Psyked

Flash Player 10 (Astro) Prereleased!

James — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:30:21 +0000

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Flash Player 10 is out on prerelease. Why not go and give it a whirl?

Edit: Serge Jespers says it better than I.

FIVe3D - A different approach to 3D Flash

James — Thu, 15 May 2008 07:40:20 +0000

FIVe3D is unlike other 3D engines ( such as Papervision or Alternitva3D ) in it’s approach. We’re not talking shape primatives here, we’re talking extending the basic flash elements ( Sprites, Text, MovieClips ) to include Z-properties. Looking at the demos, it’s not what you’d expect from ‘Flash 3D’, because we’re expecting another Papervision clone. But no, the approach that Mathieu has taken when developing this is much different - and actually makes much more sense for a lot of situations.

Plus, it’s fun. I’m a sucker for fun demos.

Check it out here.

Inline Javascript and the defer attribute

James — Sun, 11 May 2008 08:30:32 +0000

We use javascript to load our Flash elements into Webpages - it just makes life so much easier. There’s many ways you can go about it, but one is to use inline Javascript to handle function calls to your document.write(); or innerHTML(); functions. Naturally, these functions scrape through our HTML and do their business, targeting and replacing elements with the embed/object code for our Flash movies.

You might call us slackers, or you might base it on our faulty understanding of the defer attribute (and this site will confirm it), but we thought that adding the defer attribute to our inline code thus;

Would mean that the inline script wouldn’t be executed until the whole page is loaded. So you could effectively add the code anywhere in the page - say, the header - and it didn’t matter. Well, what works in Internet Explorer doesn’t always work in Firefox (et al.).

The code itself is running a getElementByID() call, so the element it’s looking for needs to exist on the page for the script to function properly. If the function call is made when the entire page is loaded, then the element you’re targeting will exist, and obviously if you’re calling the function inline - before the appropriate section of the page has been rendered - then the element won’t exist. Think the defer attribute would solve it? Alas, you are wrong.

Browser differences?

In Internet Explorer, the defer attribute works like this (pausing script execution until the page has rendered), but in Firefox the code seems to execute at the moment it is encountered, and not display the results until the page has finished rendering. So, if you’re trying to cut corners in Firefox, it just ain’t gonna work.

In summary;

Make sure your inline code is still able to execute without the defer attribute - otherwise it won’t play ball.

Essential ActionScript 3 Classes #1

James — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:30:48 +0000

BiteArray.org has a little collection of several ActionScript 3 Classes that would feel right at home in your core libraries. There’s a JPEG encoder, PDF generator, Zip file generator and even a class for gesture recognition, and many more besides. It’s worth a look.

Red Interactive

James — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:30:48 +0000

Red Interactive have got a really cool full browser flash site going on at their (really geeky domain) ff0000.com. It’s a showcase of what flash really can allow you to do to a traditional website, for better or worse.

Each visitor gets their own chat avatar, that other online visitors can see, and they can all chat through the website - something which I’m sure must have something to do with the new socket features of AS3.

It’s inspirational, to say the least - I can’t stop dreaming up new ideas for other realtime flash chat servers now…

Turns out - from their portfolio - that they’re also the guys behind this rather cryptic site, Ethan Haas Was Right. If anyone can figure that one out, I’d be interested…

Alternativa3D - More 3D goodness from the Flash Player

James — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:30:42 +0000

3D Flash engines seem to be popping up everywhere at the moment. [Although I wouldn't call that a bad thing] - Each one tends to take a different approach, do a different demo to distinguish themselves. Take this for example, a very impressive looking offering from Alternativa3D;

Papervision might have a lot of features and a large fan-base, but I have yet to see such a visually impressive demo [as this one]. And they’ve already sorted the first-person movement and collision detection. It’s also very cool that the demo seems to ‘quickstart’ - loading low-res textures to get you going as soon as possible, and streaming in higher res. ones while you play.

