O'Reilly Media | Browse Blogs by Tag

Blogs

Tags > actionscript

Announcing O'Reilly Answers - Clever Hacks. Creative Ideas. Innovative Solutions.

By Allen Noren
November 4, 2009

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

Advantages of Lazy Loading

By Amy Blankenship
October 30, 2009

Wikipedia defines Lazy Loading as "a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed." Typically, we do this to make an RIA application more responsive–since we're not...

Create cleaner ActionScript with conditional compiling

By Tyler Larson
October 26, 2009

A large part of any ActionScript project is code dedicated to testing and debugging. These parts of your application may be needed while in development, but usually not needed within a production environment. You might think that making a...

ExternalInterface and Code Injection Part 2

By Tom Barker
September 25, 2009

In a previous article I outlined why I needed to inject JavaScript into a page from ActionScript, now I'd like to show the implementation. Essentially I created a new class called JSInjector. Within JSInjector I created a static function...

Custom SortableList Component using Flex 4

By Simon Barber
September 9, 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.

ExternalInterface and Code Injection Part 1

By Tom Barker
September 7, 2009

In some of my recent articles I detailed the architecture and some implementation of a video player swapper - that is a video player that can play different kinds of videos, assuming that the videos required specific unique players. After...

10 Tips for Flex Application Performance

By Andrew Trice
September 2, 2009

We're going to keep this post lean and mean, and get down to business with 10 Tips that will keep your Flex applications fast, lean, and responsive. Read on to see the list.

Memory Management with the Dictionary Object

By Tom Barker
August 31, 2009

In my previous article I detailed the architecture for a video player that would switch between multiple players, using composition to support the same interface across each layer of the architecture. The architecture worked out really well, but when I...

Facebook App Case Study: Additional elements and gotchas

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 14, 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.

3 Design Patterns Built Into AS 3

By Jesse Freeman
August 10, 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 - 3 Design Patterns Built Into AS 3

Client-side Error Logging Architecture

By Tom Barker
August 9, 2009

In one of my previous articles I spoke about the need for client-side error logging. In that article I elaborate a bit on why you need to. Here I explain one way to go about doing it. The core logic...

Production Topics: Flex Profiling - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
August 6, 2009

This video excerpt is from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 2. In Course 2 of this unique DVD training series, you'll learn intermediate to advanced ActionScript 3.0 programming concepts. World-renowned ActionScript guru and educator Colin Moock presents...

Production Topics: Flex Debugging Mode - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
August 6, 2009

This excerpt is from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 2. In Course 2 of this unique DVD training series, you'll learn intermediate to advanced ActionScript 3.0 programming concepts. World-renowned ActionScript guru and educator Colin Moock presents this intimate...

The Display List - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
August 6, 2009

In this excerpt from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn how to place visual content on screen, then rearrange, remove, and manage it with code. Guest-star appearance by Adobe engineer Jim Corbett, the creator of ActionScript's display API.

Graphics Programming - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
August 6, 2009

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn how to create visual content in ActionScript. Guest-star appearance by Adobe engineer Jim Corbett, the creator of ActionScript's display API.

Object References and Garbage Collection - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
August 6, 2009

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn to refer to a single object from multiple parts of a program, then study the principles of memory management in ActionScript. Remember, values are not socks!

Facebook App Case Study: Front-end Module

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 5, 2009

Welcome back to our exciting series. In the last article, we discussed about the administrative part of the application, where we implemented a background activity to allow every application user to upload their own videos and add mistakes. This time we will work on the front end that will be visible to everyone by default and where the main game play will take place. Before we start with the development, there are important things that need to be considered. First of all, there will be 14 levels to play, 14 levels means 14 video clips, 14 movie snippets.

Facebook App Case Study: Administration module

By Mirza Hatipovic
August 3, 2009

Last time we talked about the way 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. We even have the feature to seek through the video using the Seek Bar that we built from scratch. 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. This is a huge advantage since the official YouTube library is written in AS2 and it does not fit our project requirements. Using the library, we were able to create video controls using pure ActionScript 3.0.

AS 3 Rest Parameter

By Jesse Freeman
August 3, 2009

Object Oriented Programming Overview - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
July 30, 2009

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, enjoy a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of object-oriented programming, including classes, objects, methods, and variables.

Introduction - Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend

By Colin Moock
July 30, 2009

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, get to know the world of ActionScript 3.0, the spirit of Flash, and your intrepid instructors.

Facebook App Case Study: Integrating YouTube Videos

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 22, 2009

Welcome back to our series. In the previous article, we discussed the elements that are the necessary building blocks of the application MovieExpert (http://apps.facebook.com/movieexpert/). We created the main swf, we created the invite screen, we worked hard to make the invite screen actually work on our iFrame. Now that we have all those details done, we can move on and concentrate entirely on the application in the swf file. We know that the invite screen on facebook appears only when the use installs the application, the next time he logs in, he will be redirected directly to http://apps.facebook.com/movieexpert/.

FLARToolkit and FLARManager

By Eric Socolofsky
July 21, 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 8, 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.

