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it’s easy once you know how.

Hobnox AudioTool

Posted by Mark - 19/12/08 at 10:12:37 am

This is one of the new flash 10 RIAs that had everyone excited at Flash on the Beach, it’s amazing! http://www.hobnox.com/index.1056.en.html

Mmm… Cookies. In ActionScript / JavaScript.

Posted by James - 19/12/08 at 09:12:03 am

I like cookies – they’re like the poor man’s server-side session.

Yes, Cookies aren’t 100% reliable, I know, but I think for a lot of things, they’re a damned good solution.  Flash has it’s own version of cookies, of course – called Shared Objects – but there’s a few problems I can think of with them;

1. They’re not very well integrated with the browser.  A user might expect cookies to track information about themselves, but they also expect that – at any point in time – they can clear the cookies themselves and reset everything. You (the developer) might not want the user to be able to do this, but tough, the user should be able to do it.  People to prefer to work with things they understand, and understand the limits of.
2. They’re only available via Flash.
3. They’re a pain to work with.

So, cookies.  There’s a couple of great resources out there for dealing with cookies in JavaScript and ActionScript 3.0. Quirksmode (http://www.quirksmode.org/js/cookies.html) is unparallelled for its discussion and practical examples of working with Cookies in JavaScript.

And in:flex Blog (http://myflex.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/actionscript-cookie-util/) has an excelent, fully featured, self-contained ActionScript 3.0 class library for reading, writing and deleting cookies, all without external functions.  Which is very clever.

Packaging Pixel Bender filters in SWC files

Posted by James - 18/12/08 at 01:12:28 pm

This is a useful post – it talks about how you can embed a Pixel Bender filter into a SWC, which you could then use for including in other projects.

http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/09/08/encapsulating-custom-pixel-bender-filters-in-actionscript-3/

Why? Well, it make sense if you don’t want to rely on multiple source files, or more likely, if you don’t want people messing around with your Pixel Bender source files (or pinching your intellectual property).

IE8 Beta goes public – and what are those new features?

Posted by James - 18/12/08 at 09:12:44 am

Or to be more specific, what the hell are the “Accelerators” and the “Web Slices”?

You can download the Internet Explorer 8 Beta from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx.  Overall, it’s quite an interesting update – and most noticeably it shows a distinct push on the innovation front.  Since I’m talking about it, I’ll go over a few of the noticeable new features, and then get onto the specifics of the “accelerator” and “web slices” features.

Continue reading IE8 Beta goes public – and what are those new features?…

ImageSizer – updated to version 0.3.9!

Posted by James - 16/12/08 at 10:12:05 am

If anyone out there is using Marks’ ImageSizer AIR application, you may have noticed a new update has appeared – imaginatively called ‘Version 0.3.9′.  

Functionality wise, the primary changes are that the restrictions on the number of images that can be processed have been removed – the original ImageSizer would only let you process 10 images at a time – a sensible restriction, because the application is pretty memory intensive when it gets going, as the component loads each of the images into memory at once.  Instead of actually fixing this issue however (that’s in the pipeline) I’ve just removed the images limit, so don’t go processing lots of images in one go.

Continue reading ImageSizer – updated to version 0.3.9!…

Using the FLVPlayback component in Flex

Posted by James - 16/12/08 at 09:12:50 am

For all of its wonderful components, Flex doesn’t seem to have anything that can easily play an flv.  Even the examples in the Tour De Flex application all use basic Flex buttons, rather than the more interactive FLVPlayback component, which leaves you with either a lot of work to do, recreating the existing flash component, or sucking it up and cutting down the interactivity.  One of the main reasons we use Flex is because everything is so easy to put together, and it just strikes me as odd that there’s no built in FLVPlayback component.

However! All is not lost, thanks to this timely post from Flex Examples: http://blog.flexexamples.com/2008/12/11/using-the-flash-flvplayback-control-in-flex/

It’s not really groundbreaking stuff, but it’s a good place to start – and you can learn the basics that would show you how to use more Flash components in Flex.  All it really needs is an enhanced display – something with those magic attributes that make things work so well in the Flex design view…

Skinning With Flex 3 CSS Explorer

Posted by James - 15/12/08 at 09:12:37 am

http://www.alagad.com/go/blog-entry/skinning-with-flex-3-css-explorer