FlashGuru Blog

For those flash developers that want to be up to date with the happenings in the flash community, flashblogs’ are the answer, with the sudden huge boom in flash related blogs, it is now becoming a nightmare to check out all your favourite news sources, hence the brightsparks amongst us decided to develop online news aggregators that can be accessed from one website address and from there you can read the news from all your favourite sources. The third known flashfeed reader has been made public, this particular reader looks much more like an application and functions much more like an application. If your favourite news sources arent listed in the default feeds you can add your own sources at the click of a button, making it truly scalable and much more useful. [Via JDB Cyberspace]

Unfortunately since Flash Version 2, bitmaps have not been rendered correctly in the flash player. Jacob Hanson has performed a test to outline the issue and has posted the results for all to see. [Via Swf News]

Macromedia Flash Remoting provides the infrastructure that enables Macromedia Flash MX to connect to remote services exposed by application servers and web services. Flash Remoting for the .NET platform has been released recently in beta form for developers to download and play with. For more information on Flash Remoting, visit the Flash Remoting Homepage. [Via Mesh On MX]

Macromedia have released an online sample application in the form of a pet store to show off the new features of Macromedia Studio MX. This application uses Flash MX for the frontend of the shop and Coldfusion MX for the backend of the shop. The best thing about this sample application is that it has been fully documented for us all to learn from, including but not limited to the source code, the usability testing, the server-side stuff, the developers perspective, user interface design techniques, best practices, process maps, quality assurance and benchmark performance. The application has that much information & documentation that it has its very own Blueprint Application Development Center. If you have a spare hour or six, then make sure you put that time to good use by learning a trick or two from the experts. [Via Mesh On MX]

The Macromedia Designer & Developer Center for Flash MX, has once again been updated with articles that are both informative and interesting to read, namely; Locking Down Macromedia Flash and Extending Components in Macromedia Flash MX.
[Via Mesh On MX]

Robin Debreuil author of the very useful online OOP guide, has created an Actionscript Obfuscator application called Viewer Screwer. An obfuscator is an application that scrambles data into a form that only a computer can understand, in this case your Actionscript is scrambled which means applications such as Actionscript Viewer cannot decompile your code, this is great news for people that want to keep their code safe from prying eyes, but im not totally convinced that the obfuscated data cannot be unscrambled back into readable form. This application is currently in the beta stages and currently only works with swf files version 5 and below, MX support is planned for the very near future. For the latest news on this application head on over to this thread on Robins forums. To test the application you need to be a registered user on Robins forums.[via Mesh On MX]

In the recent days, my newsfeed found on the right hand side of every page under Syndicate(RSS) has been requested on average 3110 times per day, last week alone my newsfeed has recieved 22,318 requests. My advice to you webmasters, provide a newsfeed that complies with the RSS-0.91 Standard and your away to high traffic land. The frontpage (index.php) has also been requested 79,107 times in the past 6 days, with some 41,872 unique visitors. My daily bandwidth usage has now risen to a whopping 1.1gb per day, god knows how that has come about with so little imagery but its all there in writing. Finally this domain now has a little over 13,000 unique external website referrers altogether and around 1,012 unique external website referrers daily, 70 of which bring in atleast 40 unique visitors each. Im impressed, thanks to all of you that link to me, and thanks to my readers for coming back.

Flash 4 had one Garys Bike Jump, Flash 5 had one Gold Rush, Flash MX has 4 new easter egg games plus the two oldies from the previous versions of Flash. With alot of hassle and movement of the finger, you should be able to access the games in the ‘About Flash’ box in the ‘Help’ menu, but i couldnt seem to hit the spot(supposeadly between the two bottom legs in the center where they join). Burak Kalayci developer of the notorious Actionscript Viewer dug through the code in Flash MX to find a loadMovieNum action, pointing to a flash movie on the Macromedia webserver, If like me, you cant click the spot then you can still play the easter egg games online at this location on the Macromedia website. Find out how he found the url to this flash movie in this article.

Phil Chung has updated his flash blog reader, with some great new options that allow us, the users, to customize which blogs we want to read, you can add any newsfeed that is outputted to meet the RSS - 0.91 standard which now makes it a general webbased newsfeed reader as opposed to just a flash blog reader.

It appears that the Flash MX SWF GZLib compression also causes problems for the Movieclip.getBytesTotal() method which is supposed to return the total download size of a movieclip. In the case of the movieclip being an external compressed .swf file, the method returns the uncompressed filesize as opposed to the compressed filesize, which isnt very useful when trying to create accurate preloaders. Try it for yourself.

5 new undocumented functions/methods have been uncovered and documented on the Flashcoders Wiki for all to see, namely; Object.hasOwnProperty(), Object.isPrototypeOf(), Object.isPropertyEnumerable(), Object.toLocaleString() and System.useCodepage(). You should check them out if you want to be up to date with Flash MX Actionscript capabilities.

No Preload has had a facelift worth a view or two. The same site sections; calendar, news and links but with a different layout and a different style. Youve got to adore that lovely toilet roll scrollbar for the news section, how imaginative can one be? very creative, havent seen that done before. Lovely jubbly!

Actionscripts.org and Friends Of Ed have teamed up to bring you the “Friends Of Ed Actionscript Competition”. All you have to do is submit a wicked tutorial or open source file to Actionscripts.org before the 30th June and the best submissions win one of nine great Flash books courtesy of Friends Of Ed. So get your writing heads on and start coding some wicked scripts if you want a free book. For the full lowdown, rules and guidelines checkout this press release.

Flush is a plugin for EditPlus that adds new workflow improvements to your actionscript programming at the press of a key(HotKey). Amongst other things at the press of a key you can switch from your text editor to Flash, clear the output window and run Test Movie aswell as being able to compile and run actionscript you have coded/edited in EditPlus. Flush is in the beta stages and it has only been tested on Windows 98 so help the developer out, download your copy, try it out and send them in your feedback, to make this little application even more useful.

jEdit is an open source, programmers text editor written in java that features everything you would expect from a text editor such as Macromedia Homesite and more… Plugin Architecture, Syntax Highlighting for 70+ scripting languages etc.. Chris Hill has developed a nice little plugin for this application which searches through your include files and creates a clickable list of all the functions and methods in your actionscript. Basically allowing you to navigate to your functions easily in hundreds and hundreds of lines of code. If you do use jEdit then this plugin could be a worthy addition to your application.

The Flashkit Flash Conference is going to San Jose in August this summer. This conference is intended to bring together the community so they can Innovate, Inspire, Educate and Network with others interested in Flash development. The main focus of the conference is the advancement of the technologies pertaining to and surrounding Flash-based Web site development. Attendees will take home the knowledge needed to make informed decisions pertaining to the use of Flash applications on the Web. Lets hope they have an internet connection this time around or i can see some very unhappy peeps floating around San Jose looking for internet cafes. Find out more about the conference here.

Flashgit goes open source, request the source-file for one of some 30+ experimental Flash games and toys. Bomberman, Double Maze, R-Type, Inverse Kinematics, Battle Tanx, Isometric Pacman and loads of other cool stuff for you to gander at and get inspired from.

Flash Player.com is a developers and enthusiast portal for viewer driven content, interaction and community. Using cutting edge site interaction we hope to drive the new wave of broadband websites. The internet is a vast landfill of information and we just wanted to create a place you could come to when looking for games, animations and music flash files, with a clean and easy to use layout.