FlashGuru Blog

Flash 8 hasnt been around for very long and im sure there are lots of people out there who have tonnes of questions and also want to get up to speed with the new tool and what it has to offer. I will be in Brighton on the 24th October for a Flash 8 Training day organised by Ariaware.

I will be presenting a great session on my favourite new feature, the BitmapData API. My session will introduce all attendees to the new BitmapData API and then i will cover Webcam Motion Detection and Tracking (which although not useful in a commercial environment, is great fun!)

That’s not all, this a full day seminar with a great line-up of sessions from the people who have been been using the tool for a good while now, namely; Aral Balkan(RIA Master), Richard Leggett(FlashLite Guru), Stephen Downs (Tink) and Rob Bateman(BBC). There will be sessions on the new Video features, Mobile Features, File Upload/Download features and lots of time for questions.

A bargain day out for any Flash Developer/Designer with a laptop and a copy of Flash 8 (Trial or Fully Licensed) that wants to keep on top of things, at only £149. More information can be found here.

Should be alot of fun, hope to see you there!

After a couple of minutes of scrolling through the names in the credits (Help > About Flash) my name appears in the ‘Special Thanks’ section amongst other friends and fellow flashers.

It’s a real honor and personal achievement to have your name in the product you work with everyday, so thanks Macromedia for letting me and the others, help you make Flash 8 into a high quality, groundbreaking, swiss-army-knife of a motion graphics tool. It was a great journey, look forward to the next one. Oh and thanks for thanking me, the pleasure was all mine.

Macromedia have just put up a fun new video that documents the making of Flash 8. Complete with interviews with the Engineering Team and you might even see me and others you know here and there, and some of my examples in the video

Its a very cool watch. Check it out!

I love all that team spirit. The Flash Team rocks!

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Okey, so everybody is experimenting with the cool new version of Flash that has just been released; Flash 8. There is lots and lots to learn and play with. Scion who’s parent company is Toyota, make cars, they have decided to team up with Macromedia to run a Flash 8 competition for people based in the United States.

The idea is simple, build something cool that is under 10mb in size and less than 2 minutes in length with Flash 8. It can be anything an animation, an interactive toy or some new funky effect, just ensure that it uses some of the scion assets (videos, logos etc..) and preferably uses some of the new features in Flash 8.

Submit your entry and you can win yourself a brand new Scion Car or a copy of Macromedia Studio 8.

The guy’s at Scion, Me, Grant Skinner, Eric Dolecki, David Nelson from Method and Andy Hall will be judging all the entries and will choose the ultimate winner of the car and the runners-up.

So, why not experiment and put yourself up for a chance of winning a great prize at the same time? Makes sense really!

View the website for more information.

Dont forget to checkout some of the Flash 8 demos on the site, Andy Hall’s experiment is particularly cool.

The London MMUG the other week was great fun, we had a good turn out aswell, over 100 people. Mike Downey showed everybody the new features of Flash and demonstrated some great usage examples, we then had a Flash 8 Jam Session where myself, Aral Balkan, Richard Leggett and Tink had 11.5 minutes each to showcase cool stuff about a particular new feature of Flash 8.

Naturally i showed off some of the stuff i have been doing with webcams and the Image API. Aral showed alpha channels with video and cue points, Richard showed all the new mobile features and Tink showed his file upload/download stuff.

Somebody secretly recorded everything on a dictaphone which was left on the speakers desk, none of the speakers were aware of this, but by the by, those recordings are now available as podcasts, there is also some good video of the event and lots of piccies.

Everything can be found here.

Ive updated my Flash 8 Examples page with a few of the webcam experiments that ive been working on. These were some of the examples that i showed during the Flash 8 Jam session at the London MMUG last week, they were very well recieved!

Ive got a fair few more webcam experiments that i will put up in the near future, but for now checkout Isocam (source available through ifbin), Pointillism and Webcam Mosaic.

A new Flash Conference is coming to Europe in November! Spark is a new european event organised by the past co-producer of FlashForward, United Digital Artists (UDA). Lynda.com is focusing the efforts of FlashForward in the United States, however United Digital Artsts, now based in Paris are bringing the same quality and experience you would expect from a FlashForward conference over the pond into Europe at an affordable price.

The first conference will be held in Amsterdam on the 16-18 November at the Paradiso and a great line-up of speakers will be there to bring everybody up to date with everything Flash 8 has to offer.

