I spent a good amount of time tonight working on getting a new release of HYPE ready. I quickly smashed through the bugs reported up on GitHub and even managed to track down a nasty series of three bugs that were all hiding behind one another (I fixed bug A, which exposed bug B, which, when fixed, exposed bug C!).

The clencher though was when I discovered that a null object error that would only crop up when I would save a file out from my test SWF – and even then, it wasn’t consistent. I was able to fix the bug, but I haven’t been able to nail down exactly what was happening. As best I can tell, opening a FileReference dialog interupts the normal process of the garbage collector and it appears that the bug was causing my code to be dependant on the rapid cycling of the garbage collector to hide it’s mess and prevent it from throwing runtime errors.

And after all of this I just discovered a particular edge case that breaks the RLE compressor I wrote for my TGA (Targa) image exporter. Ugh. Gonna have to deal with that one in the morning.

There are times in which I feel a bit too much like the apes beating on the monolith in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. One of those times was… well, this entire morning. For the life of me I couldn’t get the keyboard shortcuts in FDT (my preferred ActionScript editor, by far!) to play nice. I could make a class with Command+Alt+N, but then no matter what I did I couldn’t regain focus in the editor. I found list after list of Eclipse keyboard shortcuts but nothing worked. I was so close to mouse-less nirvana dammit!

But then, on a whim I simple restored Eclipse’s keyboard shortcuts and everything worked… almost. Now, I could open the new class dialog, but no matter what I did I couldn’t tab onto the damn Browse button to select my classes base class. The urge to go find a bone, howl, and beat on the computer was strong at this point. Luckily, before I before I began raiding the company fridge for whatever bone I could find I tweeted about my problem and a follower of my Dominic Graefen (@devboy_org) tweeted back that it was an OS X option! WTF?!?

Turns out Dominic was dead on, it is an OSX option – toggle full keyboard access. It’s keyboard shortcut is Control+F7 – dangerously close (particularly with my flailing about trying to make the editor regain focus) to Command+F7, which in Eclipse changes to the next View. I turned off the system keyboard shortcut and am now happily in Eclipse keyboard nirvana – haven’t touched the mouse in a solid 15 minutes – woo! Thanks Dominic!