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 twoarticles 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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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? (more…)
Monday I set out to build a desktop Flash Video player using HTML, JavaScript and AIR. When I assumed the size of the video to be played, I was able to knock the project out in just a few hours. On Tuesday I decided that playing a specific sized video wasn’t good enough, so on Wednesday, I set out allow my player window to resize to a user-selected video. And that’s where my problems began. (more…)
The second leg of three for the on AIR Bus Tour is drawing to a close. The crew is in Philadelphia, PA now, with Boston to go at the end of the week. During this leg of the tour I’ve been showing off some new samples, the most popular of which seems to b applying Flash bitmap filters to HTML elements in AIR. In this walkthrough, I’ll cover some of the techniques I use to blur the line between Flash and HTML. (more…)
Flex has had effects since its initial release. The limitation of these effects is largely that they are all fundamentally linear in nature. You can move something in a straight line from Point A to Point B for example. You can fade a display object in and out, but again only as one continuously incremented/decremented animation. What if you wanted to move something along a curved path? What if you wanted to fade in and out at various levels along the path of that curve? Until Flash CS3, this is something that would have been particularly challenging, but we now have “Export Motion XML”. (more…)
If you have a digital camera, you’re no doubt already familiar with the concept of EXIF data. For those of you that don’t know, when you take a picture with most modern digital cameras, extra information about the configuration of the camera when that picture was taken, is stored in the image file itself. When the picture was taken, shutter speed, f-stop and even GPS information in some cameras are all stored values. Getting at this data programmatically has historically been for the likes of programming languages with fine-grained, low-level control (read: not ActionScript). (more…)
Yes, I’m a Macromedia employee. I’m also a fairly technical Macromedia employee, who’s generally closely associated with the Flex product. That being said, while I’ve known about all the Flex 2.0 announcements for some time, my first chance to play with the bits was the same as everybody else – after the official opening of Macromedia Labs at MAX 2005. With that in mind, I wanted to go on a little exploration/learning tour of all the new goodies. I set out to load some XML, use data from the XML to affect the UI and do so using only Flex Builder 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0. (more…)