Progressive textures - how cool is that? (above)

Of course, there’s visual trickery going on here - the fantastic visuals are more down to excellent textures, rather than dynamic lighting or raytracing. But that doesn’t mean that the Alternativa3D team doesn’t have that on their ‘to-do’ list…

So, what are you waiting for? Go check it out at alternativaplatform.com.

Open Screen madness?

James — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:48:57 +0000

Madness in a good way, of course. Like all those people who queue outside stores before the sales? That’s the good kind of madness. That’s the madness I mean. (And I couldn’t think of a more interesting Post title, and apparently, provocative Post titles are good for readership)

Adobe are at it again, it seems. You may remember that the flex sdk went open-source just over a year ago, and now the swf and flv formats themselves are going open source. Here is the press-release, and here’s the official site for the “Open Screen Project”.

So, what is the Open Screen Project, and why do we care?

Well, it’s pretty exciting, especially for a Flash Developer. We’ve rapidly gone from animation to application, to desktop application. And before we’ve even got settled with that, we’ve got the potential to go truly universal.

1a : Open source.

That’s interesting, but from my point of view the Flex SDK (although it’s taken a year for me switch to using an Open Source editor) has already sorted this element. Don’t get me wrong, its great that it’s going Open Source - it’s just that it takes a while for something exceptional to appear as a result of this [- people have to develop them, you know!] We can get excited about this later on. I imagine many more Video editing environments will start including FLV encoding options, but I can’t see any obvious uses for the swf format.

1b : License restrictions removal.

Okay, this really goes hand-in-hand with the Open source - it just seems a logical step. Can you imagine the confusion that an open source project with license restrictions would cause? Besides, license restrictions would only hurt their “1 billion devices by 2009″ target. But there’s one point in particular that interests me, one I thought of almost immediately after reading the first announcement;

2 : Device porting.

“[Adobe is] also planning to publish the device porting layer APIs for the Flash Player.” (Ryan Stewart)

This is a major step out from their normal territory. The rapid advancement of technological devices means that shiny new phone you’ve got isn’t far off that old desktop machine you had 8 years ago. The XBox 360, Playstation 3, your Digital TV recorder - they’ve all got the oomph to run Flash. Hell, if Apple and Adobe would agree you’d have it on your iPhone.

All that’s lacking is support for whatever hardware / OS the device is running on. So if you imagine that Adobe would release some tools - any tools - and encourage other companies and manufacturers to develop their own specific versions of the Flash player, it shouldn’t be long before we start seeing Flash everywhere.

“The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.” (Press Release)

I’d love a newer version of the Flash Player on my PS3, or a snazzy digi-box interface - or some Youtube flv’s streaming directly to my phone. Now all we need is some companies /manufacturers to buy into it…

3 : The lineup.

BBC
Cisco
Intel
LG Electronics Inc.
Motorola
MTV Networks
NBC Universal
Nokia
Samsung Electronics Co.
Sony Ericsson
Toshiba
Verizon Wireless

That’s an impressive lineup. And I think it’s safe to say that if these guys are supporting Adobe in this, looking at their industries, then they’re going into it like an arms race. LG sure won’t want Samsung to develop something impressive without having their own, just like Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson won’t want their competition developing a better Mobile Flash player. So perhaps the developments won’t be as slow as I first thought.

What is it with Open-source, anyway?

Well you know, besides the community development, improvements, that sort of thing.

You might think that being the sole distributor/developer of a runtime which has 98% market distribution would be pretty sweet. I’m sure it is. But I guess there’s a serious business reason for opening up your proprietary file formats - and it’s not just to stop others from reverse-engineering your systems.

A single, universal, file-format would be a godsend as far as those that delve into the murky waters of HTML and CSS are concerned. Adobe is in the position - with its user base, development base, and the kudos of the company itself - to seriously establish the Flash player as a universal runtime.

Have Adobe realised that the Flash player has grown beyond even Adobe?

Flash has an entire subset of the web development industry devoted to it - broadening their capabilities is only get these guys more work - and the more they develop, the more people it reaches. If making things open source is the fastest, easiest way to make this happen, then so be it.

Or are they just deploying countermeasures to stave off the EU competition commission?