Hey guys I had heard about this a while back but hadn't been reading it much. But today I was taking some time to get some AS3 work under my belt and decided to spend sometime with it. Although its not super deep information it gives you some great high level tips on AS3 and its changes. So If you are still new to AS3 and looking for a few more little tips jump over to Kirupa's site and get started reading the AS3 Tips of the Day!
Tag Archive for 'as3'
I just ran across nocrossdomain.com for the first time! This is super interesting. Anyone else trying this? Seems almost to good to be true. Anyone have any good stories about it?
Yesterday when I was looking at the new panels Lee Brimelow released it got me thinking about his tutorials on AIR and video. So I was like, hey, it would be cool to have a super simple AIR app that played my FLV's I've been compressing. It seemed like every player I tried was just a bit much. Soooo... here is my first AIR app. Its really nothing so don't expect anything. Currently, as it is, it has no controls or REAL features for that matter. I just put it together so I could play some FLV's I've been compressing. Really just to view them quickly and see how they looked in a player. Anyway its really just for quick testing tool for developers like me. So don't hold your breath for your new end all FLV player! It does the trick and has some scaling feature when you drag the video onto it, it will resize to the size the video has in its META data. Oh and enjoy my amazing graphics I made for it!
px4 flvPlayer 0.6.3
(0.6.3 cause I always wanted to have some weird beta number on something.)
Features - if that's what you want to call them
- drag FLV's onto it to start playing
- scales to the movies correct dimensions
Download :
1. Get Adobe Air
2. Download the flvPlayer
3. Play FLV's and H.264
To be added later:
- full play/pause/seek/volume controls
- ability to check META data
- screen shot video and save to PNG
- custom chrome
I will most likely open source the entire project so you guys can see my AS3 mess and help out or maybe learn a little. Either way it will be worth it to someone!
Update: I added H.264 support. And it was incredibly easy. Really as easy as a simple 'if' statement. Thanks for the idea Freddy! If you do place an MOV on it that isn't H.264 format it just won't play or will stop the video that was playing and wait for a new video to be loaded. I will do some error handling to this at a later date. Enjoy for now!
Snippets kick ace! and events don't hurt either!
So... have any of you guys downloaded the two panels Lee Brimelow released recently? If not I would suggest doing so. They are killer time savers!
The snippets panel lets you store your code or get code from others that you reuse often and you don't want to have to constantly setup. Almost like knowing OOP but "not" and its reusable. 
Really it could be any code you want! Its easy to add your own through an XML doc that Lee gives you access to edit and add to the panel. If you want to add some code to the panel just navigate to the XML doc and start pasting. Below is one I made really quick for setting up a simple Fuse function:
<snippet label="Setup Simple Fuse Animation" ascript="import com.mosesSupposes.fuse.*;\nZigoEngine.register(Fuse, PennerEasing, FuseItem, FuseFMP);\n\nfunction animation():Void\n{\n\tvar f:Fuse = new Fuse();\n\tf.push({ target: me, _alpha: 100, _x: 0, _y: 0, ease: 'easeOutQuad', time: .5, trigger: .25 });\n\tf.start();\n}\n\nanimation();" />
I would love to see some of us share our favorite snippets to use in our own panels! I'm trying to get a little list together of mine and I will be sure to share it with all of you guys. But anyway Lee gives you all a nice list to start with. Some good AS3 code snippets for Tweener, some AIR stuff and more! I already started a little project just from the AS3 things these two little guys taught me. Its a pretty simple AIR app I plan to share very soon! But don't stress you don't have to use AS3 for your snippets AS2 code snippets will work fine too!
Also the Event panel is great to. Its like a snippets panel but it creates events for your AS3 project. Its really worth looking at since events are the basis of any project or site you are creating. Just make a movieclip choose a few events its going to have and viola, its auto creates the actionscript for you!
Well don't just sit there go download the Code Snippet and Event panels now!
This afternoon Steven Sacks announced the Gaia 2.0 Panel for Flash CS3. So for those of you guys interested jump over a read his official release post. I am hoping to review it myself this week and see what I can find. But I'd love to hear what you guys think when you try it out!
Ok not really on shelves per say put on a web site near you! I know some of you guys are really excited about this release and can't wait for Steven to release the final version. But for those of you already creating AS3 sites why not help out in testing! This way you can be sure its the product it can be! For you, and for everyone else out here on the inner webs. Well thats, that. Its a quick post, I know, but I wanted to make sure you all knew in case you hadn't been reading Steven's blog also! Enjoy! And please comment and lets us all know what you think about it and let Steven know too!
Wow, what a whirlwind of a week has it been since my little Dear Adobe letter. So many of you have responded from around the globe, giving me and Adobe feedback on so many aspects of the topic. It's been really great to get this boiling in some of your minds and to see how many people from all backgrounds care about flash intimately and how they envision flash growing. Well, I wanted to try and clarify some things about my letter, so let me just kinda recap somethings since the dust is starting to settle.
Am I upset Adobe has created AS3, MXML and a tighter programming environment? NO! That would be ridiculous. I know that AS3 is the step in the right direction for Actionscript and the player. It is cleaner, faster, stronger... everything that a new iteration in a language should be. It helps give developers the freedom to tighten down their apps and provide a much better product to the end user. The flash 9 player has given older machines new life by running these larger apps faster than ever before. And that means a lot to all of us, since it's broadening the audience of flash sites and apps all together.
