Tutorials | Illustrator Tutorials Roundup

07/03/2008 01:10 am by Flash Enabled Blog in Brushes

In this post you will see some of the best Illustrator tutorials. By trying these tutorials will improve your design skills for sure. Now let’s take a look to them: Chinese Bamboo Read Tutorial Complex Circular Design Techniques Read Tutorial Automotive Cutaway / See-Through Car Read Tutorial Adobe Bridge Icon Read Tutorial Create a Professional Business Background Read Tutorial Comic Book Style Graphic Design Read Tutorial Retro car [...]

unloadAndStop in Flash Player 10

07/03/2008 12:24 am by gBlog in Flash

Adobe has announced the addition of the new Loader.unloadAndStop() method for Flash Player 10. This API makes it much simpler to free a loaded SWF for collection. It's still possible to prevent a SWF from being unloaded, but it's much more difficult to do by accident. Kudos to the player team for putting this in.

Flash Player 10 (Astro) Beta 2

07/02/2008 11:15 pm by senocular.com in

I haven't seen much attention given to this, so I thought I'd post a note. Adobe labs has posted Beta 2 of Flash Player 10 (code named Astro). Not only were a great number of bugs fixed (especially with the new features), but more features were even added including... wait for it... [limited] keyboard support in full screen! Security unfortunately limits us from allowing full keyboard support, but hey, we'll take what we can get.

Well, at least I didn’t have to wonder for too long…

07/02/2008 11:01 pm by FlashApe in

…about google searching swfs. In my post yesterday I said I was skeptical, and looks like I was correct in my reasoning. Looks like I completely overlooked one major point of the announcement: 2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file [...]

Tutorials | Export from Blender and 3D Max to Flash CS3

07/02/2008 10:50 pm by Flash Enabled Blog in Flash

Today i bring you two tutorials showing how to export either from Blender or 3D Max Studio, as also a cool place for getting free 3D models which you can use to test your PV3D skills. Exporting from 3D Max Studio Read Tutorial Exporting from Blender 3D Read Tutorial Free 3D Models - 3ds, lwo, lightwave, br4, bryce, pz3, poser, [...]

Yahoo! to fix GeoPlanet JSON API today

07/02/2008 10:50 pm by Aral Balkan in General

As I posted last week, a backwards-incompatible API change to the JSON version of Yahoo!'s excellent GeoPlanet API caused the new teaser site for the Singularity web conference to fail. Today, I got an email from Eddie Babcock from the Y! Geo team informing me that this was due to a regression and that they will [...]

More Flex Camps This Summer ...

07/02/2008 09:37 pm by The Official Flex Team Blog in Community

There are a few Flex Camp events coming up that you should know about. The first is in Michigan, where the Flex user group is organizing a two day Flex Camp event with a hands on Flex training event for the second day. The event starts at 9:00 AM on Wednesday July 30th, and ends at 12 Noon on Thursday July 31st. Registration is $25 for one day, or $40 for both days. Registration is limited to 150 people, so you'll want to register soon.

There's also a Flex Camp event happening in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on August 21st, from 5:30 - 9:30 PM. There are 3 presentations from local Ottawa companies, and 3 demos from companies using Flex. Again, registration is limited, so you'll want to register for Flex Camp Ottawa. (Its free!)

If you're interested in hosting your own Flex Camp event, you can learn more about hosting your own Flex Camp event at flex.org.

PaperKing3D: The Papervision3D Contest!

07/02/2008 08:58 pm in News

Do you want to be world-renown for your Papervision3D skills? Do you think you have what it takes to impress the developers of Papervision3D? Do you want to have a shiny PaperKing3D badge recognizing your awesomeness on your resume? Welcome to the PaperKing3D Contest! Here are the full details: Contest: Best use of Papervision3D. Anything goes. Requirements: [...]

Adobe Flash Player 10 pre-release refresh

07/02/2008 08:30 pm by kaourantin.net in

We just just released another pre-release of Flash Player 10 (build 10.0.1.525). Go get it here and make sure you read the release notes. As a reminder, as we are nearing the release it becomes increasingly difficult for us to address bugs, especially if they are not crashers. If you have backwards compatibility issues (and I almost guarantee you that there will be some which will affect your content) please report them.

There have been numerous stability and performance improvements. The most important additions are support for WMODE=transparent and V4L2 cameras (which is still work in progress) on Linux which addresses two of the top 2 feature requests on this platform.

If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster. How will this affect you? Well, OSX device text rendering got a huge performance boost. If you use lots of device text you will see a big difference. I posted more details in a comment here

Finally the dynamic sound APIs have slightly changed as I announced previously. I will be updating my posts [1][2] later today.

Grant Skinner posted on Open Source Licenses

07/02/2008 08:27 pm by FF9900.org in Whatever

Grant just posted a great blog entry on Open Source Licenses and how they relate to Flash code in particular. It is definitely a very valuable resource to read when deciding on an OSS license for your ActionScript project. I wish this were around when I was starting to release our projects. It would have [...]

Handling HTTP GET Requests in Java Servlets

07/02/2008 07:35 pm by Brajeshwar in Asides

Servlets can be used for handling both the GET Requests and the POST Requests. An individual developing servlets for handling HTTP Requests needs to override one of these methods in order to process the request and generate a response.

