Adobe released a new version of Director which have many new features such as support for up to 40 file formats for video, audio and images, DirectX 9, AGEIA PhysX engine, Flash 9 importing, Unicode support for multiple languages and an improved user interface.
Adobe release new betas today of AIR and Flex 3.
Adobe AIR Beta 2
Adobe® AIR™ lets developers use their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
Adobe Flex 3 Beta 2
Adobe® Flex™ 3 is a cross platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/
If you are planning on attending the Flashforward2007 Boston conference and have not yet bought your ticket check out Thumbplay’s Widget Festival for a chance to win free admission, travel and accommodations.
The contest ends Aug. 31st, 2007 and for complete details see the Thumbplay website at http://partners.thumbplay.com/widget_festival
This summer two new Flash books are coming out that I had the pleasure of getting involved with as a technical reviewer. They are both very good books and will be excellent additions to my bookshelf.
The first book is “Flash Video for Professionals” written by two very good friends of mine Lisa Larson and Renee Constantini. The book is well written and has many examples on all aspects of Flash Video development in both ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0. It’s a great way for developers not yet using AS3 to get started with Flash Video today and yet be able to continue to get more out of the book as they delve into AS3.
The second book is written by a colleague I haven’t yet met in person but have read many things by him before. William Sanders’ “ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques” covers all of the popular Design Patterns and how they can help solve common problems in Flash and Flex applications.
I’m now teaching a “Macromedia Flash: Animation and Introduction to ActionScript” at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The class is a continuing education class with 3 CEUs and meets on eight Saturdays 10:000am to 2:00pm June 9th through July 28th, 2007.
After a very worth while presentation by Joey Lott last night on Test-Driven Development using AsUnit I was sold.
Up until this morning I was doing unit testing on a very minor scale. I would make these empty FLAs and write some code to test all of the methods in class I wrote. While this method worked well, the testing FLAs weren’t very organized or consistent and have certainly cluttered my folders. My problem was I was lacking a formal approach.
I’ve been developing with C# and Asp.Net since its beta version and enjoy using it as a development platform. When I started learning Flex, I was often reminded of my Dot Net developing experiences and often translated concepts in my mind to help me learn. This article runs through a very basic C# Web Form and translates the code to an ActionScript 3.0/MXML Flex application. This article assumes that you are already familiar with developing with either C#.Net or Flex 2 and wish to learn the other.
I’ve rewritten my LiquidGUI tutorial for use on Adobe’s developer center. The new tutorial was revamped using ActionScript 3.0 and Flex Builder 2.0. The original tutorial I wrote using ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8 can still be found on my site.
Alessandro Crugnola posted another sweet Firefox extension on his
blog. The plugin installs a small icon to your browser’s status bar. Clicking the icon opens a menu where you can choose different Flash Player versions. After selecting one, your browser now acts as if it had that player installed. I tested it out with a handful of pages/player choices and it seems to work as expected. It’s a very cool plugin. Alessando also wrote the Flash Tracer extension as well.
In trying to create a read-only property for your class, you declare a private variable with a public getter. By omitting the public setter, you feel confident that you’ve just created a read-only property. However, not all variable types are created equal. In this entry I’ll examine a case where a property mistaken for being read-only is actually modified outside it’s class and how to avoid this gotcha.
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