Flash The Ripper

First Ukrainian Conference Of Web Developers is being broadcasted. There’s two Flash Platform Speeches:

3:15-3:50 PM EET “RIA in Flex Perspective” by Alexey Zatvornitski and Sergey Kovalev.
[ - cofee-break - ]
4:15-4:50 PM EET “Adobe AIR. Desktop applications for web developers” by Evgen Tyutyunnyk.

Also, there’s an “Silverlight 2.0 At First Sight” speech by Sergey Baydachnuy tomorrow March 28 at 5:30-6:05 PM EET (also, see the full UAWEB 2008 conference agenda). Sorry ??” all in Ukrainian.

Eldar Prilutsky’s Speech, “Event Model in AS3″
Originally uploaded by mrjazz

We did it. First official meeting of UAFPUG in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 15 March 2008.
Please read the brief reports with a pair of photos from Andriy ‘JabbyPanda’ Panas and Sergey Kovalev (in English :)) Also, there’s some are nice photos of Kharkiv and meeting from Denis ‘mrJazz’ Sheremetov and Roman ‘NoubaSE’ Shuper.

There were 3 speeches at all: “Event Model In AS3″ by Eldar Prilutsky, “FMS2 & What’s New In FMS3″ by Denis Papazoff and “Using PureMVC Framework In The Development Of Map Application” by Rostislav Siryk (it’s me).

I was very happy to host this first meeting in the office of my company, GlobalLogic (ex-Validio Ukraine). A lot of respect to our VP of Software Development Yury Landgraf who very kindly responded to this idea, and to Anastasia Logvinova from our HR department — she helped me a lot regarding organization. And respect for everyone of 45 developers who was there!

I was writing about Alternativa Game project from their very beginning for some time, trying to depict the growth of great project with talented people behind it.

The most recent news about this development are the coolest too: Alternativa Game becomes Alternativa Platform. This happened nearly a month after their meeting with Oddcast, a well-known company in the avatar platforms world. Please find details in the Alternativa blog:

Alternativa Platform
We have guests from Oddcast

–
Rost
http://en.flash-ripper.com/

Like the effect below? See the Keith Peter’s post: how to make polar distortion in plain Flash.

Photo: Mangup 2006 :: Holeful Meet, originally uploaded by hyzhak.
Prominent job, Keith!

This was amazing. RAFPUG, or Russian Adobe Flash Platform User Group second meeting has been the best event to start this Flash year with. It took place in Moscow, January 15 2008. More beautiful, two evangelists from Adobe, Andrew Shorten and Enrique Duvos, were talking to the Russian Flash Community there. Moscow was the very first city in the Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR Pre-Release Tour.

They both were so charming and well-prepared. Despite the fact that Andrew’s Macbook has gone before the presentation (maybe due to some oocasion in the local electrical circuit, but I don’t know the exact cause), he made his speech very well and kept the delicious sense of humor through his whole presentation. Andrew demonstrated almost everything regarding Flex and creating Flex applications, he even featured the creation of component in Flash CS3 and then embed it into working Flex application. Enrique covered almost everything regarding Adobe’s Open Source initiatives, including just open-sourced Adobe BlazeDS solution for pushing data between the Flash Player and server with high performance. A lot of respect comes to Adobe and its really good evangelists.

Later, local speakers made good part too. Constantin Kovalev presented the short history of RIA and its current state. Ivan Dembitsky summarized the importance of Adobe’s move toward the Russian community and its efforts in docs localization. Artemy Malkov from the Flexis company (they made this whole event possible) told about the brand new education program for the schools, where Flash used as platform.

There was 87 flash developers total at the meeting. This was the very important event for many of them, and so important for me: I met more than a 20 famous Russian Flash persons there. We knew each other for nearly 5 years through the web, but we never met offline before. Now it happened. I saw it: everyone at the RAFPUG was completely happy!

Here’s the official report from the RAFPUG-2 in Russian, and its Google translation in English.

Stop. Relax. Meditate.

Originally derived from Papervision3D, this engine has been almost completely rewritten, as his author Alexander Zadorozhny told me and other Ukrainian Flash Platform developers during our most recent meeting in the Kiev, Ukraine (that’s how UPFUG met for the first time). Alex demonstrated really cool demo of 3D editor built on top of the Away3D. Real environment maps does render pretty fast. True 3D mesh editing and objects transformations reminded me those beloved Maya tools. While this editor itself isn’t public at the moment due to customer’s request, there’s a bunch of Away3D tech demos available and Away3D engine itself is opensource: see the new Away3D project home page at the Google Code.

In the Engine Overview Demo the core features are shown, such as Texture projection, Mesh morphing, White lighting, Color lighting, Mesh morphing, Z ordering, Skybox, Perspective texturing, Level of details, Sprites, Meshes, Drawing, Mouse events, Bezier extrusion, wire primitives, Occlusion culling, Movie texturing, Transforms and Primitives.

Some unique features of Away3D were so well accepted by developers of the PV3D that Papervision3D has merged them back as official PV3D blog says. These features will be included in Papervision3D 2.0 release. There’s an Away3d Architecture Overview available: all about engine main concepts.

Read the Away3D FAQ and visit its original home page ??” its worthy.

So, now our lovely Flash Player will support HD TV, MPEG-4, QuickTime, hardware acceleration and multi-core processors. As well as Adobe Media Player and Adobe AIR applications will do. There’s a lot of info wrote about these great news of the decade. Follow it:

• Ryan Stewart: The H.264 Announcement in Black and White
• Aral Balkan: Full FAQ on Adobe Flash Player H.264 video support.
• Adobe Press Release: “HDTV Quality Web Video Reaches the Masses with Industry Standard Video Codec in Flash Player“.

Web goes TV.

