FlashGuru Blog

So, its conference season again and ive got alot of travelling to do in the next few weeks which im throughly looking forward to. I cant wait to get out of the UK were it has done nothing but rain for the past couple of days. I have a serious Vitamin D deficiency- thanks to the lack of sun on this miserable island.

I will be travelling with the one and only London Flasher known as Tink, who will be shaving off the beard which hes been growing for a good 6 months now

First stop is Sydney, where i will be presenting for the third year in a row at the webDU conference, this time on the subject of the Flash 8 - BitmapData API. We will be over there for 9 days soaking in the summer sun on Bondi Beach, cocktails in hand and then we are heading over to Hong Kong to break up the monster 24 hour return flight, we will stay there for 6 days before embarking upon the final part of the journey back to London.

The day after i get back to London, i fly out again, over to Washington D.C to stay with a friend for a few days, before we both head off to Microsoft Mix 06 in Las Vegas, where i will stay for 4 days and hopefully return with some money in the bank courtesy of the casinos.

Lots of fun will be had and lots of photos will no doubt surface on my flickr account.

We all like to know a little more about what goes on under the hood of our favourite tools. Undocumented features and the like have a certain appeal that gets everybody excited.

Flex Builder 2 which is currently in public beta has a little known gem of a feature (for which documentation is scarse) which you can use to learn alot more about what Flex actually does under the hood to make all that mxml markup goodness into a working Flash movie. This compiler option did not work in the previous public alpha build.

The brains of Flex 2 lie in the compiler (AKA MXMLC) which internally converts all your mxml markup into Actionscript 3 classes ready for the next stage of the process which is Actionscript compilation. The Flex 2 compiler accepts certain arguments (or compiler flags) that allow you to change the way it operates slightly.

There are plenty of these compiler flags but my favourite has to be the option that tells MXMLC to keep all of the Actionscript 3 classes that it has generated as part of the project building process. You can then view these actionscript files to find out more about how Flex actually works.

The compiler flag i speak of is called -keep-generated-actionscript and you can turn it on in Flex Builder 2 for your own pleasure by doing the following:

1. Right-click a Flex Project in the Navigator Panel.
2. Select Properties from the Context Menu.
3. Select Flex Compiler in the Properties Window.
4. Enter -keep-generated-actionscript into the 'Additional compiler arguments' field.
5. Click 'OK' to apply the changes.
6. Build your Flex Project by clicking the Run button.
7. Right-click your Flex Project again in the Navigator Panel.
8. Choose Refresh from the Context-Menu.
9. A new folder should appear under your Flex Project in the Navigator Panel, named 'generated'

Inside the 'generated' folder lies the under the hood Actionscript 3 files that the compiler generates as an interim stage of the whole compilation process. Open them up and have a nosey as to what Flex 2 is actually doing under the hood to setup all the default component styles etc... it's an awesome feature, lets hope they keep it in there.

Enjoy.

I'll be in London again tonight for the Adobe Launch Party.

This year ive chosen to skip the lure of the FlashForward conference that has moved location to Seattle and instead i will be heading over to Sydney at the end of February to present a seminar about the new Image API in Flash 8 for the webDU conference (previously MXDU).

This will be the third year in a row that ive braved the 24 hour monster of a flight to hang out with the Aussie Flashers and present at the conference. Ive said it before, and ill say it again, webDU is an awesome conference! My favourite of all the conferences ive been to and this year is shaping up to be even better than it was last year. Checkout last years photos.

Tink and LordAlex will be joining me this year to show the Aussies how to drink beer and party properly and im thinking that we will probably visit Tokyo or Hong Kong on the way their for a couple of days, to break up the flight and hang around for 10 days or so after the conference to enjoy Sydney.

Hope to see you there.

I will be in London tommorow for this months Macromedia User Group.

My del.icio.us bookmarks. Yugo also uses del.icio.us.

Perspective Distortion with Actionscript in Flash 8. Click here.

Here in the UK we have a great internet magazine called .net, the only one if it's kind worth reading. It's mainly aimed towards web designers & developers and their are often Flash related articles in it. This magazine replaced the much loved, but sadly less bought Create Online magazine that was around during the days of the .com boom.

Anyways, i am proud to have written the featured seven page article for the special "Web Design Trends 2006", January issue (The one with the black and silver cover) on the subject of Speed Improvements in Flash Player 8. If your in the UK, pop into your local magazine shop and give it a read.

