Development Blog

As you may or may not know, Visual Link Languages uses an animated image to represent each word or phrase that is taught in our course.  Sometimes it can be difficult to portray some thoughts as an image.  Sometimes we come up with some pretty interesting and comical solutions.  For example, how would you portray the phrase, “until later” (hasta luego in Spanish), as an image?  Well here’s what we came up with:

A care bear riding a motorcycle?  What does that have to do with anything?  I’m not entirely sure, but imagine this.  Let’s say your buddy, or an acquaintance, or even some stranger came up to you, dressed like a big care bear and said, “Hey buddy!  You wanna go for a ride?”

I don’t know about you but I’d probably say, “Ya..I think I’ll pass on that. See ya later dude!”, and get the heck out of there.  I mean why would you go on a ride with some dude in a big purple care bear suit?  That would just be weird, not to mention, dangerous.  I mean how could he see to drive wearing that ridiculous bear head?  Anyway, that’s how I get until later from that image.  So when you come across this phrase in our courses, you’ll totally see the connection now.  Happy learning!

Dan Davis
Software Engineer
Visual Link Languages

P.S.  I feel I should mention that “until later,” while it is a literal translation of the Spanish Phrase “hasta luego” (hasta = until, luego = later), the actual meaning of hasta luego more closely expressed in English as see ya later.

Uncategorized

This is a fairly simple one, but it can be very annoying if you are running into this one. The problem is that you have a Sprite or Movieclip that is being cut off at the very bottom of the scroll pane. The solution that we use  is to draw a transparent pixel at the very bottom of the source for your scroll pane. I usually have a variable that I call curY that is used to keep track of the current bottom position of the content. I use that plus some padding for the y location for which to draw the pixel. Here is a sample snippet:

var pixel:Sprite = new Sprite();
var gr:Graphics = pixel.graphics;

gr.beginFill(0xFFFFFF, 0);
gr.drawRect(0, 0, 1, 1);
gr.endFill();

container.addChild(pixel);
pixel.y = curY+10;

pane.source = container;

I hope this is helpful.

Actionscript 3, Flash AS 3.0, Flash

We just wanted to drop a quick line and let everyone know what we’re up to and give a little glimpse of the future development here at Visual Link. We are currently hard at work on some new software and it’s not just Spanish anymore. We plan to offer additional languages. We’re excited about how it’s shaping up and are planning to have phase 2 of our private beta shortly. This new software includes many new lessons, games, a personal trainer, and our absolute favorite, speech recognition. We are looking to launch later this year and will be sharing more tidbits here and there.

General Update, What we're up to

What do you get when you take high powered computers, a love for programming, and a really big bag of gummy bears? You get the Visual Link™ Development Team. Who is the Visual Link Development Team you ask? We are a group of Software Engineers dedicated to creating software that is FUN, ENGAGING and EFFECTIVE. This blog is all about the current things we are working on here at Visual Link, solutions to programming problems we run into, as well as an occasional interesting topic we feel is worth addressing. Here at Visual Link Languages we do everything in-house from the web to the desktop so we will cover many different topics. However the majority of what we do revolves around the Flash platform and the Flex framework. With that said the bulk of our posts will probably focus on those areas. We have been helped greatly by the blogging community in these areas and now hope to give back in some small way.

Sincerely,

The Visual Link Development Team

General About Us, Flash, Flex