It is pretty common these days that Flex developers come from traditional programming backgrounds. This means that more and more, many developers leveraging the Flash Player, have never worked with Flash CS3. It also then means that many Flex developers aren’t always familiar with common Flash authoring techniques. Here’s a quick introduction on masking for Flex developers, with some collaboration thrown in for good measure.
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I’ve been using Twitter for a while, and while I can appreciate the ability to see what my friends are doing, I was never really compelled to use the service. Something just seemed missing. Then I was introduced to Brightkite. What Brightkite adds to Twitter is geographical/geospatial data, and I’m hooked! Within my first week of using the service, I was making new connections with people that were simply in my vicinity. While the Brightkite FAQ says that a blog sidebar is coming, I enjoy the service so much that I just couldn’t wait.
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During the AIR Europe Tour event in Brussels, Belgium I was approached by an attendee with a technical question. He wanted to drag and drop video content from the desktop (or presumably other source), and drop it into his application. After the drop operation, he wanted to size the native window to fit the specific content size. This might initially sound pretty easy, but it requires accounting for the OS-specific chrome. There are also some usability questions to consider.
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En route between Madrid, Spain and Paris, France, Lee Brimelow and I got into a somewhat philosophical conversation around why the HTML features are important to Flash developers. The obvious standout is in being able to render HTML content in all its glory. Is there anything beyond that though? What about the script-bridge feature? Being able to reach into the HTML DOM and manipulate it from JavaScript? What we came up with was a visually interesting, if not entirely useful example.
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As I was hanging out in Madrid, getting acclimated for the AIR Europe Tour, I started thinking about what I was going to present - specifically around script bridging. In the United States, I just talked about how Flash and HTML are separate, but can be integrated. I though it would be good to actually show how separate they are in the browser, and contrast that with how integrated they are in Adobe AIR. Several hours spent exploring ideas, and a new demonstration was born.
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The web’s insatiable appetite for upload functionality never ceases to amaze me. What do I mean? My little blog has around 100 posts of technology goodness. In the top five most trafficked posts are two articles I’ve done on uploading files. The more popular of the two goes all the way back to the days of Macromedia Central, and I still get random emails about it on a weekly basis. With that in mind, I decided it was time to revisit some of that old code with the latest tools and libraries.
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I’ve seen a couple blog posts recently from Emanuele Feronato about shuffling an image using the BitmapData class in Flash. It’s a great overview and I highly recommend checking it out if you’re into image manipulation with Flash. I remember the days when such effects were only possible through movie clip duplication and heavy use of masking. What I thought was interesting however, is that he uses an image linked in from the library.
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As a general rule, I try only to post content involving source code on my blog. I have been known to leave long comments however, and that’s exactly what happened yesterday when I read Richard Leggett’s blog post on the future of Ajax. I have nothing but the utmost respect for Richard, but I thought this particular post could use some rounding out. After some consideration, what follows is that comment turned blog post.
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It is unfortunate but true that the HTML control in AIR Beta 2 does not yet support Flash content. Depending on the requirements of your application however, you shouldn’t let this stop you from using Flash content in your HTML-based AIR application. Huh? It’s important to remember that the HTML control is integrated, and indeed part of the very display pipe that is the Flash Player in AIR. To demonstrate this I put together a very simply Flash Video (FLV) player using HTML, JavaScript and AIR.
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Flash Remoting. The product now more commonly referred to simply as “remoting” is woven deep into the very fabric of many of Adobe’s technologies. It’s available in ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services on the server. Of course you know you can use it from Flash and therefore Flex on the client. Did you know however, that this also extends to JavaScript in AIR?
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