What else has AS3 done? Well, besides the player and scope improvements, it has brought on a much larger scripting engine. One that has improved everything, with better event handling, methods, properties and functions. So why was I saying it's so much harder? Imagine you are a designer and you want to jump into flash, action script and flash animation and start building a website or some type of interactive experience. In the AS1 and AS2 days it would be EASY. Throw some buttons on the stage, put a few mouse events with gotoAndPlay's on them and viola! You're starting to build something. Granted the options were smaller than what we could do but hey you were building a FLASH site/animation!
Now move yourself forward in time a little. Flash is using the AS3/4 engine. It's code driven and can build the best apps in the world! But what happened to all the fun of flash? It's gone. Designers can no longer go hey it would be great to build "X". They can't write a site on one frame. They don't have a clue what an object is and hardly know that actionscript is. But they want to build something in flash. Their minds don't and will not ever work in code. Some of you "devigners" are the exception and are the ones TRULY pushing flash to the edge of its boundaries. But if you weren't ever given the opportunity to start building something with flash in its early years you are never going to find out you are a "devigner". You will always remain a "designer", lost trying to understand what you can do with flash and actionscript. This is what I was trying to truly get at in my previous letter to Adobe.
Was I trying to get Adobe to keep AS2 around forever? No! I was just trying to get us all and Adobe to think about what Flash has done to the design/interactive world! And how this tool is used to not only create apps (which I hope is what Flex will be for, not Flash) but to create engaging animation-driven websites. That engage our end users and "had" made it easy for designers to pick it up and start engaging our users in ways most developers never would of never thought of. This is what made flash magical. All I am asking Adobe to do is look at the product and again think about how to leverage Flash and all the technology behind it back to the designer some again. And not to run off into the sunset of the online application world too fast. But to maybe keep progressing the scripting language to give both worlds the ability to create!
I just want to make sure the designer doesn't lose control and the ability to design with Flash. The word design is funny in today's interactive world. It can mean MANY things. But it still has its roots and whether you are designing with code, photoshop or with the Flash animation tool you can still design! That's what made flash so great. It divided the gap and also made the impossible possible for a designer. That is what was really amazing! And it made it all possible on the web! I REALLY can't wait to see where the product goes! But I also don't want to see it run off too far from all of the designers that are engaging our end users with their magical minds! So I just want to say I know Adobe can still keep moving in the developer direction but I think with the right tools and additions to the product it can also keep the designers interested and keep their hands in the product evolving the web.
I haven't sat down and thought directly about what these changes may be. But I will! I know that my opinions about these tools are not everyone's opinion. But that's not why I have been blogging about this. It's to hear the rest of the community's opinions and open the door a bit more for the designers and everyone to speak! Thanks for listening again!
Update: Sorry for the eariler miss hap on the title of this post. I promise that was not on purpose.
Hey guys last night I got my invite key to the blist beta site. Its a pretty interesting Flex app for sharing a database with friends, family and really anyone you want to. Anyway if any of you guys are interested in seeing what they have built comment below and I will share the love.
I really want to know what you guys think of this app and how you might see it useful to you. Right now I am not seeing how I could potentially use it but maybe I am missing something. Mostly I see myself browsing docs others are sharing. Maybe it would be fun to keep some tutorials I want to put together in a blist doc. That way all you guys would be able to edit and improve the code in them. To build a better database of scripts we all regularly use. Whata you think?
Update: The guys at blist put up there live demo from DEMO today if you are interested in watching it also.
So I have been reading these types of posts:
http://www.reflektions.com/miniml/template_permalink.asp?id=456
http://aralbalkan.com/1126
and wondering what is gong to be happening with flash. And if you guys are going to be killing off the mid to low flash developers as time goes by and on into the new flash players etc?
So here is my questions:
Why are we making it more difficult for non programmers to pick up actionscript and play with it? It used to be so easy for many types of designers/developers to open flash and instantly get a lot out of it. It seems like you have wanted to cater to the few that bitched about actionscripts non traditional programming format and not to the designers turned developers. Now we have gone into the AS3 days where we can't code on buttons (which is fine for me but maybe hard for others) and we can hardly code on the timeline for that matter. We are needing to start hiring engineers almost to develop flash sites now because its become so complicated to understand this new programming language. I mean this is what made flash so amazing in the past. I went to art school and got a job dong flash. And in two years I could code great sites and simple games. Now I am able to do about anything in AS2 but moving to AS3 has been a huge leap cause OOP is a completely new concept. And I think it is for MANY non traditional developers and developers wanting to pickup a product like flash WAS.
What does this mean to the future of flash? Are we going to see the traditional advertising flash sites start to fail due to budget and demand for creative engineers (which are few and far between) that want alot of money. Are you guys developing a product for app developers? Or for the MASS amounts of AS2 developers out here creating great creative work. I mean do you think flash would be where it is if it wasn't for designers to be able to open flash read a few tutorials and start tweaking code. The imperfections of actionscript coding style is what made it so appealing to SO many people worldwide. No longer can a creative director understand how to tweak a AS3 site without a tremendous amount of ramp up time to learn OOP concepts.
This new community you are trying to build is great for Flex/AIR but terrible for Flash. The creative appeal is falling away and now becoming a DEVELOPERS playground and not a 'devigners'/designers playground. You are going to find less and less designers converting to developers as time goes on making the gap that much wider between the two. And much harder for businesses to communicate between the two departments. Which will again kill the creative appeal to flash. All I ask is please be careful what you do with our precious flash. And don't forget about the mass amounts of developers that made flash what it is. By coming from a design background to become self taught flash developers who helped create the product you have today!