The line-up is still being confirmed, however a partial list of speakers is already available. The likes of myself, Kevin Lynch, Mike Chambers, Grant Skinner and Chafic Kazoun are already on the roster.

At 236 euros, half a days work for most contractors, there is no excuse for you not to show your face. Amsterdam is a great city and this is going to be a great conference. Registration is open now on the website.

FYI: This conference will actually happen, scouts honor and all that, its not a scam like the previous two events (FlashParade/FlashEurope).

Ive just uploaded a big zip archive that contains of the source-code for my Flash 8 Examples. You can download the zip from here (18mb). You will need Flash 8 to open the files.

[update] The files have been removed, the server crashed in a very short time after posting the examples. They are now fully commented and can now be downloaded through the ifbin service along with many other examples from other authors. Some of the examples are available for free, others will require a subscription.[/update]

More reading for everybody. Another article i wrote for the Macromedia Developer Center, which went live earlier this morning. This time i discuss my experiments with Webcam Motion Detection using the Flash 8 Image api. I forsee that alot of people will be doing this kind of thing with Flash 8, especially for interactive installations at museums, galleries and on kiosks. Enjoy!

A rather comprehensive introduction to the Flash 8 Image API that i wrote, went live on the Macromedia Developer Center early this morning to coincide with the Flash 8 launch. The first of many tutorials i plan to write when i get time. Hopefully its useful. Check it.

Macromedia Livedocs has been updated with the full contents of the Flash 8 Help Panel. You can find the Flash 8 Online Documentation here.

The 30-day trial version of Macromedia Flash 8 Professional is now available to download from here. Get there quick before the pipes get warm and the traffic jams start.

The Flash Developer Center has literally just been updated with all the new Flash 8 articles. Check out all the new content!

Apparently Flash 8 is available for download now, for Macromedia Devnet Subscribers. If you have a Devnet Subscription, go and login and see if its available. Im not sure how accurate this information is, i dont see any news on the Macromedia homepage as of yet.

Along with Grant and others, i have also being working with the Macromedia Developer Center team, writing various Flash 8 related articles that will surface on Macromedia Devnet when Flash 8 starts to ship. There will be a whole range of new content available to help people get started with all the new Studio 8 tools.

Initially there will be two articles going live that i have written, the first is an introduction to Webcam Motion Tracking using the Image API and the second is a somewhat lengthy introduction to all things Image API aka the BitmapData Classes. Look out for these any many other articles, coming to a monitor near you in the near future. Ill post here when they go live!

As i mentioned earlier on, a good understanding of the different color spaces and number systems is necessary to work effectively with actionscript and the new expressiveness classes in Flash Player 8.

Ive been messing around with these classes for a good while now and during that time i have built up a library of methods that i use regularly to convert between different color spaces and number systems, currently the class can do the following:

• convert red, green, blue values into a 24-bit hexadecimal color value
• convert alpha, red, green, blue values into a 32-bit hexadecimal color value
• convert a 24-bit hexadecimal color value into red, green, blue values
• convert a 32-bit hexadecimal color value into alpha, red, green, blue values
• convert red, blue, green values into hue, saturation, brightness values
• convert hue, saturation, brightness values into red, green, blue values
• convert a 24 bit hexadecimal color value into hue, saturation, brightness values
• convert hue, saturation, brightness values into a 24-bit hexadecimal color value
• convert a hexadecimal color value into a base 16 hexadecimal color string

No doubt, it will come in very useful to others, so im making it available to download here.

This class is work on-going, so will be updated and fixed as and when necessary.

Very soon, when Flash 8 is released, developers will need to learn and understand a few things, which they may or may not have encountered before.

To use the various new expressiveness api's effectively (BitmapData API, flash.filters.*), you will at some point need to learn a thing or two about the following, so follow the links and get studying:

• computer memory (bits & bytes) for memory usage
• various number systems (binary - base 2, hexadecimal - base 16)
• bit shifting & bitwise operaters
• color depths (24-bit, 32-bit)
• bitmaps
• different color spaces/models (HSB/HSV and RGB)

Thats rather generic stuff in computer programming and web design but more specifically to Flash 8, you will probably want to do some reading on:

• Transformation Matrices
• ColorMatrix
• Convolution
• Displacement