Dean Stringer's List: Flash and Flex

"In SVG, a path is the outline of some object. It is described as a series of segments, where each segment can be different, either a line, curve, or arc. Path data is most often given in shorthand syntax as a series of commands followed by coordinates (we’ll ignore the long form for now). Let’s illuminate the discussion with some examples."

"If you want to display a hand cursor over a Flex component (any Flex Component I would say ?), there are two properties that come handy. useHandCursor and buttonMode. In some cases, a third property called mouseChildren might be required as well."

"When you have content with width set to 100%, and verticalScrollbarPolicy set to auto, when you resize the window so the vertical scrollbar is needed, you would expect the content area to adjust to handle the newly added vertical scrollbar, but it doesn't. What happens instead is a horizontal scrollbar appears."

"In Part 1 of this series, we examined the best overall approach for testing your AIR application with FlexMonkey. In this article, we take a look at building an instrumented version of your AIR application and getting it working with the FlexMonkey IDE Console."

This page contains a summary of the expected player size for OSMF apps.

"Codename Cirrus (previously codename Stratus) enables peer assisted networking using the Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) within the Adobe Flash® Platform. RTMFP is the evolution of media delivery and real time communication over the Internet enabling peers on the network to assist in delivery. Cirrus was first introduced in 2008 as a rendezvous-only service that allowed clients to send data from client to client without passing through a server. Adobe Flash Player 10, which debuted peer assisted networking, has been adopted today by over 90% of all internet connected PCs. "

"Welcome to the next version of the Flex SDK, code-named Hero. The Hero release has three main goals: * Multi-Screen Development: Allow developers to build applications that target the web, desktop or mobile devices using a single unified framework.
* Spark Maturation: Polish and grow the Spark architecture by adding new Spark components and capabilities. * Large-Application Development: Support developers building large applications by improving fundamental pieces of the Flex infrastructure."

"This document describes the known backwards compatibility issues between Flex 4 and previous releases."

"You probably know Grant Skinner from all his amazing Flash work. Recently Grant has been experimenting a lot with HTML5 and he also worked on PiratesLoveDaisies.com, a tower defense game built with HTML5 and Javascript. At FITC in Amsterdam I asked him about his experiences with HTML5 and his thoughts on the HTML5 vs Flash “war”."

"Thanks to Flex 4.5, you can rapidly build and deploy mobile applications on Android. In June, we’ll update both the framework and Flash Builder to deploy your applications on iOS."

"We are developing our latest graphics engine Alternativa3D 8 which supports Adobe Flash Player’s 3D API Molehill. Molehill is the codename for a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that will provide the necessary power to deliver advanced 3D experiences across screens using Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. Visualization is achieved through DirectX, OpenGL and software emulator SwiftShader. It operates with all popular OS and platforms, including PC, notebooks, netbooks and mobile platforms (i.e. Android). "

"Using Photoshop or Gimp, you can create lots of artistic pictures from photos like water painting, oil painting, sketch ..., by powerful filters there. Actionscript provides some filters such as BlurFilter, DisplacementMapFilter... and two basic but useful filter ColorMatrixFilter and ConvolutionFilter. We can do many things using those two filter. Here are two tutorials explaining them:"

"This article offers some common Flash development rules that you may find useful in your own work. Feel free to follow these suggestions to create content more efficiently and optimize elements to ensure that your projects download quickly and run smoothly.

The tips descibed herein are useful not just for Flash developers but also for Flash animators and designers. Apply these approaches to your own projects to see how you can improve them."

"The last weeks I dealt with the vimeo Moogaloop API. The documentation on the JavaScript and Flash API was not so well. But fortunately a couple days ago they updated the documentation for the JavaScript API and then for the Flash API. So now I am able to give an introduction how you can use the Moogaloop API in Flash."

"Vimeo has a pretty cool player and the thing that puts it over the top for my app is that it is written in ActionScript 3. But, as with everything, it isn’t perfect. YouTube has a good API page, and some decent forums, and support of the widespread dev community. Vimeo does not. Their API page is nothing short of pathetic, to say the least."