The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIRâ„¢ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes.
Tags: OpenSource, Flash, FLV, F4V
Bill Gates offers some insight on their rationale behind trying to acquire Yahoo… and everyone is talking about that. What i found more interesting is their approach to provide their software for free to students. Now that is a move that I believe it is going to help them greatly. If you are a student you might not be able to afford $400+ USD software, even some professionals have a hard time gathering the cash to buy the software. Some packages cost as much as $2,000+ USD. So providing Microsoft products for free to students -I believe- it is the right move because those same kids that will spend hours using the software right now, tomorrow will shape the stability of what software is being used at that moment.
In an interview with CNET News.com’s Ina Fried, Microsoft’s chairman explains why the company is giving away its developer tools to students and offers a glimpse at the rationale behind the Yahoo bid.
Source
[kml_flashembed movie="/labs/swf/iHold.swf" height="150" width="450" quality="best" fvars="fs=/imgs/adobe/flashplayer10.jpg" /]
The name is out! Emmy Huang, product manager for Adobe Flash Player released the code name for the Flash Player 10 “Astro” and for those lucky ones that will be able to make it to MAX this year they will be able to see what “Astro” can do first hand.
Read the rest of this entry »
I had a few hours to spare the other day and I created the diagram (sketch) above trying to understand Colin Moock’s take in the subject. One post won’t cover all the ins and outs of this Design Pattern but its more of a review and study of the author’s view.
I had the opportunity to work on Out of the Box mini site for UPS at T-3. I had the chance to do all the Flash actionscripting after receiving the comps from the Art Director, and this is what we came up with…
Link: outofthebox.ups.com.
Thats right, Starcraft II is finally in the works. After almost 10 years after the first release of Starcraft they finally decided to put their act together and get us the new version. Can’t Wait!
Link: www.starcraft2.com
That is right, thanks to the guys from TextMate and their help I was able to get a small Macro that will trace the selected word in Flash.
What I mean is this:
1. Select a word
2. Run the Macro
3. the word you selected will appear in the next line as follows:
trace(”the Word You Selected = ” + the Word You Selected);
Neat uh?
Bind that to a short cut (in my case CMD-E) and anytime you need to trace a variable or an object you are set to go.
Interested in the macro?
I haven’t tested this kind of array usage against the processor so I am not sure how intensive it is but it definitely helps in case you want to keep your arrays very descriptive and you don’t want to do a search on the array every-time you need a certain node.
So the regular way of using arrays is:
var myArray:Array = new Array();
myArray.push (”this”, “this one”, “this two”);
myArray.push (”that”, “that one”, “that two”);
so lets say you do a simple trace
trace( myArray);
you get a nice long list with all the items you have pushed into the array (”this,this one,this two,that,that one,that two”). So you want to organize the arrays in a way that you want to access “this one”, well you can certainly do
trace(myArray[1]);
now lets try to get “that one”…
trace (myArray[4]);
That is because we know that the position of “that one” is the 4th position in the array. But all of the sudden you are running down your scripts trying to figure out the best way to access the information in your array without having to memorize the position of each of them. So then what do you do? You can create an array for each one of the items you need. like this:
var thisA:Array = new Array();
thisA = ["this one", "this two"];
var thatA:Array = new Array();
thatB = ["that one", "that two"];
Now lets say we need “this one” we can access that value by doing the following:
trace(thisA[0])
That is an easier way to know what we want and now we can refer to each array by their name. But lets pause for a second and think that maybe… MAYBE 3000 lines down your code you find yourself stranded trying to figure out if thisA[0] was “that one” or if it was thisA[1]… so what if we could name each one of those arrays with a specific name that we could remember later….
Hummmm… now we are talking.
lets do the following
var thisA:Array = new Array();
thisA = [{positionone: "this one", positiontwo: "this two"}];
eh?… lets taste it…
trace(thisA[0]["positionone"]);
and it works! So do I mean that if I want to access position two all i have to do is remember the name of the array “thisA” and the name of the value I am trying to access? of course… lets try the secnd one
trace(thisA[0]["positiontwo"]);
Sweet! there you have it, go wild! go crazy in the mean time I will find out how much processor we are eating with this approach.
After seeing so many people requesting help with the easy Username and Password method for Flash I decided to write a small class.
Granted UserName and Password verification shouldn't be taken slightly, but many times you just want to make a section of your site "Pass Protected with flash", and in reality this is a very simple verification that should be used against the average joe, not the average geek-joe who knows about flash-deconstruction and such.
So have your Password-Protected flash site in 3 steps;
1. Download the class from here:
2. unzip the files in the directory where you are building your flash movie, so the file structure should look like this:
-root directory
--com
---helmutgranda
----PasswordProtect.as
3. on the root timeline of your flash movie write the following:
Please do not write telling me geek-joe was able to break into my site! because this is not a bullet proof password verification, this is just a quick way of keeping the average joe from looking into any "secure" section of your site. I might write a more robust version with some PHP/mySQL/flash combo but for now this will do.
helmut | 
05 1st, 2008| 