Razorberry’s Adobe Flash Blog

I’m super-pleased to say that Adobe AIR in Action is now available in all good bookstores (those that don’t have it aren’t good bookstores.. I’m looking at you, Boston Prudential Center’s Barnes & Noble).

I had a fantastic time contributing my chapters for this book, and even though I may be biased, I think it is a great guide for learning all the features of AIR, and how to apply them in real applications.

I have to say big thanks to everyone who provided their input, including the reviewers. Also high-fives to the other authors, Joey, Sam and Kathryn. I really hope to get the chance to work with them again.

Anyway, click this link (UK) for the amazon page. Or you can buy the newfangled ebook from Manning.

Click here for the table of contents.

I found this javascript-controlled audio streamer I made a while ago. It weighs in at a massive 1.2k and is very basic. Maybe you could make it a personal challenge to make it smaller!

Download the swf here. (right click & save).

Source (AS2):
Main.as
MiniStreamer.as

How to use:
Basically you need to embed the swf at whatever size you would like the progress bar to be.
Then play or stop an mp3 using javascript calls playAudio(url); and stopAudio();.

I’ve posted about the components I’ve been working on as a side project for a long while now. Finally, I’m just about ready to release them to the public in a beta state.

The Razor Component Framework is intended to be a lightweight, yet feature-rich alternative to the mx framework for Flash, Flex and AIR. It comes in both ActionScript 2 and 3 flavours while maintaining as consistent an API as possible.
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For a while now I’ve been spending my spare time writing about AIR for an upcoming book titled “Adobe AIR in Action” published by Manning.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with three very talented co-authors, Joey Lott, Sam Ahn, and Kathryn Rotondo. I’m psyched about the release since I think we’ve put together a very solid guide to Adobe AIR from a Flash and Flex perspective, and we’ve come up with some great examples that utilize each individual aspect of the new API.

My chapters are centered around utilizing databases in your AIR application, including some primers on SQL, and integrating HTML and JS content into your app.

The book will be released in a few months, but if you can’t wait that long, you can actually read chapters in their ‘uncut’ format in Manning’s Early Access Program. You can also pre-order the book on Amazon, here.

Click here for more information.

Been a long time posting! I guess you can put it down to being busy busy, but probably also due to lack of creative juices (beer?). I’ve found that I maybe underestimate my free time when it comes to my personal projects, and that I take on too much.

Case in point.. I’ve been working on an AS2 component set now for over a year and a half. I took a look at it the other day and its still missing some features, like you still can’t skin with bitmaps (an essential feature!). Anyway, I started going over the API, standardizing method names, documenting, and making things private that shouldn’t be public. I would like to convert them to AS3 pretty soon, because I still think there are some pretty cool aspects about them that people might find useful.
So look forward to that in 2009!

In the meantime, I’ve been following the progress of both Sandy and Papervision3D. Both engines are making great steps to cool 3D stuff in flash, and I’ve started using papervision for a small 3D game idea (think Rez).

Also, Joa Ebert is doing some really awesome stuff with image processing, and also experimenting with the Wii remote. This is interesting to me having just acquired a Wii console (those things are hard to find!). I’ve inserted his blog into my regular blogroll.

ByteArray.org has some interesting low-level AS3 stuff, definitely worth checking out.

I really need to get back into making fun stuff in flash!

A couple of weeks late posting this (been busy!), but I am very happy to report that I’m now an employee of Schematic, working out of their new Boston office with some very talented people.

After being mostly in the education industry for 5-or-so years, I’m looking forward to creating stuff that might be a little more exciting (and a little more visible)!

The whole method of waiting a frame to allow other functions to complete never sat right with me. It just seems.. broken.
In the MX components, doLater is used a lot - a function for putting off execution of another function until the next frame.. usually to allow other child components to finish initializing before laying them out.

Personally I would have used a cascading series of events, where the child components dispatch an “Ok I’m ready” event. The parent component would listen for these and when all child components are ready, it does its stuff and dispatches its own “Ready” event.

I’d be interested to know what methods other people use to make sure that things like layout get executed in the right order.

I don’t usually have a problem with comment spam.. I delete the few that manage to get past the filter. I just got a spam message apparently from a previous legitimate commenter (Mr Peters, I didn’t know you’d taken up trying to sell little blue pills). The comment was ‘no problem….’, but on the last dot there was a link to a dubious site.

Nice try! Too bad it was spotted
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Is it me, or do the security settings at the following url just not persist with the FP8 beta?
Clicky.
I’m trying to get the Flash Comm server administration panel to run and failing miserably because FP8 won’t let it connect.

Are the settings just not updated yet because it is a beta?

I’m not usually one to merely post a link, but this deserves it.

Pimpzilla theme for Firefox.

Also, something flash related that depresses me.

Flash Player installing Yahoo! toolbar.