Archive for Actionscript 3
December 18, 2008 at 10:37 am · Filed under Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, Flash, Flex, Open Source Flash, SWFAddress
Rostislav has announced the release of SWFAddress 2.2 this morning, with a large number of enhancements and bug fixes:
- Refactored JavaScript implementation
- New SWFAddress.swc AS3 component
- New CS4 based Splash screen sample
- New Digg API sample
- New up() method for easier deep linking path navigation
- New XSS protection that doesn't affect special characters
- Support for Internet Explorer 8
- Support for custom HTTP status messages in the SEO sample
- Improved title handling
- Improved unload event handling for IE
- Updated Rails sample
- Fixed getBaseURL() for AS3
- Fixed Safari 2.0-2.0.3 support
- Build-in fix for the Firefox 3/Mac OSX blinking effect
- Additional onLoad fix for application/xml content type
- Fixed optional options parameter for the popup method
- Cross platform build script
- Various optimizations
This looks to be a major release, and took over seven months of development. I remember speaking to Rostislav about this release back at FOTB 2008 Brighton, so he truly has put in a lot of effort. Here's hoping it gets wrapped into the expected new Gaia release.
The new version is available for download here.
December 10, 2008 at 10:46 am · Filed under Actionscript 3, Books, Flash, Flex, Open Source Flash, PHP, SWFAddress
A few months back Jason McCoskery and I wrote a fairly detailed article for Flash & Flex Developers Magazine about SEO for Flash and Flex. It looks like the article has just been published in the January 2009 issue.
Jason and I used our experiences in building the p.i.n.k. Spirits website as a platform for testing the concepts and they worked so well that we decided to write an article. The article covers using SWFAddress and SWFObject with PHP to provide your content in an alternate view (in this case HTML instead of Flash) for SEO purposes.
The article contends that when Adobe announced they were working with Google and Yahoo! to improve the searchability of Flash and Flex websites and applications, the Flash development community largely applauded the initiative. However, months after the announcement there has been minimal increase in the effective search engine rankings of Flash and Flex websites.
We discuss why the current method of Google and Yahoo!'s new 'headless player' isn't working quite yet, and how you can provide a mirror of the exact same content in your Flash and Flex projects as HTML using a single data source. This is a 'white hat' approach and doesn't break any of Google's rules.
There have recently been some articles on how Google has been updating the 'headless player', namely this article on InsideRIA, and I may do a blog post updating the article if necessary. Until then, be sure to check out the article in the January 2009 issue of Flash & Flex Developers Magazine.
December 9, 2008 at 11:59 am · Filed under Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, Adobe, CS4, Flash, Flex
Big Spaceship released a nice AIR app today which allows you to download and view the entire AS3 language reference locally. However, you don't need an AIR app to view the language reference offline -- there are actually two other options.
I had previously posted about the offline help and language reference locations in Flash CS4 which allows you to access the local copy of the language reference from within a web browser. But did you know that you could also access these local files from within the Flash CS4 help panel?
Normally when you access the help panel in Flash CS4 it automatically tries to load the online version of the documentation and language reference. I assume Adobe chose to do this so they could keep it updated and you could benefit from other user's comments in the Live Docs.
To access the local copy of Flash CS4 help and the language reference, just tell Flash to “keep you offline”:
Go to Window > Extensions > Connections. In the panel that pops up, click the arrow at the top-right and select “Offline options”. From there you can check the box for “Keep me offline”. Flash will then always default to using the offline help.
I should note that doing this may also prevent you from using any other panels which call out to the internet, such as Kuler and the Flash startup/new file screen. As of now I'm not using any Internet-connected panels and I have the splash screen set to not show on startup, so this works quite well for me.
November 22, 2008 at 7:10 pm · Filed under Actionscript 3, Flash, Portfolio
Project:
Leanne Marshall website
URL:
http://www.leannemarshall.com
Synopsis:
Leanne is a fashion designer who recently won season five of Project Runway - a reality competition show on the television network Bravo.
Before the show had ended and Leanne knew she had won, I was approached to help build her a new website to display her collections. I immediately asked my friends over at Transport if they would help out by designing the site.