Closing all your application windows in AIR

07/02/2008 07:28 pm by Christian Cantrell in Apollo

Here's a little snippet of code I sometimes use in AIR applications to make sure all windows close when the main application window closes.

convert xml tags to lowercase

07/02/2008 07:16 pm by moockblog in

Here's a handy little function for converting all tag names and attribute names in an XML object to lower case. Useful for doing case-insensitive matching on tag names and attribute names. public function xmlTagsToLowerCase (xml:XML):XML { // Convert the root tag to lowercase xml.setName(xml.name().toString().toLowerCase()); for each (var attribute:XML in xml.@*) { attribute.setName(attribute.name().toString().toLowerCase()); } // Convert all descendant tags to lowercase for each (var child:XML in xml..*) { // If the...

How Adobe’s special search indexing Flash Player works

07/02/2008 07:10 pm by Doug McCune in Flash Player

So Adobe created a special version of Flash player for Google and Yahoo to index SWF files. This basically goes through your SWF and magically figures out what to click on and how to interact with your application, just like a real person would do. How does it do it? Here’s what I think is [...]

AS2 → AS3: Attaching Sounds From The Library

07/02/2008 06:57 pm by EVOLVE in AS2 to AS3

Download Example Files AS3 no longer has an attachSound() method in the Sound object so attaching sounds from the library is a little different. It's actually more intuitive (as usual with AS3) because it acts just like attaching bitmaps and other objects out of the library. The code to attach a sound from the library in [...]

assert in ActionScript 3

07/02/2008 06:46 pm by Manish Jethani in

In the old days of Java, one often complained about the lack of an assert statement. Once, I even wrote an Assert class that threw a runtime exception (based on a debug flag), but I didn’t end up using it all that much due to performance constraints.

Eventually Java did get a native assert statement.

Now we’re finding ourselves in a similar situation with ActionScript 3. My program has grown complex enough that I need to sprinkle it with assertions in certain portions. This is becoming important as more developers start working on the same piece of code. It’s good to document the pre-conditions and post-conditions in source comments, but — let’s face it — nobody reads comments until they actually run into a problem. The whole point of having assertions is to be able to detect problems at their root instead of letting them manifest into bugs elsewhere in the software.

Thanks to conditional compilation in Flex 3, it’s now possible to implement an assert “statement” that is mostly compiled out in the release version of your program.

Here’s my assert.as file.

package com.example.utils
{ public function assert(expression:Boolean):void
{ config::DEBUG { if (!expression) throw new Error("Assertion failed!"); }
} }

As you can see, it’s very simple: If the expression is false, it throws an “Assertion failed!” error. This part is wrapped into a conditional block: the code is compiled into the SWF only if the config::DEBUG flag is set, not otherwise.

In the release build of your program, you set config::DEBUG to false, which strips out the code within that conditional block.

Here’s an example of how I’m using it:

private function layoutThumbnails():void
{ var i:int = 0; var j:int = 0; for (; i < numChildren; i++) { // complex calculation for layout ... } assert(i > j); ...
}

Does this incur a performance penalty? Yes, it does. Even though the assert function is empty in the release build, it still seems to get called every time. I imagine that the VM might detect it as a candidate for optimisation at some point during the execution of the program, but it certainly isn’t doing this during initialisation. What that means is that too many assert calls might significantly increase your program’s startup time and thus have a negative impact on perceived performance.

Moreover, even though the function calls might be optimised, the expressions are still evaluated. The only way around this is to wrap the call itself into a config::DEBUG conditional block.

I’m using this sparingly for now.

Let’s hope that the ActionScript language gets a real assertion facility in the next version.

The Love/Hate Relationship with Twitter

07/02/2008 06:44 pm in General

I love Twitter. Some people don’t get it, but once you get hooked, you can’t live without it. I hate Twitter. It’s down half the time. You get me hooked and then, just when I need a fix, you’re gone. I just got onto the private beta of TweetDeck, installed it, gave it my username and password, [...]

Using Flex 3 with BlazeDS and Java (JEE) training course released by Comtaste (London,Milan,New York)

07/02/2008 05:07 pm by Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web in AIR Adobe Integrated Runtime

Comtaste Training is proud to announce its new training course about Flex 3 development using BlazeDS. The course is the result of some enquiries made by our clients about those topics. I've worked on the outline of the course and it's ready and I've just published it on the italian section of Comtaste's site (I'm working on the english outline for this training course): Enterprise Flex Applications: Using Flex 3 with BlazeDS and Java (JEE) The Flex 3 and BlazeDS course adds to Comtaste's course programs and it is the open source alternative to the Enterprise Flex Applications:Using LiveCycle Data Services and J2EE (Java EE) training course. The Flex 3 with BlazeDS is a 3-consecutive-day lessons and we're scheduling it in the following three locations: London, Milan and New York City.

Mozilla Prism Apps aren’t RIAs

07/02/2008 05:00 pm by Flex RIA United in RIA General

Apart from Adobe, Microsoft and Sun, even Mozilla took notice of the surge in RIAs. It started a project called WebRunner long ago, with a goal “to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform,” and later renamed it as Prism towards the end of [...]

The illusive itemRenderer

07/02/2008 04:30 pm by Flex RIA United in Flex Example

The item renderer is a powerful concept in Flex, that enables custom implementations of data presentation and input within controls like Lists, DataGrids and Charts. In our last post, we saw how a custom item renderer can be used within a bubble chart to enable interactivity. We showcased that using a chart with one [...]

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