O'Reilly News & Commentary

URI Manager Utility

By Jesse Freeman
November 16, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - URI Manager Utility. In the past I have talked about using RegEx to create a utility for replacing tokens in a string. My uri manager utility follows the same concept but helps you organize all of your URIs in a external file. Not only that but when you request them when, you can customize their values on the fly. Whether you are keeping track of 1 or 100+ URIs this simple utility will help make your life way easier.

5 Tips For Flash Unit Testing

By Jesse Freeman
November 9, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward.

The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around - If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!

By James Turner
November 9, 2009

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

Using Flash Remoting for Authentication to your AFCS/Facebook AIR Application

By Russ Ferguson
November 4, 2009

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

The importance of ubiquity

By Scott Barnes
October 23, 2009

I've spent a few years studying the behavioral pattern associated with ubiquity, and I'm surprised at what I've learned along the way. Here right now, I'm going to unload my findings, and it's up to you to keep an open mind about it all and take a deep breath about the subject. Ubiquity is only important to you, the one in the "doing" seat (developing/designing). Ubiquity isn't important as much as the reasons why people will use a given technology in the first place. Ubiquity is simply a scorecard to track whether or not people are choosing NOT to install a plug-in.

The Aftermath of Adobe MAX 2009 - Flash Player 10.1, Flex 4, LCDS, Air 2.0, Flash Catalyst

By Yakov Fain
October 19, 2009

This was my second MAX and, let me tell you, I enjoyed it a lot more than the last year’s one. This was an intriguing event with lots of interesting news, and promises of new releases. Among the announcements, news about upcoming developments for Flash Player 10.1, Flex 4, LCDS, Air 2.0, and Flash Catalyst.

Flash to iPhone

By Veronique Brossier
October 16, 2009

Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications wants be an active participant on mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Adobe engineers put their minds together and delivered a solution to work around the problem of the iPhone browser's lack of support for Flash. If the iPhone Safari browser will not support the Flash player, let's use the Flash tools to compile a native iPhone application (ipa) which lives directly on the device. This initiative now gives the opportunity for ActionScript developers to develop applications for the wonderful iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Could Adobe potentially harm the iPhone AppStore

By Scott Barnes
October 15, 2009

Adobe have spent a lot of cycles / years nudging Apple that Flash should be on the iPhone. Apple have firmly just said no, and despite the answer, Adobe keep expecting them to cave due to public demand. The problem with this logic is that Apple won't give in. Let's break this down into two parts: First, Don't poke the sleeping giant. Secondly, just because it's easy, doesn't mean its successful.

Flash on Devices

By Rich Tretola
October 6, 2009

Inside RIA's Rich Tretola reports on a treasure trove of links. Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.

Custom SortableList Component using Flex 4

By Simon Barber
September 11, 2009

Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge. Behold the SortableList component.

Flash Developer Guerrilla Workflow - Starting from Scratch on a Deadline

By Jesse Freeman
September 9, 2009

Advance Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Setting Up The Flash Developer Guerrilla Workflow.

Four Short Links: 25 August 2009 - Reverse Search, PDF Stripping, Flash Visualization, Failure

By Nat Torkington
August 25, 2009

TinEye -- Reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it's used and where it come from originally. Unlike traditional text-focused search engines that focus on metadata and keywords, TinEye uses image identification technology. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Facebook App Case Study: Additional elements and gotchas

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 19, 2009

Welcome back to the series and the concluding article of the exciting facebook series. So far we worked hard to implement features like the front end, administration, loading of YouTube videos etc. In the last article the application came finally to life. We implemented a database that contains 14 levels for the game.