These Firefox search plug-ins provide Flex & Flash developers not only fastest but the most clever search by ActionScript 3, Flex 2, Flex 3 LiveDocs, Adobe Labs and Flash documentation because of Google engine is used. Install with one click:

1. Install ActionScript 3 LiveDocs Firefox search plug-in.
2. Install Flex 2 LiveDocs search plug-in.
3. Install Flex 3 LiveDocs Firefox search plug-in.
4. Install Adobe Labs search plug-in.

Today’s the great day. Sun is shining, I slept for two hours because of Gmail Threadless, wake up and read that Yahoo! announces its Flash Platform Team!

P.S. After I created and published these pluginsI’ve found that Alessandro Crugnola has made cool Flash/Flex Firefox Search Plugins already, and even proposed a cool approach of searching for flash docs with Google Suggest.

Today I discovered that Flash CS3 JSFL reference doesn’t mention that grouped MovieClips and TextFields can be detected throught Flash Javascript API.

Documentation only says that there’s only shape.isGroup property; if true, the shape is a group.

The surprising thing is that not only shapes have the “isGroup” property but other Elements too.

For example, create TextField and group it; then create MovieClip and group it: you can easy make sure that it is possible to detect the isGroup property correctly for both of these objects!

But JSAPI documentation doesn’t say it, it only describes the isGroup property for shapes, not for any other type of stage Element.

So, you can use isGroup property for any Element JSFL object! This is very important when you doing enumeration of each elements in Documents using Flash JavaScript. Whoa!

Matt Voerman brings a truly fresh look at the our lovely Flash Player calling it a SOC - Service-Oriented Client from Adobe. Very good point regarding any negotiations between developer and client: now, instead of saying “we can use Flash” you can tell everyone: “We will use the ubiquitous, most popular, lightweight, persistent, secured and rich-functioning web client software to deliver the project to the end user”. SOA + SOC = Flash Platform.

This is Flash 2.0, baby dear stake-holders, project managers and every true creator.

Yesterday I faced the task of importing pretty complex Adobe Illustrator CS2 file into flash. File contained a lot of vector shapes for creation of characters like this one (there was a lot of characters in teh AI file):

First, I tried to import AI file with Flash 8 Professional. After import I’ve discovered that almost everything become bitmap — not the thing I need!

So I tried to import the same file with the Flash CS3 and got so pleasant surprise: excepting a couple of dashed strokes everything imported perfectly in vector!

More, when importing, I have the advanced dialog where can choose the import settings for each AI file layer - to import it as movieclip or raster, and so on. There’s a good option of selecting everything with [Ctrl + A] and setting the needed import details for all items by a couple of clicks.

One of the issues I’ve noticed during import was slightly changed red channel in images, but I think I should talk to my AI illustrator dude first and ask him to clear the color mode issue. He provided me the file in CMYK. So Flash CS3 warned me that I try to import file in CMYK mode, so I changed the Illustrator’s file color mode in AI and re-saved and re-imported the the document and all went good. But the slight color change seems to be here.

Respect Adobe: Illustrator Import to Flash CS3 is just a candy.

Daniel Cassidy has implemented the XPath support for the haXe universal language.

The aim is to fully implement XPath in compliance with W3C standard. This very alpha version of XPath for haXe still needs some features to be finished, like compilation to JavaScript, implementation such XPath functions as id(), namespace-uri() and lang(), namespaces support and some more small features, related to details of XML implementation in haXe.

Here’s XPath for haXe documentation.

See also: haXe: installation and creation of your first Flash application with haXe compiler

haXe is universal high level programming language and its free compiler. haXe lets you create applications fir such platforms as JavaScript, Flash Player 6-8, Flash Player 9 (ActionScript 3) and Neko. Author of this technology is Nicolas Cannasse, the creator of the fastest flash compiler MTASC (now you’ve got a feeling about quality of haXe). Learn more about haXe.

To install haXe compiler (for Windows users):

1. Go to haXe download page and download installation file.
2. Unpack. Start haxesetup.exe. Installation goes on in best guerrilla tradition, without unnecessary buzz. One second — and you see the message about succesful installation.
3. Reboot your machine (to enable PATH variables, added at the previous step).

To create your first Flash application using haXe compiler:

1. Create test class file ‘Text.hx’ containing the following code (haXe source files have ‘*.hx’ extension):

   class Test {
       static function main() {
           trace("Hello World !");
       }
   }

2. Create compile.hxml file (’*.hxml’ files are used to tell compilation directives to haXe compiler) with the following code:

   -swf test.swf
   -main Test

3. Double-click compile.hxml file to open it.
4. Compiled ‘test.swf’ file will appear in the same folder. You can open it to see the result!

???? embed compiled swf file into web page, use standard html code for embedding flash files (test.html file):

<html>
<head><title>haXe Flash</title></head>
<body bgcolor=”#dddddd”>
<object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″
width=”400″
height=”300″
id=”haxe”
align=”middle”>
<param name=”movie” value=”test.swf”/>
<param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” />
<param name=”quality” value=”high” />
<param name=”scale” value=”noscale” />
<param name=”salign” value=”lt” />
<param name=”bgcolor” value=”#ffffff”/>
<embed src=”test.swf”
bgcolor=”#ffffff”
width=”400″
height=”300″
name=”haxe”
quality=”high”
align=”middle”
allowScriptAccess=”always”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer”
/>
</object>
</body>
</html>

Have good day with haXe!

These instructions is the compilation of the haXe Usage, haXe downloads and Getting Started with haXe/Flash pages.

For further studying and using haXe visit the last link and other haXe tutorials, for example, haXe for Flash9 as replacement of ActionScript 3.

Something is not clear? Don’t hesitate to ask here or in the haXe mailing list.