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"Eager Loading" in Actionscript 3

By Amy Blankenship
November 11, 2009

Last week, I wrote about the Lazy Loading design pattern. There's not much written about its opposite, Eager Loading, in ActionScript 3. The reason for this is simple–true eager loading can't be done in AS3 itself, it has to be...

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. Lets quickly talk about what TDD is:

The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around

By James Turner
November 6, 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 with 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.

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...

RIA Radio Episode 1 - Mike Downey

By Garth Braithwaite
October 23, 2009

Mike Downey joins us to discuss the competition between Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. Prior to working for Microsoft as a Silverlight Evangelist he worked for Adobe for 9 years with the Flash Platform. Joining us on the panel...

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...

Dynamically Creating Classes From XML

By Jesse Freeman
October 18, 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. 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 - Dynamically Creating Classes From XML.

Flash to iPhone

By Veronique Brossier
October 15, 2009

Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications, wanted to, once again, be an active participant. As part of the Open Screen Project, it collaborated with multiple partners and will soon release Flash Player 10.1 to run on a large selection of mobile devices' browser. You can watch the related announcement made at the MAX 2009 keynote or read the article on Adobe Labs.

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 wont' give in.

RIA Radio, Live at Adobe MAX - Day 1 Keynote

By Garth Braithwaite
October 7, 2009

We sat down with Chris Griffith and Kevin Schmidt to discuss the big MAX announcements and give our take on what they mean. Topics covered include: Flash for the iPhone, Flash 10.1 on mobile, TVs, and netbooks.

Flash for iPhone, WebOS and Windows Mobile

By Alessandro Pace
October 6, 2009

Adobe MAX 2009 is underway and yesterday during the keynote Adobe announced Flash 10.1 for mobile phones. It's a new runtime with improved performances and memory usage with support for new mobile platforms such as the Palm Web OS and...

Flash on Devices

By Rich Tretola
October 6, 2009

Flash on Iphone: 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.* http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kusXgPAmMLw Flash10 on...

Summer of Flash Episode 12 - David Macy and NJ

By Garth Braithwaite
October 2, 2009

David Macy (Senior PM for Illustrator) and NJ (Product designer and developer on Flash Catalyst) join us to talk about using Illustrator in RIA workflows. We also discuss the keynote from FOTB and upcoming MAX announcements. Experts: Leif Wells,...

Summer of Flash Episode 11 - Ed Sullivan

By Garth Braithwaite
September 25, 2009

Ed Sullivan from Adobe joins us on this episode to announce the Adobe Cookbooks website upgrade. We also talk about Adobe's recent acquisition announcements (Omniture and Business Catalyst). Panel of Experts: Leif Wells and Zach Stepek. Download this week's...

Adobe Announces "Flash Platform Services"

By Andrew Trice
September 22, 2009

Today, Adobe made the announcement of "Flash Platform Services", a suite a services that enable developers to easily create, scale, and monetize their applications. This includes 3 components: Distribution, Collaboration, and Social.

Summer of Flash Episode 9 - Rachel Luxemburg

By Garth Braithwaite
September 17, 2009

In this episode we talked all the exciting preparations and announcements for MAX with Rachel Luxemburg. We also discussed certification, Adobe Groups, Community Experts, and Flash Camps. Val Head joins us briefly to talk about FlashPitt.

Summer of Flash Episode 8 - Jesse Freeman

By Garth Braithwaite
September 9, 2009

Jesse Freeman (The Flash Bum) joins us to talk about CSS in Flash, the designer/developer workflow, and the Flash renaissance man. Expert panel: Leif Wells, Zach Stepek, Stacey Mulcahy For more information on Jesse's projects mentioned in this episode...

Flash Developer Guerrilla Workflow

By Jesse Freeman
September 8, 2009

About Advance Flash Tactics 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...

Summer of Flash Episode 7 - Tom Ortega and John Wilker of 360 Conferences

By Garth Braithwaite
August 28, 2009

John Wilker and Tom Ortega join us to talk about the origins of 360 Conferences, upcoming events, songs in code, and FITC's beer. Stacey Mulcahy, Leif Wells, and Zach Stepek join us on the panel of experts. Right-click or...

Four short links: 25 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 24, 2009

Tineye -- reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it's used. Check out their cool searches. PDF Pirate -- upload a PDF and this web site will give it back to you minus the restrictions on copying/printing/etc. Flare -- an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in...

InsideRIA talks AR at MAX

By Jesse Freeman
August 24, 2009

Everywhere you look, Augmented Reality is a hot topic. With MAX a little over a month away, FLAR will be thoroughly covered in at least 4 different sessions. I was offered an incredible opportunity by InsideRIA to speak at...