Working with the extremely talented team at Transport, we designed and built this site in about five weeks. As Transport notes, Leanne needed something up quick, but she also needed it to last more than a season. The design works as any portfolio should: by putting the artist's work up-front and center. When a visitor comes to the site they are immediately presented with two large, randomly chosen photos from Leanne's various collections.
The entire site is controlled via a simple CMS system, based on XML files, which Leanne can edit whenever necessary. This allows her to update images, add collections, add stores and modify her bio without needing to know any technical details. For even more customization, Leanne can even control the pop color that is associated with each collection.
The site was built using the Gaia Framework for Flash, in ActionScript 3 and PHP.
You can view a video recap of the final runway show, held at Bryant Park during NYC's fashion week, which includes Leanne's winning collection here. Leanne has also recently been featured in magazines such as Dwell, and I'm glad to have been a part of her start to a successful career in fashion design.
November 18, 2008 at 8:38 pm · Filed under Actionscript 3, Adobe, Adobe MAX, Flash, Web Apps
While I wasn't able to make it to MAX this year, I did follow Serge Jespers and Andrew Shorten's live blogging of the keynotes and the sneak peek session. Lots of amazing sneaks revealed tonight, but by far the best announcement for developers (in my opinion) was ActionScript 3 as a server-side language. I had actually blogged about how I wish this would be released back in July, 2007.
What does this mean for developers?
From what I read in the live blog, it allows you to write ActionScript 3 which runs on the server by defining a .sas file containing your AS3 code. In the same file you can also define code to run both on the server and in the client by setting a runat variable: runat="client" for client side code and runat="server" for server-side code.
As you can see in the photo above, pulled from the live blog feed, you can run ActionScript code on the server from within your normal client-side application code. If you can't quite make it out, the photo is showing MXML in Flex Builder.
And in this photo you can see how ActionScript can be embedded within HTML, just like PHP, etc. Notice how both client and server-side code allow calls directly to databases with an executeQuery() function, passing in an SQL statement.
I'm eager to hear more about this, but from what I can gather, unfortunately not much else was mentioned at the sneak peek session. Nothing on Adobe Labs yet, either. As more details become available, I will certainly be sure to blog about them.
Update: Looks like it is coming with the next release of ColdFusion server, codenamed Centaur, which makes a lot of sense. Some additional details can be found over at this blog post.
November 18, 2008 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Actionscript 3, CS3, CS4, Flash, Open Source Flash
I've been using FDT for quite some time now, and I keep having a recurring issue when using external, third-party, open source classes/libraries: if the code is not strictly data typed and/or contains some other small issue FDT's parser doesn't like, the folder containing the classes shows up with a red 'x' symbolizing there is an error.
This is annoying for several reasons, the biggest being that if your custom classes are in the same folder you cannot determine at a glance if your code is error free.
I had blogged about this exact issue when using BulkLoader a while back, and in that case I had resorted to altering the code so the errors would go away. However, I typically do not like to go in and alter code for open source projects which I know work perfectly well because updating them later becomes a crap-shoot at best -- you no longer have the option of just simply copying over the old classes with the new version.
However, I recently had someone comment on my post about BulkLoader issues in FDT with a much better solution.
First, setup a new folder in your FDT project for all your external classes/libraries. For instance, call it "external" or "classes" and put libraries such as BulkLoader in that folder.
Next, open the properties panel for your FDT project as shown in the following screenshot:
Once in the properties panel, select "FDT Build Path" from the left-hand menu and then select the newly created project source folder ("external" or "classes") and un-check the check box next to "Generate Problems/Tasks".
Hopefully this will help others out who also like to maintain an overly clean FDT project setup. :)
I am thinking about posting a series of small FDT tips including how to get it setup for use with Flash CS4, so if you'd like to see them please comment or send me an email at info -at- jonnymac -dot- com.
Lastly, to avoid any confusion I should note that Arthur Debert, the creator of BulkLoader, did make the necessary change to the project's code after my post on the subject so BulkLoader no longer throws errors in FDT. Made for a good example, though, since I had blogged about it at one point!
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