Send Gifts Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 8, 2009

Sending gifts and items are one of the favorite actions among the millions of facebook users. Friends send items to friends, "buy" gifts, "sell" virtual items etc. Honestly I am not engaged in this activity a lot on facebook, but the number of people willing to send virtual gifts, buy virtual goods is shockingly high! So this article might be underestimated on the first sight, but because I am aware of the trend of sending and receiving gifts, it is worth writing a complete article that covers the trend in actionscript. The number of possible implementations for this component is really countless and in this article we will be able to show only few of them.

Search Friends Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
July 6, 2009

Welcome back to the series. In the previous articles we discussed topics like publishing of news, sending notifications to specific friends etc. The articles covered topics that are not only bound to the user interface in the facebook application development. This time, we are going to play around with the already existing (but complex) MultiFriend component. The component from the article 11 was quite good, but it really had the potential to be a kick ass component for facebook. There were things I wanted to implement, but was not able to because the whole article covered the basic construction of the component.

Calendar Component in ActionScript 3 Part 3

By Tom Barker
July 2, 2009

So far we've seen how to implement the calendar component, and explored the logic inside the Calendar class itself. From here I will show the logic inside of the Day class, and talk about potential ways to expand the...

User Info Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
June 17, 2009

Welcome back to the series. This time we are goings to build a really exciting component that will be used to simply display information about the user. Well, you might say why to we need such a component, is there are real purpose behind that? Well, in my opinion, yes. There are a lot of facebook applications out there done in Flash where we see information about the friends etc. During the process of facebook application development, there will always be a need to quickly display information about the specific friend. The information that is contained inside the component could be every bit of information that was entered by the user.

Publish News Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
June 17, 2009

Welcome back to our exciting Facebook ActionScript series. In this article we will discuss one of most important (and most exciting) features of the FB platform, it's the publishing of news. We all know when we log in to facebook, we see plenty of news about our friends. Some were sent by the users, some where sent by applications. In lots of cases, the action is initiated by applications. We see stuff like "FriendX has just completed level 5", "FriendY just left the building" or "John just sent something to his friends", I'm sure you saw a lot of news similar to this on FB. News are an integral part of application because it's one of the ways that the virality of applications is ensured. Suppose we have the fanciest application on FB, what value we have out of this application if we do not publish any news, if we dont make sure the friends are not notified about the action don't in the application? The application simply needs to "talk" and publish news if the application user performed some action. We need to make sure everybody knows that we just topped the high score of the player from Nigeria.

Calendar Component in ActionScript 3 Part 2

By Tom Barker
June 17, 2009

In my previous entry I discussed including and implementing the Calendar component in a new project. In this next entry I'm going to explore the Calendar class. The basic idea for the Calendar class is to assemble a collection of...

Notification Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
June 10, 2009

The notifications are one of the most interesting (and important) parts of the facebook area. In order to completely understand the Flash side of it, we need to understand the basics of the facebook notification, what it is and how...

Calendar Component in ActionScript 3 Part 1

By Tom Barker
June 8, 2009

A few months ago I sat down to make a calendar component, purely as a technical exercise, but because of the way that I set up the architecture it ended up being a fairly useful and easily extended component....

Multifriend Selection Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 26, 2009

Welcome back to our series. We will continue to work on components that will help us develop facebook applications faster and with less bugs. There is one quite useful component that will will be used throughout the facebook development and that's the MultiFriend Selection Component. There is already one developed by facebook and is displayed when using standard FBML.

Enhanced status component

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 26, 2009

In the last article we worked extensively with the ProfilePic component and showed how the component can be used in real time scenarios. We had an interesting example of a real word application with the "Would you..." application clone. I really had a lot of fun working on it and hope you too. For us it's important that we were able to work with components that where previously build based on the previous articles. The goal is not to hurt the "DRY“ principle, which means "Don't repeat your self". Every component that was created needs to reused again so no development time will be spent on them anymore, except when extending it. This tutorial will deal mostly with text. The idea of the application is the following: We need to create some sort of "Mood Checker", an application that will allow us to browse through the statuses of users.

Flash Performance Monitoring

By Jesse Freeman
May 25, 2009

Using Flex Builder 3's built in profiler is great but sometimes you need to do your profiling on a live site. What if you are still developing and need to debug at the same time as you profile? For a long time having a FPS counter (something not available in the Flex Builder's profiler) has always been part of my personal Flash development toolkit. Recently I was looking for something that would display FPS and Memory to help me closely monitor the performance of my application as I developed. That is when I came across Hi-ReS! Stats by Mr Doob.

MinimalComps

By Jesse Freeman
May 12, 2009

The other day I needed to create a few demo apps for one of my projects and was dreading dusting off my Flex skills to create some quick UIs. Don't get me wrong, I like Flex but sometimes I just need to do something quick and dirty in AS 3. That's when I remembered MinimalComps - the minimal AS 3 UI Component set by Keith Paters over at Bit-101.

