There are some nice desktop wallpapers here on flickr for Flash, Flex and AIR.
Vector versions of the logos are available here for you to make your own.
Archive for the ‘Old Articles’ Category
Flash Platform Desktop Wallpapers
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007Astro Sneak Peek
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007Attendees at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago were today shown a sneak peek of some of the new features coming in Flash Player 10 (Codename Astro).
On show was the much anticipated advanced text layout with bi-directional text support (at last), 3d effects (a new ‘z’ axis property on DisplayObjects) and something you can play with right now, support for custom filters and blendmodes.
Custom effects are written in a new image processing language (Codename Hydra). You can play with custom effects right now, by downloading the new Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit Technology Preview which was released on labs today.
People have already being releasing source-code for some effects that they have written with the new language, after only a few hours of it being available. Check them out.
Colin Moock coming to London
Friday, September 14th, 2007Flash extrordinaire Colin Moock will soon be heading off to visit ten cities of the world, providing a full free day of Actionscript 3 training in each one. Anybody wanting to learn how to program with Actionscript 3 from scratch should checkout the website and sign up. Colin will be coming to London, where and when is to be announced.
Flash Player 10 Wishlist
Friday, September 14th, 2007Ted Patrick mentioned recently that Adobe will be showcasing some big new features due in the next release of the Flash Player, codenamed Astro, at MAX in two weeks time.
Since i wont be going to Chicago for MAX, i will be anxiously checking the blogs for news, heres what i am hoping to find:
- I want to be able to load any files into the flash player without having to send it to the server first and have access to the raw bytes of the file. IMHO the user has explicitly granted permission to access the contents of the file, by browsing around their file system for it and then clicking the ‘Open’ button, so there are no security issues.
- The ability to create a file inside of the player with a bytearray, set its mime-type and use FileReference.download() to have the user put that file onto their filesystem, again without having to send the bytearray to the server-side script.
- The usual request for bi-directional text support, both display and input.
- The ability to get the sound spectrum of the Microphone input.
- DisplayObject quads (similar to quads in Director).
- Typed Arrays, gotta be some more speed improvements to be had from these.
- Mute context-menu item (banner ads with sound are so annoying!).
- Overhaul of the system settings dialog box.
- Ability to have sub-menus in the context-menu.
- Last but not least, bring the audio feature set of the player up to par with everything else, complete with an api that allows to create and modify sounds at run-time.
*G* Flash Player 8 is so old already!
Flash Components
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
Alot of sites that are selling commercial Flash Components are popping up in recent months. Flashloaded has been around for along time and has collected quite a serious amount of quality components, one thing that sets them apart from the rest is obviously their great support and fast response times. Regardless ive added a Flash Components section in the sidebar which lists alot of the sites that sell and/or giveaway components. If i have missed yours, let me know and i will add it.
Actionscript 3 Resources
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Trevor McCauley aka Senocular has been very active since the public got their eyes on Actionscript 3, in helping the community get up to scratch with whats new and whats changed in the new language, firstly by providing, probably one of the most useful posts i have seen across any of the major Flash Forums since the good old days of Were-Here, with an Actionscript 3 Tip of the Day thread, containing a collection of over 100 posts containing Actionscript 3 tips and tricks.
Secondly, a very accurate/comprehensive tutorial that will get people started using Actionscript 3 in Adobe Flash CS3.
That’s a whole lot of writing!
PaperVision3D Experiment
Thursday, July 12th, 2007If you havent heard already, PaperVision3D is in public beta, i haven’t done much experimenting over the past 6 months, ive been out and about enjoying myself instead, but ive now made a concious effort to put some fun back into my work, so ive been spending some time playing with Flash again, mashups et al.
Ive set up a new site, which will eventually become an experimental gallery, in the meantime, i wanted to put something up there, since ive just registered the domain.
I decided to have a quick dabble with PaperVision3D, and it officially rocks, its so easy, although the API needs some work and i found some rendering glitches here and there but anyways my new site guywatson.co.uk took 30 minutes to put together and just less than 100 lines of code, before PaperVision3D and Actionscript 3, something like this would be sssssllllooooooowww and would take 10 times as long to put together and most probably alot more code. My oh my how far things have come.
Now, what can i make next….
Flash Player on the iPhone
Friday, July 6th, 2007
There is alot of hype about the new Apple iPhone simply because it is stylish and it has an iPod, i have an iPod and a phone, should i get rid of them both for this new style icon when it becomes available in the UK? or should i get myself a proper phone like the Nokia N95 which granted doesnt have the same funky intuitive interface but has alot more features and a bigger camera, 3G, Flash Lite and GPS, besides that Apple also forgot to include the Flash Player for Safari.