Summer of Flash Episode 6 - Ryan Stewart

By Garth Braithwaite
August 19, 2009

Ryan Stewart joins us to talk about MAX, Flash Camp Singapore, how he got started in RIAs, neat stuff he has found in his vast travels, and how RIAs are defined. On the panel of experts were Zach Stepek,...

Four short links: 18 August 2009

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...

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.

Do You Speak Flex? Part One: Building a Team

0 August 12, 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.

Summer of Flash Episode 5 - Rich Tretola

By Garth Braithwaite
August 12, 2009

Rich Tretola joins us to talk about how InsideRIA works and his sessions at MAX. We also discussed the need for choice in Flex frameworks (read: micro-architectures) and some of Flash Player on mobile devices.

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.

Summer of Flash Episode 4 - Mark Anders

By Garth Braithwaite
August 4, 2009

Mark Anders, Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe, joins us to discuss upcoming versions of Flash Player for mobile devices, the Open Screen Project, Ashton Kutcher's appearance at Adobe's offices, and Adobe's magical rings of power.

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.

Summer of Flash Episode 3 - Simeon Bateman

By Garth Braithwaite
July 31, 2009

This episode we get a chance to chat with Simeon Bateman and pick his brain on his recent projects. We discussed continuous integration servers, the name space change in Flex 4, and the open source nature of Adobe Flex.

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/.

Summer of Flash Episode 1 - Flash Catalyst

By Garth Braithwaite
July 22, 2009

Adobe has been busy and this summer we have seen some changes to their Flash Platform and some new tools for working with it. In the new Summer of Flash Podcast our panel (Garth Braithwaite, Stacey Mulcahy, Zach Stepek,...

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.

Flash On The Beach - Interview with John Davey

By Dan Thomas
July 14, 2009

Flash on the Beach is fast approaching this year, tickets are selling out faster than ever and we're promised this is going to be the best yet! But don't just take my word for it, I managed to wrangle a few minutes from John Davey, organiser and head honcho of Flash on the Beach, to ask him a few questions about why this is one of the hottest events on the conference calendar.

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.

Building a 3D album with FIVe3D and TweenLite

By The Tech Labs
July 3, 2009

In this tutorial I will show you how to build a simple 3D photo album in AS3. We will build an application similar to this one. I will use two AS3 libraries: FIVe3D and TweenLite, both open source. Five3D is a lightweight 3D library written by Mathieu Badimon. TweenLite is one of the many libraries available for script based animation in AS3. It was created by Jack Doyle from Greensock. It's principal characteristic is that it's small (hence it's name) and simple to use. FIVe3D and TweenLite work very well together!

Poll Results: HTML 5, are Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX in trouble?

By Rich Tretola
June 28, 2009

This poll was one that brought many votes and most of you don't feel that HTML 5 will be making any major impact any time soon. Over 40% of you voted for "I don't think so: HTML 5 doesn't touch...

Building a Simple Chat App With Adobe Flash Collaboration Services

By Andrew Trice
June 26, 2009

In this post, we will focus on getting started with Adobe Flash Collaboration Services (formerly Cocomo). If you've heard of this, but aren't really sure what it is, AFCS is a hosted service provided by Adobe which enables real-time collaboration within your own Flex applications.

Flash and Silverlight... an unlikely symbiosis?

By Justin J. Moses
June 24, 2009

Recently Mike Slinn wrote a post suggesting how Adobe could win the RIA war. War? You mean the whole Flash vs Silverlight thing? It’s not a war - it’s sibling rivalry. The only bloodshed I’ve seen is amongst those comment-stream melees that follow controversial blog posts, instigated by the usual suspects. Antagonisms aside, Adobe and Microsoft are working together, shaping our RIA landscape.

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.

Flash Builder, Linux and Winning the RIA War

By Mike Slinn
June 17, 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...

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...

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.

Flash On Tap: Beer + Flash + People = Success

By Jesse Freeman
June 5, 2009

I have finally recovered from Flash On Tap in Boston and all I can say is WOW! It was truly an incredible conference and the start of something epic. Even though this was the first time holding this conference, the quality of speakers and attendees was on par with what I could have expected from a well established event. I really have to thank Infrared 5 and Influxis for putting on an amazing conference.

The perfect conference brew: Flash on Tap 2009

By Chuck Freedman
June 3, 2009

Before I begin my cheerful rave about the newest conference on the Flash Platform circuit, let me sum it up in 3 words: Boston. Beer. Flash. Unlike any conference you have ever been to, Flash on Tap was equally about...

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.

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