There are many compelling features in Flash Player 10, but if you are a nut about data (like me), then local file IO is probably the one that gets your attention. It turns out that using this new feature couldn’t be easier. There’s a couple new methods on the FileReference class and you are off to the races. I wanted to test this functionality out myself, so I built a little application to read iCalendar files.
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What? PHP, Zend and Adobe goodness. Why? Because I’m obsessive compulsive and can’t stop myself from iterating over a problem every which way possible. Depending on how you count it, there’s somewhere between 13 and 54 different Flash, and/or Flex examples included in the attached archive - that doesn’t even count the different PHP examples (also included). I started these examples in support of the Adobe and Zend announcements related to Flex Builder and AMF. With some help from Wade Arnold along the way, it’s now a rather overwhelming collection.
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After a bit of a delay, I’m finally beginning to play with Flash Player 10. It was a bit of a false start for me when the betas first hit the streets because tooling options weren’t particularly polished, and I still had Flash Player 9 projects on my to-do list. Another big question was where to start. Like most people I landed on the new 2.5D features, and then tried to add something new using a web camera to control the rotation of a display object.
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I was doing some casual end of day surfing the other day when I ran across Rich Tretola’s blog post on getting a user’s IP address into Flash. What I really liked about Rich’s implementation was the simplicity of the approach - put the IP in the containing HTML. When I wanted to solve this same problem in a past project, my first reaction was to build a service, because, well, everything is a service these days. Here’s my little IP service, built on ColdFusion, and a little ActionScript to use it.
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I was working on a project recently, where I wanted to offer the user some fine grained control over transformation of display objects. A quick search led me to Green Sock, run by Jack Doyle. What can I say other than that Jack has tweening libraries for every flavor project and task. He also has a transform manager library, which at the time was only ActionScript 2. After an email exchange, Jack graciously provided me with an advance copy of his ActionScript 3 code base. That ActionScript 3 version is now done and you can purchase a license by heading over to the Green Sock web site.
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I’ve always been interested in using Flash for visualization of business data. In fact, I evaluated Flash 2 as an alternative technology for the Java applets I had been employing to that end. The other day, an opportunity presented itself to play around with contact data. My first thought was that of mirroring the physical world of business cards, and the following layout management example was born.
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