agitcraft

As I probably promised before in the post announcing my itinerary for Adobe MAX 2010, I now have video for all of the sessions I attended.

Deep Dive into Mobile Development with the Flex SDK

Deep Dive into Flash Player Rendering

Creating Testable Flex Applications

Performance Tips and Tricks for Flex  and Flash Development

Having Fun with Layouts in Flex 4

FutuRIA: The Convergence of Rich Internet and Enterprise Applications

A while back I sent a video around the office (this one about Molehill) and received a confused response from a coworker:

You might think I’m completely stupid, but what is an API?  I was at the Flash in the Can Conference a few months ago and have been hearing that term ever since.  I assume it’s an AS3 thing?

I explained it as follows:

API means Application Programming Interface. It basically refers to a set of procedures and protocols for getting things done. For example, you could say that things like waving hello, handshakes, speech, and meetings are part of a human communication API. When we talk about new APIs, we mean that either the set of things we can do in a specific sphere has expanded or become more powerful. If you can imagine people who are only able to do things like wave and shake hands, an API upgrade might then allow them to truly speak, or maybe shake hands more vigorously.

It’s often challenging to explain things like this to non-programmers, but this seemed like a very useful metaphor to me. Would you agree?

I just thought I’d announce that I’m formally taking the plunge into mobile application development. It seems more and more (though I should have figured this out by now) that mobile is the future, and I hope to get on board.

As you know if you read this blog, I have extensive experience with ActionScript and the Flash Platform. You may also know that Apple recently lifted the ban on applications developed with Flash (and other platforms) for its iPhone. You may know (furthermore) that Android 2.2 (aka Froyo) has support for running applications targeting Adobe AIR.

You might naturally assume, then, that I’ll simply be developing the way I always have and porting to both platforms.

Nope. Not right now at least.

If you knew me personally, you’d know that I take a comprehensive approach to life. I like to do things from start to finish in their entirety. When I pick up a book or film, I finish it (whether I like it or not). I do perhaps 90% of my cooking from scratch (including growing my own herbs at this point).

We all know what happens when you take shortcuts. Sometimes it’s fine, but other times what you get is cheapened, incomplete, or unsatisfying. In other words you get what you pay for.

I’m currently studying the android platform and learning how to write applications for it in Java. I already have a little bit of experience with Java, and this is as good a reason as any to pick it back up.

I have no intention of developing for the iPhone (at least for the time being). Their behavior towards consumers and developers, frankly, frightens me at times.

Because this is a new journey for me I’m digging up as many resources as I can to help me learn this stuff. Here are a few that I can point to right now:

1. The Android Developer Page: This should definitely be your first stop if you want to develop for Android. Everything you need to begin can be found here. I particularly recommend the Quick Start Guide and the various tutorials available in the Resources section.
2. My first android app: I just found this blog post today, and it applies more to people with a background in Java, but it’s nice when somebody takes the time to make notes about bugs, quirks, and other potholes on the road to developer nirvana.

This is just a start, but I’ll definitely post more resources in the future as I stumble upon and use them.

I’ve just made my first commit to GitHub, and it consists of a modified version of as3syndication lib that will work in the Flash IDE. You may recall that earlier I proposed the fix and offered the files here. Now, if you prefer, you can just go to my profile at GitHub.

The people may now rejoice.

I’d like to take a moment to draw your attention to a very useful class that’s been around for some time, but that I’ve never really bothered to use: flash.system.Capabilities. It gives you all kinds of useful information about the environment your SWF currently resides in. I’ve got an example below.

The SWF above (with any luck) should tell you whether or not you’re running a debug version of flashplayer, who the manufacturer of your flash plugin is, what operating system you’re running, what player type you’re using (should be plugin on this page), and what version of the flash player you’re running.

The code for the demo is as follows:

field_version.text = Capabilities.version;
field_player.text = Capabilities.playerType;
field_os.text = Capabilities.os;
field_manufacturer.text = Capabilities.manufacturer;
field_debugger.text = Capabilities.isDebugger.toString();

If you download the files for this demo here and run the SWF on your local machine, you should see a different value in the player type field.

The player type is the most useful piece of information to me. In theory you could use it to load different data or behave differently in general depending on whether you’re viewing your SWF in the Flash IDE or on a webpage, without having to add your own obnoxious boolean “debug” flags.