Four short links: 18 August 2009 - iPhone App Backstory, Cookie Resurrection, The Entrepreneuralism Lickmus test, and An Interesting Database

By Nat Torkington
August 18, 2009

The Making of the NPR News iPhone App -- interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn't have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked with our station representatives to manually test each stream. In the process they found enough new streams to double our database. All of these streams are delivered to the app from NPR's Station Finder API. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Do You Speak Flex? Part One: Building a Team

By Ben Elmore
August 13, 2009

With the release of Flex 4, misconceptions abound regarding Flex, and there has been a general reluctance to build Flex development teams internally. These are that Flex resources are scarce, and that teams need years of experience, must be large, expensive, and comprised of all-stars. However, I've found that with a few exceptions, the opposite is generally true and that nearly any organization can afford to build an effective team. This series of articles intends to debunk mistaken notions and help organizations realize the power and accessibility of this skill set.

Facebook App Case Study: Administration module

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 4, 2009

Last time we talked about how to work with YouTube videos and how to implement those into our app. We worked hard to implement typical features that can be found on most video sites like play, pause, seek etc. As we already know, there is one external library used in our application that allows us to load videos into the swf and manipulate the video using ActionScript 3.0. Now it’s time to actually work on the admin part of the app and the features that allow us and all our application users (players) to add their own videos along with mistakes. This way the application will much more extensible. There are lots of Facebook users who are movie fans and we will give them the ability to contribute.

FLARToolkit and FLARManager

By Eric Socolofsky
July 24, 2009

FLARManager is a lightweight framework that makes building FLARToolkit augmented reality applications easier. When I first came across FLARToolkit, I was simultaneously excited and stymied -- there seemed to be so much potential, but it was difficult to use and even harder to understand. Augmented reality is still a long way from maturity, and leveraging FLARToolkit on the ubiquity of Flash Player provides a great opportunity for further exploring its possibilities. FLARManager aims to provide quicker entry to the technology, to allow a focus on new forms of interaction via marker detection and augmented reality.

Facebook App Case Study: Preparing the Elements

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 21, 2009

Welcome back! Finally we will work on a real world application that will go live. The application that we will be creating will be named “Movie Expert”. One reason why I chose it is because I am an avid Movie fan and I will have lots of motivation to work on it in detail. The other reason is because it is really a sample that has the potential to utilize the facebook actionscript 3 library the proper way.

Flash Builder, Linux and Winning the RIA War

By Mike Slinn
June 19, 2009

Summary: Adobe should address developers with a marketing program that is separate from their designer marketing program, and offer products aimed at hard-core developer interests. The goal would be to leverage the influential developer community to drive sales of products...

Union Platform - Interview with Colin Moock

By Rich Tretola
June 9, 2009

Union is a development platform for creating multiuser applications. It includes the Union Server, a multiuser communications server, and Reactor, a framework for creating Adobe Flash client applications. I recently had the opportunity to discuss the new Union Platform project with Colin Moock who is one of the creators of this new platform. Here are the questions that I asked of him.

Exploring the Data List Component in Flash Catalyst

By Chris Griffith
June 3, 2009

Now that the first public beta of Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo) has been released, we can start to explore some of the features that have been added since the Preview release from last November. I will assume you have worked through some of the other introductions to the Flash Catalyst user interface. One of new features that has been implemented in the release is the Data List Component.

Component Architecture for Facebook Applications

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 12, 2009

In the last tutorial we discussed the new library that was released by Adobe. The new library from Adobe fits much more naturally into the whole architecture of facebook applications that are built using the Flash platform. We need to know that the previous approach using the PHP library is not useless. In order to create stable and useful Facebook applications we need to know about many ways how to achieve the same goal. If you followed the series from the start then you are on a good way to be able to create truly cutting edge facebook apps as we have discussed have to grab results from DB and we also make use of the ActionScript library.

Getting Started with Flash Catalyst

By Russ Ferguson
May 8, 2009

At the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco, Adobe passed out DVD’s of both Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo) and Flex Builder 4 (code name Gumbo). These products together hope to bridge the gap between designers and developers, by giving designers the ability to control the look of the application and then handing off a project ready to be coded by a developer. This tutorial has been created with the version of Flash Catalyst that was distributed during the MAX conference last November. Since this is an early build of the software some features may change and others added before the final release.

