FlashGuru Blog

Michael E. Gunn, the webmaster of Hollowcube dropped me a line this morning, to let me know that his site has been updated with a fresh coat of paint, i like it! See for yourself!

Here are the winners of the Flash Film Festival 2003 - San Fransisco, voted for by you the Flash Community.

• Motion Graphics : elevation
• Application : GModeler (Grant Skinner)
• Educational : BrainPop
• 3D : Tokyo Plastic
• Art : The Beauty if Details
• Typography : WDDG
• Navigation : Perfect Fools
• Cartoon : KunstBar
• Commerce : Nike Basketball
• Original Sound : Defenders of the Universe
• Technical Merit : gskinner (Grant Skinner)
• Game : Battle for the Sudan
• Experimental : Repurcussion
• Video : Eagle F1

A while ago, a few sites recieved anonymous tip off’s on a new product that would be released, Macromedia ‘Something’ 1.5, most of the comments to this article, guessed this would be an upgrade to FlashComm Server MX and they were correct. Today, Macromedia have announced the release of Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX 1.5. Among the new features are:

• Support for HTTP Tunneling
• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
• Enhanced audio support
• Enchanced administration
• New, improved model for adding capacity

The new version also adds support for Red Hat Linux 7.3 and higher. Macromedia also noted that a free fully functional but capacity restricted developer edition of this new release will be available.

Mr. Chambers will be keeping us all updated about the goings on at FlashForward San Fransisco 2003 over the next couple of days, for those of us who are too busy to get our asses on a plane over their. So keep checking back at his blog.

Coming in Summer 2003, Macromedia Central will help users more easily interact with information on the Internet, and help Macromedia Flash MX developers and designers create, distribute, and sell Macromedia Flash applications. Give this Macromedia Central Whitepaper (.pdf) a look, and also checkout the Macromedia Central Development Center. For those of you that dont know, System.product an actionscript method will play a key part in the deployment of these applications. Heres a sneaky peek of how Macromedia Central will look. One thing i am dieing to find out, is whether or not we will be able to deploy commercial Flash Components using this architecture, that would be a huge step forward and good news for us developers.

Ahmet Zorlu webmaster of the Zoode blog has today released another Actionscript DrawingAPI enhancing package entitled Zoode Geometries2D. The package provides general rendering methods that can be used to draw two dimensional geometry primitives such as lines, quadratic and cubic curves, polygons, regular polygons, rectangles, round rectangles, parallelograms, ellipses, arcs and general paths. It is modeled along the package java.awt.geom of J2SE, but is much simpler and doesn’t provide advanced features; such as affine transform etc…. You can download the package as a Macromedia Extension(.mxp) here. Or you can copy and paste the source-code from here.

Ted Patrick unearthed one of the numerous undocumented features in Flash MX, today in the form of a new clip event handler, onClipEvent(initialize), which works in the same way as the onClipEvent(load) event handler, but is fired before the onClipEvent(load) event handler is fired, so really it ‘appears’ to have no real use, other than defining an onLoad event handler but still nice to know that undocumented features are still popping up, all be it a rarity these days as most were found during the beta stages. [Via Quasimondo]

Branden Hall has thrown together a sample Model, View, Controller Object Oriented Flash application to show a real life example of the use of OOP and Design Patterns in Flash MX. The source-code is available for download at your leisure.

Friends Of Ed probably the most prominent publisher for Flash based books, has closed it doors after its parent company Wrox decided to call it a day! We should all thank Friends Of Ed for their great contribution to the Flash Community and hope that somebody else buy’s the company very soon.

Jonas Galvez explains how to compile actionscript into a .swf file using the Scite Flash actionscript editor and Robin Debreuil’s Flush application.

FlashComponent.com is ‘live and kicking!’ once more with a shweet new re-design and a request to re-submit all your flash extensions/components.

Gregg Wygonik has created an actionscript class that outputs raw pdf definitions, which can then be written to a file using an external script or a third party projector tool and then viewed in Adobes Acrobat Reader. He has set up a new website which houses all the examples, code and information. What i want to see now, is the opposite, flash reading pdf’s and displaying them which is theoretically possible and will be very useful!

Claus Wahlers has written a new syntax highlighter class for displaying actionscript, javascript, html and other such languages within a flash textfield. He hasnt released the code yet, but he plans to do so in the very near future. In the meantime checkout an example.

Today i have release a new class in the form of a Macromedia Extension and an Actionscript include file, which extends the functionality of Flash. The Form class, is an all code extension which can be included in your projects and will help both designers and developers to easily manage the process of creating a form in flash

FLAP is an open source implementation of Macromedia’s AMF protocol, using this code it is possible to send arbitrary data between client and server using very few lines of code. There is no need to pack complicated data structures into CGI form parameters or XML strings. The coding time can be spent on better things - data preparation and graphical presentation, not data delivery. Download the latest version here. The initial code is baed upon AMF-PHP, a similar thing using PHP which is available here.

The Macromedia website re-design has gone live and i must say it looks shweeeet and works a treat! Check it out! Also, dont forget to check out four new Macromedia Rich Internet Applications which they have integrated into various sections of the site, namely the Macromedia Exchange, Trial Downloads, Membership and Product Registration.

Since i took the link down to the “Best Use Of Flash Ever! - Bouncing Boobs” i have had literally hundreds of emails asking me where it has gone, so back by popular demand, you can download the Bouncing Boobs to your desktop, here and again it is in the navigation bar.

Darren Richardson the webmaster of Actionscripts.co.uk has re-designed his resource site, go over there and check it out!