Macromedia are now officially owned by Adobe, the aquisition was completed on Saturday and now their flag is flying on the Macromedia Homepage which has changed slightly here and there to get website visitors into the huge transition that lies ahead (Im glad im not the person responsible for the re-branding - the poor soul!).

Adobe have launched a new web product bundle to co-incide with the announcement, which includes Studio 8 Products.

The major concern at present for me and various others developers is the badly worded FAQ that kind of suggests that Adobe intend to bundle Flash Player and Adobe Reader together as one... apparently, and hopefully that is not the case, but i wouldn't put it past them. What a disaster that would be, Flash Player only succeeded because of its small footprint, Adobe Reader is a good 20 mb download which would make Flash Player bigger than Shockwave Player to download - which we all know didnt reach the masses quite like Flash, simply because it was bloatware - something that Adobe have worryingly mastered down to a fine art.

I must admit as a developer im not very familiar with Adobe (Although i am presently learning Adobe After Effects), the only thing i know for sure about them is that i hear they are not very good at working/communicating with their community/customers (Although they did start blogging not so long ago), their beta programs are elitist, their website kind of sucks to say their products are primarily for visual thinking people (what's going to happen to DevNet and Macromedia Forums) and they have alot of learning to do when it comes to making tools for developers.

Hopefully Macromedia Developer Relations as we know them (Mike Chambers, Danny Dura, Christian Cantrell at al) won't be over-shadowed by the Adobe regime and that Macromedia Labs and the new open initiative/customer driven product development cycles dont die an early death (How cool would it be to see public alphas of Photoshop and After Effects up there?), and lets hope MXNA doesnt become a censored AXNA.

All in all im hoping that good things will come from this aquisition and that Macromedia can teach Adobe a thing or two about the web, dealing with customers, keeping the filesizes down and working with developers not designers.

Exciting times? Im not too sure yet, it's too early to tell. But still, farewell to Macromedia and welcome Adobe - we are watching you very closely

Hopefully your watching us too!

It's that time again already. Macromedia are actively monitoring the community and looking to their customers for suggestions on what features we still think is missing, or could be improved in the next full release of Flash Authoring, codenamed Blaze.

Tomas van der Haase of Macromedia QA has put out an official request on the [ExtendFlash] mailing list for customers to share their wishlists for Flash Extensibility. Use the comments below or post on the list, the top 3 things you would like to do with JSFL which currently are not possible, or are possible, just not gracefully.

Tomas also notes that soon Development Resources in the engineering team will be spoken for (booked out) and changes will become harder and harder to get into the final product, the longer you wait. So now's your chance, wish away.

Ill start it off, with my wishlist:

1. Ability to define our own Filter Effects and have them show up in the Filters panel, a filter can be a jsfl script that is executed when it is added to the list of filters for the selected instance. This would require changes in the player to support custom filters.
2. Ability to create a new document based on a template .fla programmatically.
3. JSFL Event Model, that amongst other things, will call a specified function in any jsfl scripts that have registered to be told about events. Lots of events, applicationStart, applicationClose, documentOpen, documentClose, documentFocus, frameRemoved, newFrame, newLayer, layerRemoved, actionsChanged.... the list is endless.

I wrote a pretty darn lengthy article conveniently titled "How to increase the frame rate of your flash movies" and it has been published as the cover story in this months issue of the MX Developers Journal magazine. It is online to read for those of you that do not subscribe to the print version of the magazine. It explains Bitmap Caching, Memory Usage and scrollRect Panning in great depth and also contains some tips & tricks Check it out.

[p.s] 100 * 100 != 1000 - Typo in the article [/p.s]

Actionscript 3 is the next generation scripting language of the Macromedia Flash Platform. In my session at Spark Europe in Amsterdam i will explore the new features and changes of the language from the point of view of an Actionscript 2 programmer. I will discuss native support for Regular Expressions and XML with E4X, analyzing sounds, the new and improved event model, binary sockets and other significant enhancements such as the new 'DisplayList', a fundamental part of Actionscript 3 programming. Finally i will take a hard, high, look at what has changed to make the new AVM so much faster than its predecessors.

Spark Europe is going to be a great event, get yourself over to Amsterdam for the first installement of the premier european flash conference.