FlashGuru Blog

Studiowhiz is currently running a competition to promote Flash MX 2004 Magic, the latest in a series of one of my all time favourite books. The competition inolves reading a sneak peek chapter from the book, then building your own maze game using the code provided within the book. There are some wicked prizes on offer courtesy of Macromedia and New Riders:

• Overall Winner (1x book, Macromedia DevNet Resource Kit CD v 3 & v4)
• 1st Runner Up (1x book, Macromedia DevNet Resource Kit CD v4)
• 2nd Runner Up (1x book, Macromedia t-Shirt)

There are also a few more Macromedia t-Shirt’s and goodies, along with 2 more copies of the book to give out as SPOT PRIZES, so get your entry in - you never know you might just be lucky! The deadline is February 13th.

Speaking of mazes, it was in 2001, back in the rusty days of Flash 5, i believe when i provided the following sourcefile as open source. Generation of an isometric random maze with actionscript.

I have modified the Bingo Machine i posted a couple of days ago, it is now fast, the balls now rotate and the fan can be turned on/off by clicking. Check it out.
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Actionscript Viewer is most definetley the most popular and most feared SWF decompiler and it causes alot of debates in the community, on the subject of keeping your precious actionscript code away from prying eyes. One such debate is currently underway on the flashcoders mailing list. To solve this problem once and for all, i have two suggestions that i hope Burak Kalayci will consider implementing into the next major release of his tool.
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In my day to day job, im currently building a set of 18 gambling games with Flash for a client. The final game on my list is Bingo and i spent Friday coding a Bingo machine that will eventually contain 75 coloured balls inside of a sphere that are mixed up by a fan. I am rather pleased with the final effect and havent shown any of my Flash Experiments on this site for a year or more, so starting as i mean to go on, give it a peek.
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Macromedia has added a few more software tools to its line up: The company has closed its acquisition of California software maker eHelp shortly before Christmas. As a result, Macromedia now offers eHelp’s flagship products RoboHelp and RoboDemo as well as the PDF creation Utility RoboPDF, RoboHelp for FrameMaker, RoboInfo, RoboScreenCapture and the PowerPoint-to-Flash conversion tool RoboPresenter.
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Apparently, the ‘neo-Livemotion Militia’ have taken down one of the four main flash resource sites on the web - Actionscript.org.

“Actionscript.org has been hacked. Severely. We have a backup less than 48 hours old so nothing is lost but if you could let people know that’s why the site is down via your site I’d appreciate it a lot. Thanks in advance.”

What is this world coming to? Do we have a Flash MX 2004 Militia? Nope, didnt think so. Adobe fans gone bonkers!

Assuming they are followers of Adobe Livemotion from the name, might be wrong, either way we can live with the thought that the hackers are not professionals - otherwise they wouldnt have malicious intentions.

As a community, we have been waiting for PHP Style - Online Documentation for aslong as i can remember, so that as a community we can add notes to the help files to share our tips, techniques and bugs. Actionscript.com built their own collaborative online documentation which seems to be going well. And now i have just noticed that their are now Macromedia Livedocs for Flash MX 2004, which means we can add comments to each page of the Flash MX 2004 Help Files, just like the php community have been doing for along time. This will be a very useful resource once people start to use it!

Ive created a new Command that makes it easy to create keyframes with stop() actions on them. I cant recall how many millions of times ive created a keyframe and then added a stop() action to it manually. Now this Command will do it for me, it takes the selected frames, converts each one into a keyframe and then adds the stop action to it. Download it here.

A new resource site is up and running today for all you Flash Communication Server MX developers. FlashComGuru contains tutorials (more to come) and forums. Code samples and demo applications will be added shortly. Check it out!