I’m pleased to formally announce the relaunch of my portfolio at www.agitcraft.com. It’s been a long,  winding, mostly poorly organized effort on my part consisting of numerous missteps and restarts. I’ve technically been working on this iteration of the site for about 4 months (from scratch), although I’ve been grinding away at redesign efforts both with this domain and with my previous portfolio at altpixel.net for well over two years now. To give you a vague idea of how long this has been brewing, the svn I’ve been working out of is currently in revision 381 after going through at least 4 branches, and I’m the only person developing this.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due:

• Jack Doyle for the greensock tweening platform (which makes all the animation in the site possible), without which I’m sure I would have gone crazy long ago.
• The entire Papervision3d team for their excellent 3D package, which powers the 3D “solar system” motif that I use to display my interface.
• The team of developers who’ve thus far worked on as3syndicationlib. There were a couple issues I ran into, but they were minor in the long run and they certainly don’t take away from the fact that I was able to parse and consolidate 5 feeds in real time with only a few lines of code. Awesome!
• The developers of PureMVC, for making a framework that has literally changed the way that I work on large projects and made my site possible.
• Matt McInerny at the League of Movable Type for providing the fantastic “Raleway” typeface I’m using both in my logo and for section headers.
• An anonymous sound fx provider at flashkit.com for providing the ominous intro tune that plays when the site loads. I say anonymous because I was inattentive when I grabbed the audio and forgot to take note of the name/location of the file I snagged. I dug around today but could not, for the life of me, find the file on there. If anybody recognizes it let me know and I’ll give a proper shout out.

The wealth of libraries and tools freely available is part of what makes Flash such an exciting platform to develop for. I certainly could not have completed a project of this scale without them.

Anyway, if you like the site let other people see it. If you have problems with it let me know. I’m hoping this remains a growing work rather than a one-off showpiece.

It’s time to speak about a problem that’s been troubling me for quite a while now. Flash CS4 (and certainly versions that precede it) seems to have major problems consistently and accurately rendering text. I’ve prepared some screen captures that demonstrate the problem.

Text Field Properties

It all begins innocently enough. I’ve created a text field on the stage and I move over to the properties panel to toy with it. In this case, the text field uses Arial Regular at 12 points as its font. It’s anti-aliased for readabilty, and it’s selectable.

Embedded Characters

Although I don’t expect that any of my viewers will be without Arial, I embed the font all the same. I make a broad selection of characters that should cover most if not all of my use cases for this text field, without embedding everything.

Editing Text

Now that I’ve configured my text field, I select it on the stage and put in some standard lorem ipsum to test my application with. Everything up to this point seems fine…

How Text Renders

…until I finish editing the text. Now that I have it selected, but am no longer editing it, everything has changed. Compare this screen capture to the one that precedes it.

This problem is not new. It’s particularly pernicious when you’re trying to align other objects with on-screen text.

Perhaps you, like me, have had a need, at some point or another, to parse RSS feeds in Actionscript. If so, then perhaps you’ve also stumbled across the generally wonderful as3syndicationlib developed by Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell. For those of you who aren’t in the know, allow me to provide the following excerpt from the project’s google code page:

Use the syndication library to parse Atom and all versions of RSS easily. This library hides the differences between the formats so you can parse any type of feed without having to know what kind of feed it is.

These claims actually hold up pretty well…once you get the code running.

The problem is that the codebase was written specifically for development in Flex. While Flex is a great platform for certain projects, many of us still use Flash for a lot of the work we do, so a toolkit that relies on packages that are only available to Flex just doesn’t do it.

This problem is also no secret. It’s listed as an accepted issue on its project page. The problem is that the codebase apparently hasn’t been updated since December of 2006.  That’s no joke kids.

Fortunately, a solution was pushed forth from outside the project by a Mr. Martin Legris in the form of a bare implementation of the missing “DateBase” class that the syndication library looks for, as well as an edit to an import statement buried down in ParsingTools.as.

So if you, like me, have a need to consume RSS/Atom Feeds in Flash and need a solution that works, look no further. I present, to you, an updated version of the as3 syndication library with the necessary changes in place to begin using it out of the box in your flash projects.

The files are all available here.

I received quite a response yesterday to my post offering a circular fill animation. First of all, I had a brief conversation with Frank Salim.

Frank: drawArc

?

is there a reason that isn’t an appropriate solution?

me: drawArc isn’t a function in flash.display.graphics

Frank: wacky

arcTo is a function on the canvas 2d context in html5

me: There is a curveTo function that takes 2 anchor points

Frank: are there any curve functions?

ok

me: but it’s not very intuitive

and this is easier

once the asset exists

Frank: can an asset contain code

me: sure

Frank: shrug

Matt Kenefick over at Big Spaceship Labs posted a thoughtful, level-headed examination of the debate on the future of Flash considered against the emerging “threat” of HTML5. This is one of the better articles I’ve read on the matter.