Extended ProfilePic Component with Effects

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 8, 2009

In this article we will extend the ProfilePic component from the last article and show example of how we can use it in real world scenarios. We will create a facebook application that asks the user a question about the displayed friend. Yes, it is in fact a copy of an existing application (I don’t remember the name and I don’t want to make advertising). The application simply switches from one question to another and associates the displayed friend with the question. Like, for ex., the question appears “Would you ever like to date Monica?" and the application user can simply select between “Yes” of “No”. On the other side, you can choose if you want that the answer is send to the user as a notification. Personally I enjoyed the application and will use it as reference to make a flash version out of it. On the other side, we will use the component and add features to it so the sample will demonstrate how useful the component can be in the development process. We will have the freedom to create our own questions. They can be stored either in the database or XML, but in our case it will be stored in a flat XML file.

ProfilePic Component

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 8, 2009

In the last article we discussed how components are built with the facebook api in mind. Now it's the time to do something more with it. We know how things need to be set up in order for the components to work. We learned about sessions, about the tow frame time line structure of the components and we talked about the inheritance of the UIComponent class. The previous example leveraged just a small potion of the methods that UIComponent provides. In this article we will take more advantange of the UIComponent class in order to create a component for the profile pic.

Component Architecture for Facebook Applications

By Mirza Hatipovic
May 8, 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.

FLARVision: Augmented Reality and Papervision

By Jesse Freeman
May 1, 2009

The basic explanation of Augmented Reality is to superimpose graphics over real-world environments in realtime. In Flash, this is usually done with a webcam and a marker card. When you hold the card up to the webcam, Flash is able to detect the orientation of the marker and superimpose, in this case, a 3d model on top of it. This technology has been around for a while now and having access to it in Flash is really exciting. Although it is still in its infancy, over time the speed and power of AR will improve to hopefully play an important role in how we view the web. Now is a great time to get your feet wet in order to get a better understanding on how it works.

Token Replace Utility

By Jesse Freeman
April 30, 2009

This is a great technique I picked up from a friend of mine, Myles Bieniasz, on his blog here. I modified his code and created this utility that will search through a given string for words wrapped in a ${...

VoiceMail service for web sites based on Ribbit, are you interested?

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 16, 2009

As you already may know, Ribbit is a relatively new technology that allows developers to integrate voice and rich communication features into websites or applications. Still, there are not many products out there where end users can take advantage of...

Using the brand new Facebook ActionScript 3.0 library

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 15, 2009

In the 5th article we will deal with Adobes new Facebook ActionScript 3.0 library. It is a brand new product and it is still in beta, but it looks promising. In fact, it has beed there for quite some time and was original developed by Jason Christ. This time Adobe decided to support it and add features. The way the library works differs from the methods from the previous articles because it is completely based on ActionScript and does not use a PHP middle layer. In this article we will explore the library briefly and examine the basic features to get us started. The goal of this article is to create a simple swf file that will connect to facebook.

Creating a Custom API for Flash using Facebook API and PHP

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 15, 2009

In the previous article we discussed how to set up the framework for PHP, FB API and Flash. We did a lot of work to make this happen. We tested the framework only with very simple methods that made calls to the FB API and databases. In this article we are going to extend the sample to implement all necessary calls to the api. We will try to find the most important and needed fb api methods and teak them for usage in Flash. All the hard work will be accompanied by a sample that will make the whole article more interesting. We will create a small photo album viewer that will let you send notifications of type "I like this" for every photo to your friends. This sample will be more interesting.

Setting Up AMFPHP for Flash and Facebook API

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 15, 2009

Following good software engineering principles and following the goal to make flash based facebook applications easier to develop there are well known technologies to utilize. So far we have been introduced to the basics of Flash - Facebook API communication. In the second article we discussed the various methods to embed swfs into the facebook canvas. Equipped with that knowledge, we can make a good step forward. In software engineering, experts say that we should develop applications “close to the problem”.

Getting Started With Adobe Alchemy

By Damon Edwards
April 15, 2009

With the ability compile C and C++ code and leverage it via ActionScript, Adobe's project Alchemy should be on your radar. If you haven't heard of it yet, here's a direct quote from Alchemy's labs page giving a little more...

What Brings Out Your Inner Geek?

By Mary Rotman
April 14, 2009

Colin Moock has admitted that he has an inner geek--now we're wondering what brings out yours. Stay tuned for a contest on Twitter (@oreillymedia) later today to let us know what brings out your inner geek and enter for a chance to win a copy of Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend.

Overview of embedding SWFs into Facebook Canvas

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 9, 2009

Following the first article where we introduced the basic usage of Flash with PHP and Facebook, we are here in the second article to discuss all about the correct embedding of swf's into the facebook canvas. There are a lot of ways of how to do that and everyone of it has its pros and cons. We will discuss this in in detail in this article. Every step will be accompanied by a sample where we will demonstrate the pros and cons.

Managing Event Listeners

By Jesse Freeman
April 8, 2009

Managing event listeners can get tricky as your ActionScript application grows. This technique takes advantage of overriding the core addEventListener and removeEventListener methods inherited in any classes that extends the EventDispatcher. When adding listeners, we will store a reference of...

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

By Mirza Hatipovic
April 6, 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.

1 to 50 of 80 Next