the thinBlog

Tour de Flex..

2008-11-19T09:00:00.003-06:00

Josh Buhler has posted this very useful AIR app, tour de Flex. I love this application, it's like Flex help on steroids.

The application has a ton of code examples from the basic Flex APIs to third party examples like Doug McCune's Coverflow. Each section offers references to the specific component or API you selected and some even offer downloads of the source code right from the app.

By far the most comprehensive look into flex I have ever seen. I must for flex devs.

Check it!

AT&T Sweeps: Guitar Hero

2008-11-11T13:25:00.004-06:00

We at the fish just launched a new site for AT&T featuring guitar hero. I love the visual/sound we incorporated in the site. Let me know what you think.

Check it!

Romke and Nate AIR Classes @ UWM

2008-11-11T11:40:00.003-06:00

So Nate Frank and I are teaching a one day session on AIR (using Flex) at UWM's Center for Technology Innovation. Want to learn more about AIR? This one day session will dive into the AIR api and also get into micro architectures in flex that can help you organize you AIR app!

Check it out.

Zend and Flex Free eSeminar from Adobe.

2008-09-19T11:00:00.003-05:00

Looking to get a bit more out of your Flex experience? Check out this free eSeminar from Adobe to learn about the collaboration that will bring together the flexibility, productivity and enterprise reliability of PHP and Zend Platform with the user experience benefits of Flex.

Register here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

Discover why Adobe Flex 3 is a complete application development solution for creating and delivering cross-platform RIAs within the enterprise, across the web, and on the desktop.

I have been getting more into integrating Flex with other back-ed technologies. I am sure this will be a good one.

Wanna Learn Flex?

2008-09-06T11:42:00.002-05:00

Having a little trouble getting all the intricacies behind Flex? No problem. Adobe is creating a series of videos and tutorials, hosted on the Adobe Developer Center, that will help you get all the basic knowledge you'll need to work in Flex in a week. The first 3 days have been completed, with days 4 and 5 following shortly. Head on over there and pave your way to becoming a Flex star!

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

I love flex and I think if you learned it too you would love it.

ECMA Snappin'

2008-08-18T23:25:00.003-05:00

I remember when AS3 first came out they stated that it was based off of ES4 "proposed" standards. Now I thought to myself "proposed", wow risky. If they were going to put all their eggs in one basket using a "proposed" standard would have me stressin'.

Today the Flash and ECMA communities have been a buzz because of a decision made at the latest Oslo meeting to merge the two groups to focus on ECMA 3.1 development. Creating Harmony.

So the big question running through most ActionScript developers is "Where does that leave AS3". Now, I can't possibly see namespaces and packages going away, which is something that ES 3.1 has removed. I will say that it does leave for an interesting future for Adobe. They have been great at adopting standards and opening their technologies to allow future growth. Now with such a change of events will they reformat their language to follow the new standard or keep going with it's already great leap forward.

I tried rounding up all the articles I read about this here. I am nowhere near a ECMA expert but I found it helpful to read over these sites and hear what the experts have to say. Hopefully it will help you understand it a bit more.

http://drawlogic.com/2008/08/14/es4-is-now-es31-es4-is-no-more-merges-with-es3-spec/

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/003400.html

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es3.x-discuss/2008-August/000469.html

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/javascript_stal.html

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/08/ru-roh-adobe-screwed-by-ecmascript.html

http://joshblog.net/2008/08/13/how-will-ecmascript-harmony-affect-actionscript-3/

FDT 3.1 StandAlone

2008-08-18T08:19:00.004-05:00

So now that I am moving more to AS3/Flex development I have found myself more and more using Flex Builder to build Flash based applications. I still use FDT 1.5 for AS2 projects because of some odd bugs in FDT 3 that I have seen other developers run into.

With that said I did just get my FDT 3 license and I thought I would start it off with the FDT 3.1 stand alone version. I read that some of the bugs developers ran into are fixed in this version. There are some cool features I thought I would mention in the new FDT stand alone:

Shipped Flex SDK (3.0.477)
- FDT Intro Contribution
- FDT Cheat Sheets
- AIR Debug Launcher as SWF Viewer
- AIR Release Launcher
- SWC Outline view
- QuickTrace..