Apparently though, according to a Wall Street Journal columnist, Apple will be releasing a software update soon.
At launch, the iPhone version of the Safari browser is missing some plug-ins needed for playing common types of Web videos. The most important of these is the plug-in for Adobe’s Flash technology. Apple says it plans to add that plug-in through an early software update, which I am guessing will occur within the next couple of months. However, a separate program included on the iPhone can play a limited selection of videos from YouTube, and the phone can play videos you purchase from Apple’s iTunes store, and certain videos you create yourself.
No Flash Player anytime soon
CNN Reports that Apple CEO Steve Jobs today that “Adobe’s Flash Player Not Suited for the iphone”.
An Adobe competition open to all
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007There has been lots of news of late from the Adobe peeps; public beta releases, left, right and center, but all that has been covered everywhere else, tens of hundreds of times over. One such announcement worth repeating is the Adobe AIR Developer Derby.
Why so? Because for the first time, the competition is open to all, including us Europeans and the Aussies. Not just the usual U.S and Canada. There are some big prizes on offer for anybody that fancies their chances at wowing the judges by creating a ground-breaking, killer application with Adobe AIR. The judges i presume being the Adobe Apollo team.
More info here.
Create Apollo Apps in Flash CS3 on the Mac
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007Good news peoples, i put a little effort into making my Test in Apollo extension work on Mac and it now works! Hoooraaah!
Ive never specifically attempted to make one of my Flash Extensions work on a Mac, so this is a first for me, i learnt a few things about JSFL on a Mac along the way.
Download the latest version of the extension. Version 1.1 from here.
Ive also updated the source-code for those who are interested. Download it here.
Cheers to Mike Chambers for his help with AppleScript.
JSFL FLfile.runCommandLine Updated in Flash CS3
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007The undocumented JSFL method FLfile.runCommandLine as of Flash CS3 now works on a Mac, so you can write shell code and execute it from your JSFL scripts.
Create Apollo Apps in Flash CS3
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007Grant Skinner and his team have converted my extension into a panel and added some new functionality, check it out here
Ive created a Flash Extension that makes it a peace of cake to test your Flash Movies inside of the Apollo runtime, straight from Adobe Flash CS3 instead of using Flex Builder. You will need Flash CS3, the Apollo SDK and the latest Macromedia Extension Manager. The extension now works on Windows and Mac OSX.
Im also working on a Package for Apollo extension for Flash CS3 which will allow you to Package up your Apollo application into an .air file for distribution, once you have finished development. More news on that soon.
Moving on, the Test in Apollo extension adds a new command in the Commands menu: Commands > Test in Apollo
Download the Test in Apollo extension here.
Download the Apollo SDK from here.
For those that are interested, the source code is available here.
Fine Tunage with Finetune Desktop
Monday, April 2nd, 2007Since Teknision put together Finetune Desktop with Apollo, ive been using it religiously. I archived all of the music on my local machine and cleared up a good 20gb of harddrive space, and now i use Finetune Desktop instead of ITunes simply because a) it is free and b) it allows me to put together playlists of my favorite tunes, share them with everybody and play all my favorite tracks on all of my computers without ever having to have those mp3 files on each machine. I can even play them on my Nintendo Wii.
Finetune is top notch and a great example of what can be done with Apollo, bringing a web-based app onto the desktop in style.
Sign-up, download the free Apollo app and start putting together your own playlists.
Why Apollo?
Thursday, March 29th, 2007Mike Chambers explains why you would want to take your web applications out of the browser, using Apollo.
Apollo now available for developers
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007Today Adobe released an alpha version of Apollo for developers on Labs. Download your copy today and start learning more about the new cross-platform desktop runtime by getting yourself a free pdf copy of Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide by O’ Reilly. There is also lots of docco on the Wiki.
Lots of playing and lots of fun to be had in the coming weeks if you have time.
Apollo Camp - San Fransisco
Friday, February 23rd, 2007The Apollo team is hosting a mini Apollo conference named Apollo Camp. Apollo Camp is a one night, single track conference hosted by Adobe covering everything developers need to know about getting started with building Apollo applications using Flex. Im going to head over there, since im living in New York nowadays.
More info here, sign up now before all the spaces are filled.
Demoscene comes to Flash
Friday, February 2nd, 2007Checkout the flash demoscene over at flashscene.org. Some awesome coding and special effects, lots of 3d and oldskool trickery going on.
Flash 8 Experiments
Thursday, December 14th, 2006If you havent seen them already, then head on over to Jailbitch, scroll down the page and checkout his Flash 8 Experiments. These are rocking, definetly the best collection of experiments ive seen for along while.