercial iPhone work lined up. Part of those experiments involved Core Graphics/Quartz programming, and the old grumpy Flash developer in me immediately thought it would be cool if i could reuse Flash vector art in my iPhone applications. More details on that here: Shape Export to Objective-C.

With as3swf (which parses SWF shapes down to the bone) i already had a powerful weapon in my hands. I’d “just” had to extend it to generate Objective-C source code from a SWF shape. SWF shape records translate almost directly to AS3 drawing API calls (so i thought), and thus also to the similar Quartz Core Graphics API calls. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

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