More on FDT

Caravella Limoncello Drink Recipes

2008-08-16T19:46:00.003-05:00

We just launched a Flex and Papervision mini-site for Caravella Limoncello. I am really excited to have launched this project and think it came out great. It was also the first time we got our designers involved with the whole Flex process and they seemed to have loved it.

Check out the site and let me know what you think!

Simple AS3

2008-08-15T10:06:00.002-05:00

Josh Tynjala took Colin Moock Charges Against AS3 and turned it into a solution called SimpleAS3. I know alot of flash designers and old school developers will love this approach because it helps them to get into AS3 without worrying to much about all the headaches of learning the new structure.

I gotta say though I am on the fence with this one. Is this framework getting developers into a bad habits? Shouldn't you just learn how to do things the right way instead of just reverting to older practices? I guess it's like the argument with CSS developers snapping that tables are not proper use of HTML for layout. Some developers still use it.

In any regard it's still an interesting solution to the problem and I am sure will get adopted by a lot of people.

Check it.

Paper Brochure creates 3d world on computer.

2008-08-03T22:16:00.003-05:00

I have been seeing this alot online. A user takes a real time video and uses visual marks in the real world to create virtual 3d renderings on screen. I can see the cool factor going on, but I am not sure how much this would catch on unless in some sort of controlled environment. I would never take a brochure from a car dealer and take it home and use my webcam to see more. I have a hard time remembering web address from billboard let alone remembering to check out more on something else!

This would be cool in the experiential arena. Thoughts?

Cairngorm Creator

2008-07-30T12:51:00.002-05:00

I found this ill Cairngorm generator called Cairngorm Creator. I thought I would try it out for a project I am working on. I didn't go into detail writing out my methods and variables but it was super dope to have the app generate the stubbed out classes with all the proper imports for my project.

check it!

Ill Sites: Ikea

2008-07-23T10:41:00.005-05:00

Ikea has done some cool stuff with stop motion video on their websites. They got a new one with some cool effects with audio and video. Not sure what the site says since it in Sweden, but very ill none the less.

check it

FlexMVCS

2008-07-22T11:18:00.004-05:00

So one big debate I have with other developers is what framework or architecture we agree on using. When it comes to AS3, people seem to be leaning more towards PureMVC for Flash Based projects just because Cairngorm is more and more a Flex based architecture.

Today I found FlexMVCS. Some folks who worked over at BunchBall created a flex friendlier version of PureMVC that addresses some of the issues of using PureMVC in flex.

You can snatch up the SVN repository info at their google code site

What do you think?

Converse, Psyop, Pharrel, Santogold, and Julian Casablancas

2008-07-17T14:19:00.006-05:00

Psyop threw down some very ill motion on a spot to celebrate Converse 100th year anniversary.

We were talking at work to see if this was possible to do something like this if papervision.

Web414 August 2008 Meeting

2008-07-17T10:39:00.005-05:00

I am giving a talk at the next Web414 meeting in Milwaukee about my experience with developing an application in Adobe AIR. I am super excited. Ever since I started with Flex 3 I have been super geeked about what I have been learning. So if you are in the Milwaukee area on the 14th of August I would love you to come by! The meetings are held at bucketworks located on 1340 N 6th St Milwaukee, WI.

Click here to sign-up.

Thanks to Mike Rohde for hooking this up!

Snappin: The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0

2008-07-15T19:01:00.003-05:00

Colin Moock has posted on O'Riely's InsideRIA charges against ActionScript 3.0. He makes a stand for Flash developers who are having issues with AS3 and feeling that the "ease of use" of previous Flash version is going away. I think alot of the points are good but I also think to make room for more scalability of the structure you have to let some things die.

Check it

Colin also has a video with Jim Cobert that talks about the Flash Player from the FITC Toronto. Some good talks about some of the current bugs in Flash and how they are trying to deal with them. Check that out!

Adobe AIR Update Framework.

2008-07-14T22:59:00.002-05:00

I am getting closer to having FlossyFX completed. One feature that I need to work on was the auto update to provide users with new versions of the app. I did a search online to see how other people are doing it and found that Adobe released their own package called Adobe AIR Update Framework last month.

The framework uses XML on a server to store the latest version, update description, and download path. You point the code to the xml and it checks itself against your current version using the application xml file.

The framework comes in two version for UI and non-UI and also in ActionScript and Javascript. I was going to code up an example but I think the samples that Adobe provides are solid. You can download the code and samples on adobe labs.