Effectively Providing Alternate Content for a Flash Application

By Todd Perkins
April 29, 2009

Flash has an undeserved bad wrap in the Search Engine Optimization world. Some SEO experts even warn not to use Flash, because many search engines have trouble indexing Flash content. While Flash content is searchable by Google, it's critical to use Flash wisely if you want your applications to be searchable by all search engines.

Adobe's Real-Time Media Flow Protocol

By Brian Lesser
April 24, 2009

This is a long post. I wrote it while preparing a presentation on RTMFP for Toronto's FITC Flash festival next week. After I recover from the festival I'll post the sample files for the demo applications. The Flash player is...

MySQL 2009 conference wrap-up: news flash about Flash and other notes from the experts

By Andy Oram
April 24, 2009

MySQL conference wrap-up: Flash, cloud computing, managing large installations, the value of community, and how to fumble your way to winning the presidency.

Scott Barnes' Take on Silverlight 3

By John Papa
April 9, 2009

I've been knee deep in Silverlight lately, (which is why I have not stuck my head up to blog lately) and its all Microsoft's fault. Silverlight 3 has so many great features and the roadmap is looking so promising to me that I have been spending a lot of time wading through the features, some more mature than others, some just a glimpse of what is to come. What does SIlverlight 3 bring to the table? Hear it from someone who knows the leading tools from Adobe and Microsoft inside and out.

Creating a Hello Friends App using ActionScript 3.0, PHP and Facebook API

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 7, 2009

As we all know life is much more colorful with friends, Facebook it's the best example on the internet for this case. Its even more colorful when you can use the Facebook API to create applications on that platform. Using Flash, PHP and the FB API we can utilize ActionScript OOP features to make the applications perform better then with standard FBML. I'm not trying to say here that FBML is bad, no, this series will try to teach how implement the existing knowledge of Flash into the Facebook application platform.

Will People Learn OOP and AS3 from Video? If it's Colin Moock? We'll See

By Steve Weiss
March 25, 2009

This month, O'Reilly and Adobe Developer Library are releasing the 13+-hour-long Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript Weekend, a two-part video series of some heft and ambition, the outcome (or logical extension, actually) of a longer, larger process. The back story may be of interest to some.

What the recent Adobe mobile announcements mean for RIA

By Dale Rankine
February 19, 2009

Funny how the perception of mobile can change almost overnight. In a flurry of announcements from Adobe in the lead up to the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the worlds of RIA and mobile were placed on a collision course.

Flex or Flash?

By Shashank Tiwari
December 17, 2008

The recent re-emphasis by Adobe on the "Flash" brand is scary!

ActionScript to Cocoa - Prototyping in Flash for iPhone

By Mike Huntington
December 3, 2008

After months of being gagged and leashed, iPhone developers are now free to talk about the iPhone SDK. Apple has dropped their NDA and opened the flood gates to those new developers who thirst for iPhone programming knowledge. I feel that Actionscript developers will have an easier transition to Cocoa-Touch than developers coming from other languages. Being a long time Actionscript developer myself I found it easy to port from Flash to iPhone. Further down in this article I show how I built my app in Flash and the steps I took to port it over to Cocoa. But first, here’s why I believe the learning curve is very low for Actionscript developers.

Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?

By Mike Hendrickson
September 29, 2008

Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what...

O'Reilly Announces 8 New Adobe CS4 Titles

By Sara Peyton
September 23, 2008

With eight new books and video lessons in the works, O'Reilly's authors are ready to help you make the leap to CS4. October brings the first of Deke McClelland's four new One-on-One titles, Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One, as well as the newest insallment in the Companion series--The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers by writer, teacher, and professional photographer Derrick Story. New York Times tech columnist David Pogue and iStockphoto evangelist Lesa Snider King--who are busily working on their own book, Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual. Indeed, O'Reilly's got the tailored resources about CS4 for every type of user, from professional designers and digital photographers to the DIY crowd.

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