It’s written for every Flash Developer out their who uses FDT or FlashBuilder, Juniors and Seniors alike. For the Junior who wants to advance their skills and the Senior who has been doing the same thing and needs more control over his/hers development process. It’s about automation, making things work for you, saving time to do more and doing it faster.

You will learn how to install and set up a versioning repository in Git or SVN and use it straight from Eclipse, how to use Mylyn to connect to your favorite bug/issue tracker (Google Code, JIRA, Mantis), and how to manage your open issues. We will teach you how to leverage the power of Apache’s Ant to automatically compile, debug, and deploy your work to an FTP server, networkshare, or webserver.
But also use Ant to do everyday tasks like automatically generating HTML and Class files, zipping, and emailing your clients notifying them for a new release. Other topics this book covers are integration with Growl’s notification system and compiling to Android and iPhone/iPad.

For more information and pre-ordering go to O’Reily’s website

It’s almost here, the FITC Amsterdam. Quite excited i must say. Looking forward to attending loads of AIR specific talks, will be attending the workshop from Samuel Agesilas . (Hope he will be releasing Saffron to the public here!).

Play with Pixels, Bitmap Manipulation with Flash!

AIR Conditioning

Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Playing

Building Red5 Applications

Reducing Complexity: An Intimate Look at Saffron

RIA Meets Desktop: Introduction to AIR APIs

The Rest of the Iceberg

Keep you posted!

Will post more soon …

This free tour from Adobe aims to provide you with the knowledge to start programming in AS3 (My god, that realy sounded like an sales pitch and i’m not even affiliated with adobe!)

Check it out on their website! I am going

[UPDATE: I'm definitely going, hoping i'm also going to FITC]

Yesterday Adobe released the new beta for their AIR platform, the new AIR exporter for the IDE and the brand spanking new Media Player, and the new Flash Player 9 beta.

Today Adobe released information about their new Flash Player 10, codenamed ‘ASTRO’. The main points of change are (copied from Ralph, because i was to lazy to type):

1. Better text handling. They FINALY support RTL languages (bi-directional) and multicolumn text.

2. “Hydra” – A language to write you own BitmapFilters. I guess you can see it a bit like the OGL / DX Pixel Shaders. According to Carlos, it executes at about the same speed as the current filters (think; blurfilter, displacementmapfilter…etc).

3. 3D Support. What was shown was a plane, running a video texture with mouse events; it does seem to have perspective distortion. I’ve seen faster examples in, for instance, PV3D.

Below is a video with footage from MAX, showcasing the new release:

There is a storm coming up in Flash country and i think i like it! This means so much for Flash developers; Multi language sites will be a breeze to do, and we can finally cover the whole of the world with the RTL.

Flash development is finally maturing, it took some time, but its getting there.

You can read more at it Aral’s blog, Ralph, Emmy and Kevin

However the solution is quite simple.

Case: When you work on a project in Flash on both mac and pc and use fonts in dynamic or static text fields, their alignment and size differs.

When Developer A publishes its project with fonts aligned, spaced and sized on a PC, it looks like peaches. Developer A stores its project on the server, Designer B opens the same project and the fonts look mangled. The alignment is off, size and weight is different than the ‘original’ like Developer A intended.

This can be fixed very easily.

Go to your library panel (CTRL-L) and create a new font.

You are now presented with a dialog box that looks like the image below.

In the name field type in the name of the font you are using, for this example I am using the name fontTest. And then select the font you want to use. Select the options you want, Bold, italics and the font size. You have just created a new font in your library which you can use in throughout your project.

And now you can use this newly created mapped library font for any text field (whether it be dynamic, static or input). You now have one centralized place to change the font. This way Designer B does not have to change all the text fields in the entire document by hand, he can just change the font mapping in his library.

“But how do I know where the font is?”
In Flash when you make an library font, it displays it in the font list with an star “*” behind it.

Like this.

Durex just released a new condom action packed site. The Pants Whispere. It’s a nice blend of Flash and video, loads and loads of video! Its a presented by a sexy and realy crazy redhead, Coresher, and she takes you on a penis adventure!

Loads of hidden videos, Dikorations, and funny stuff. I especialy love the “Great moments in penis history”. When you answer the questions, wait a little so you see more suprising video takes

Bring this briliance on! Find it here: http://www.thepantswhisperer.com/

“Another part of the Wii site shows a user navigating the Wii’s news service via WiiConnect24. No news provider was named for the service, which appeared to consist of a news feed of headlines and photos but no video content. Nintendo also confirmed WiiConnect24 will let users surf the Web using Opera Browser, which is also the basis for the Nintendo DS’s browser. The company showed a still of the browser accessing the popular search engine Google and promised it will support Adobe Flash animation.”

You can check more video’s about the Wii on the Wii site or on the Wii video site.

Ingriedients:

• Create a MovieClip with 4 frames. On every frame place a small graphic of your chooise about 50px by 50 px, and all in different colors.
• In that clip create another layer and call it actions and lock it. In every of the 4 frames place a stop() command.
• Set the linkage idenitefier of that clip to its name.
• Go back to the main timeline create a layer and call it actions and lock it. And put the script below on the first frame of your maintimeline.

/*
Paint-a-heart.
Sidney de Koning, 14/07/2006

http://www.funky-monkey.nl

*/
var num:Number = 0;

_root.onMouseDown = function ()
{
_root.onMouseMove = function ()
{
var temp = _root.attachMovie(“loveheart”, “heart”+num++, _root.getNextHighestDepth());
temp._x = _root._xmouse;
temp._y = _root._ymouse;
temp.gotoAndStop(Math.ceil(Math.random()*4));
temp._xscale = temp._yscale = Math.random() * 100 + 20;
temp._alpha = Math.random() * 100 + 20;
}
}

_root.onMouseUp = function ()
{
delete _root.onMouseMove;
}

The result can be seen below (To draw click and hold mouse, to stop release mouse):

Be sure to wacht the music video, play the test drive and ofcourse dont forget the eye test (optical inch).

This stuff is really hilarious, a nicely made Flash site with good use of Flash Video. The guys making this site must have had a blast shooting the video assets! Check it out at http://www.shaveeverywhere.com/