FlashGuru Blog

Jarle posts his opinions on the way Macromedia are treating the speakers for their up and coming Devcon conference. I agree with everything he has to say, speakers should have their travel expenses, tickets and accomodation payed for, especially as Macromedia are charging $1000 per head to enter the conference, what a joke. Flashforward speakers get much better treatment! Head on over and post your opinions.

On September 12th, Branden Hall and Samuel Wan’s Object Oriented Programming with Actionscript book will be released, a must buy for all actionscript developers! Two great coders and flash instructors teach the principals of object-oriented programming and how to apply these to actionscript. The books covers components in great detail aswell. This looks set to be another huge flash book alongside Colin Moock’s - Actionscript: The Definitive Guide. The companion website has now been released, for more information related to this book, checkout the official website, Wheelmaker.

AS2FLA is a new tool currently in alpha stage, that adds an option into the context-sensitive menu, found when you right-click a .swf file in windows explorer. The menu item when clicked, outputs frame and object actions found on the main timeline of the .swf file to a .fla file that you can then open in Flash MX, with all the actions ready to edit. This tool basically converts bytecode(p-code) found in the .swf file back into human readable actionscript form and then places the actionscript inside a valid .fla file that Flash MX will go ahead and open. I have a strange suspiscion that somebody has been reverse engineering the .fla file format Oh! Did i mention the program is in german?

Earlier we reported about Mozquito, a company that is developing a Flash MX XML/CSS2 renderer. Today they released some more examples showing off the features of their Deng engine (IE6 only so far): blog-like application “deng in 5 points”, rendering of a simple weather report xml, rendering of a standard rss xml feed Note that those are only XML files (View>Source in your browser), they just contain two extra processing instructions that transform and style the XML document. Deng is still in the pre-alpha stages but currently still offers some awesome features, like fully W3C compliant rendering of XML documents styled using basic CSS2 (XML stylesheets) and form functionality to edit styled XML (in page WYSIWYG editing) that can be submitted back to the server. Mozquito promises to ship Deng as Flash MX Components (modularized deployment, add on components for additional namespaces and even allowing third party modules) as well as a standalone engine using XSLT to take care of the XML to Flash mapping.

As previously announced, Optimaze the flash compression tool, has finally made its way onto our computers earning a valid place in our developer toolboxes. I recently got my hands on a review copy and so ive written a couple of hundred words about the program, my experiences with it and why i think you should have a copy already. Read on….
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For those of you who read the OpenLGX article, it was requested that it be removed and to show respect to those words, its dead and gone! Regardless of whether OpenLGX was a scam or not, if Arthur says it wasn’t, then we have no reason to doubt his words. Openly, freely bashing a good man who has done no harm to any of us, is wrong, and i was guilty of that in the article aswell, for which i am sorry! From what i have heard, it seems that Arthur spent alot of hard work, time, energy and cash on the project, and when his team mate did a runner with the code, that was the end of the line, a huge shame and dissapointment to all of us who got so excited about the program, but i am very sure its not something we should of gotten so emotional about, were all still breathing right?

Flash Capture is a plugin that integrates seamlessly with Internet Explorer to puts functions such as sending .swf files, saving and categorising .swf files at the click of your mouse. Personally i cant see any use for such a plugin, but it may be of use to some of you guy’s and gal’s. $20 isnt at all pricey, but this plugin is far from a swiss army knife of functionality, so i would see it being more widely used if it was available for download as freeware.

Two Foriegn Flash Resource sites ive noticed in my webstats quite often of late, FlashMXPro and ThaiFlashDev both of which seem to have alot of content, of course i cant read it so for all i know it could be random rubbish. Check them out, if you can read the languages.

Eric Dolecki has compiled a list of the publically available presentation material from the last Flash Forward Conference in New York City. The list can be found here.

SWF Compresser is a small application that utilises a simple windows interface to compress Flash 2, 3, 4, 5 and MX .swf files. The result is a lighter file that will only play in the Flash Player 6. When you use Flash MX, you can compress your .swfs files using the publish settings, if you dont have Flash MX, then you can use this tool. The funky thing is that this little application will also batch compress .swfs, so even if you have Flash MX, this feature may be worth the download.

Thomas Glyn has just launched his new blog. Expect to find alot of information about 3D Actionscript and flash games over there, in the near future. To kick off the site in style, he has announced the release of four simple, yet very addictive multiuser games for you to have a dabble with; Tic Tac Toe, 4 In A Row, 5 In A Row and Reversi. These games are created using the new Flash Communication Server MX, great examples of its power, be sure to check them out!

PSD2FLA, a new photoshop plugin that allows you to export layered photoshop designs to flash file format (.fla) with the click of a button. All photoshop layer effects and layer names are intact. Open the .fla file in Flash 5 or Flash MX and start adding your funky flash bits to the imagery. This plugin works with Photoshop 4 and later versions including the latest Photoshop 7. Download a fully functional trial copy of the plugin here or buy it for $89.

Form = function has made nine enhancements to the Flash MX Drawing API publically available and free to download from his site. You will find new methods to create dashed/dotted lines, arcs, bursts, gears, ovals, regular polygons, rectangles, stars and pie chart wedges. Download a zip file containing all the actionscript files here.

Yes! more bug fixes and yet another release of the Flash 6 Player, now Flash Player 6.0.47.0. Checkout the changes made to the latest release here. The new flash player wont load and read header redirects anymore which means alot of feedreaders wont work as they are now, to fix the problem you will have to use a proxy, for more details of how to fix this problem, checkout this technote. To be honest i think this is a joke and its getting ridiculous now, but then i also sway towards the tempremant “if you find a bug fix it”. Whats worrying is that so many bugs have arisen in such a short time, unprofessional engineers? , bad luck?, sloppy code? or poor beta testers? i dont know, but it needs sorting out! What do u peeps think?

A developers line of defense against code decompiling and theft, actionscript obfuscator makes code unintelligible yet still functional, which basically means that decompilers cant turn the code back into readable form yet the flash player will still understand it. Download this freeware obfuscator and give it a whirl, maybe this will give you peace of mind.

Ive been doing alot of work on components of late and would just like to list a few of the best examples i have seen out there, the following components are all useful additions to your development arsenal. Stuart Schovenolds’ Colour Picker Component and Slider Bar Component, Samuel Wan’s Bevel Panel Components and Samuel Wan’s Fisheye Listbox Component. If you want to learn how to create components, then be sure to check this very informative tutorial. Components are the future, start developing them!

Mike Chambers announces the release of seven new Flash Communication Server MX components; AudioConference, Cursor, PresentationSWF, PresentationText, RoomList, VideoConference and Whiteboard. There are now a total of fourteen components available for us developers. Checkout the full list and download the components here.