One thing to note is that the framework is still in beta, but it seemed stable enough to use. I guess you could provide the final code update when you update your app!

Check it

TweenMax AS3

2008-07-13T16:24:00.003-05:00

My man Matt Przybylski just lead me to TweenMax. TweenMax is TweenLite's big brother. It has a ton of goodies from regular tweens to filter and bezier tweening. After trying it out seems, it to be one of the best (and smallest 8K!) tweening engines I have tried so far.

I definitely like the ability to stop all tweens and delays. This is always good when user starts or stops an interaction.

Check it!

Thanks Matt!

Reading .wav files to AIR.

2008-07-12T23:04:00.005-05:00

So while working on FlossyFX I was trying to see if there was a way to import .wav or .aiff files into AIR to play in Flossy. Since those file types aren't native I was trying to look for alternate ways to get this going.

At first I thought I could write a hook to lame to convert the file into an MP3 then import into AIR. But from what I read security is tight, so that was a no go. Boo!

Then I saw Merapi, a project that allows a bridge between Java and AIR. So I signed up for the beta. I am still waiting for the beta email, but while waiting I found Benjamin Dobler's Rich Apps blog. Benjamin broke down how to take the byte array information from a wav file and stuff it down to a swf for the sound to play. This totally answered my issue of getting wav files working.

Now I am in the process of taking the wav conversion code and converting the idea over to aif files as well. The binary structure of an aif file is way more organized then wav is it seemed fairly easy to get to the byte data. I just have to make sure it's saving the data in all the right places. If I get the code done I will post the solution.

Here is the post on the wav conversion. I did have to change the code a bit in Benjamin's WavSWF Class and add the LoaderContentInfo to the Loader because of the new security settings in AIR.

FYI, if you are looking for more information on ByteArrays check out http://bytearray.org/

Pass the Hydro..

2008-06-12T13:18:00.003-05:00

Ok Ok. Let's not get to excited. I found HydroTween on the Go blog today. HydroTween is an AS3/Go animation sequencer like Fuse.

We use Fuse alot on AS2 projects. Although Fuse isn't the cleanest it is one of the best sequencer that I have used. I currently use Tweener on my AS3 projects, but I miss having the ability to sequence like fuse. I know you can do a Tweener/Go combo, but it's nice to have a sequencer as a part of the system. I haven't done any tests yet, but this seemed promising enough to be able to post before I try it out. Has anyone used it, and what do they think?

Check it!

Kiss fight!

2008-06-10T08:35:00.003-05:00

Mentos once again catches my eye with this online game. Kiss fight! is a 3d animated game that puts you up against 3 skillfully kissable ladies. Can you lay it on them before they get you?

I love this game. The production quality is amazing, and the experience is right on! What do you think?

Check it

On the touch screens of steel.

2008-05-27T10:08:00.003-05:00

Engadget posted this ill video of the ATTIGO TT touch screen turn tables! Very ill. I will say I that I wasn't sure how you could really scratch on there, but they seem to pull it off.

Check it!

Facebook AS3 api.

2008-05-13T08:47:00.002-05:00

Jason Crist has got a Facebook AS3 API that I thought I would try to use. It uses Facebook's Javascript engine then creates a bridge between the two to talk to facebook. You can't do things like upload photos yet, but it's nice to have a framework to integrate with Facebook in AS3.

Setting up the app wasn't hard but it does take a while to get a key from Facebook, then making that key secure isn't to easy in Flash.

None the less I am working on my first Facebook app, I will post later about my findings.

Check it!

Yahoo! Flash Developer Center

2008-05-13T08:29:00.004-05:00

I saw a post on Zues Labs about Astra in Yahoo!'s dev center, so I thought I would check it out. There are a ton of Flex and Flash Components in the site that you can use under the BSD license. I must say Yahoo! has got some mad love for us Flash Devs!

Check it!

They also developed some AS3 APIs for their current products. I used the Map API in AS2 before and it was super handy. The AS3 version looks dope! Adobe has got a post about the new Map API and Blaze DS.

Wide Eye: Cold Shot Game

2008-04-16T21:51:00.003-05:00

Wanna figure out who's going to buy the next round? Well with the launch of an online game for Wide Eye you can!

Check it!