Friends of ED has been releasing competently compiled web design books made with collaboration from some of the best for quite a few years now and when they offered a few books to the Flash Insider team to read I jumped at the chance. The first book I cracked open was the latest in their Essentials series, Flash 8 Essentials. The Essentials books are meant to grab current and future web designers and give them a quick dip into the latest web design software. This book was written a quick guide to Flash 8 and includes enough tutorial and code to get most designers and developers up to speed. The writing style of this book is similar to a motivational seminar on Flash. This helps the reader become extremely excited about the new version and can make you feel like you can do everything in the book.
Flash 8 Essentials has six authors, but the reader will not notice a definite change from one chapter to the next. Each author has already made a name for himself in the Flash design and development world. Two of the authors have already written a few books on this subject and one helped to create the current Developer Certification Exam.
...so get some help! And help others while you're there too!
Programming is Hard is a code snippet repository that covers a number of useful languages, including Actionscript. FriedGeek's post with AS shortcuts is a great tip to know and there's plenty of other good info here. Grab what you need and leave a snippet or two of your own!
One of the most common post topics on the Adobe Flash User Forums is a request for tutorial recommendations. Well, here ya go! Great tutorials and it FREE!
IFBIN.com just opened their service to the public for free. It is a client that you need to download and install that allows you to browse and download the Flash By Example and Flex By Example code/tutorial libraries. Great stuff!
The current IFBIN.com site is a little sketchy on the details, but the FREE message is loud and clear. You can read Darron Schall's (one of the contributors) description of the service here.
IFBIN is the brainchild of Adobe Flex Evangelist Ted Patrick. Originally, a subscription service, the move to a FREE model is a little confusing, but it's certainly not time to look a gift horse in the mouth!
Geek Cocktail Party Bonus: What's better than throwing around alphabet-soup acronyms? Knowing what the mean. Check here to lean what IFBIN really stands for!
MDM Multimedia is celebrating its fourth birthday by hosting a Flash contest...actually TWO contests. They've set it up as a Designer Vs. Developer contest, but that's really not the case. It's really two different contests: one for designers and one for developers (a distinction that I've never really liked...I know that there has to be some division of duties in a business workflow, but the implication that a designer is the "creative" person and the developer is the "technical" person just doesn't sit right with me, nor has it ever been that clean-cut in my experience...end rant...).
The designer contest is for a marketing campaign and the developer contest is more application oriented. The new version of MDM's Zinc supports Flash Player 9, AS3 and Flex 2, so the idea that you didn't use for the Flex Derby would be a great fit here.
The prize packages top out around $1,000 worth of goodies, so take a look-see and show 'em your stuff!
Miltos Manetas has put together a nice time waster for your Monday afternoon. Create your own Jackson Pollock drip painting without all the mess at JacksonPollack.org. Great use of the Drawing API! I can't wait to show this to my 7-year-old...but I get to play with it for a while first...
Added Note (7.6.06): Seems the authorship of JacksonPollock.org is questionable. See the comment below for some background and Stamen's site for the original.
Adobe is sponsoring a Developer Week (12-16 June). This is a free series of online presos aimed at developers. Lots of Flex stuff, an overview of the Adobe Engagement Platform, and AS 3.0 for Flash developers (in case you haven't started exploring AS3 in Flex). If you haven't had a chance to play around with Flex, this would be a good place to get an introduction so you know what's coming on deck.
Looks like there's some good information to be had here...and its FREE! So go sign up today.
Sean Moore over at the eponymously named ActionScriptCheatSheet.com has put together some great single page cheat sheets for ActionScript. Currently, he's posting sheets for AS3 (so far, he's posted sheets for Top Level Classes, Packages and the Display Package), but there's an older AS2 sheet as well if you're still not on the beta bandwagon.
Download 'em and print 'em! And keep 'em close by! And don't forget to send a note to Sean and tell him thanks!
Check out Kinglong's Gradient Explorer! (The link is directly
to the SWF file. If you'd can read Chinese or want to use Babelfish on Kinglong's post about the project, go here.) It's a great way to experience how code works in
real time. See how and where the little numbers change the way things look instead of just playing around with
sliders...and you can always cut and paste the code into your own Flash movies too!
Yahoo! Yippee! Etc! Yahoo has just released two new APIs for its mapping service. Web developers can use the new
Yahoo Maps AJAX API and the Yahoo Maps Flash API to create their own Yahoo maps in any web-based (or just web
connected) application. Now Neave will need to roll the Yahoo info into his Flash
map. The API includes hooks for other live data from Yahoo sources like their trakkic tracker and more. Plus the
Flash API comes in a Flex flavor for RIA developers looking to roll maps and live data into their applications. I would
like to see this added to a live pizza ordering application that shows a highlighted delivery route and availability map
that allows a user to click on their house and even draw out a map. Heck, while we're thinking of map drawing, let's
create an interactive app that multiple users can log into at the same time and watch a leader draw a live route on the
map (with notes) to give directions to a meeting (or something).
Clive
Whitear over at Adobe Consulting's Work in Progress
blog just posted a really nice Transition and Tween Explorer. Not the prettiest app you'll ever see, but really
functional. Great way to learn some Actionscripting as well if you're new to the whole coding aspect of things. Have
fun playing with the effects, then cut and paste the code into your own files! Download the files
here!
Adobe should build this into future Flash UIs, similar to the filter explorer in Photoshop.
Looks like the merger completion brings with it another big (and not unexpected) merge:
What are Adobe's plans for Flash Player and Adobe Reader? Our long-term plan is to develop a "universal client" by combining PDF, Flash and HTML in a single, integrated runtime. Of course, we will continue delivering the Flash Player as a small, efficient runtime for content and applications on the web, and Adobe Reader for viewing and interacting with PDF documents and forms. The integration of these technologies into a unified framework creates a ubiquitous platform that runs on virtually every device, and dramatically expands the opportunities to create compelling solutions.
I guess Flash Paper is just a vectorized Adobe Reader now. Plus SVG will soon be fully consumed by Flash. The only question I might have is... where is my PDF manipulation ActionScript?
For you serious code junkies out there, here's some fun reading (and a blog to keep an eye on). Brendan Eich of Mozilla has posted an update to his blog which lays out the very latest on JavaScript 2/ECMA-262 Edition 4. For those of you who didn't know, Flash's own Actionscript it an implementation of ECMAScript, so the future of ECMAScript is the future of AS...thus the reason to be interested in what Brendan has to say. Actionscript 3 brings AS into full ECMAScript compliance. Macromedia is also a part of the standards committee for ECMAScript, so the future of ECMAScript is being influenced from the Flash camp as well.
I've been playing around with Google's Map API in the last couple of weeks (going to take a look at Yahoo's version now after their strong showing at MAX last week). I just found VGMap (Vector Overlays for Google Maps) from Eyebeam's R&D Lab, and I am psyched because now I get to add Flash to my Google Maps!
VGMap is "simply the glue between GMap and Flash, as well as a handful of
Flash ActionScript libraries and sample code to simplify the process of drawing over the map correctly." Check out the New York City Subway map as a Flash/Google Maps mashup here. VGMap is an answer for those folks who think Flash and AJAX are somehow antithetical.
Nathan Stockton posted a nice tutorial for creating a platform game (you know, like Mario Brothers...does that date me?!) in Flash over at Kirupa.com. It may not be the most cutting edge OOP programming, but it will give you a nice intro to some fairly intricate code as well as some insight into translating game play into that code.
Well worth your time to look over, especially if you're interested in building games with Flash.
The simple answer is yes, but how. Two sites released their versions of file upload via Flash 8 yesterday and after browsing their wonderful code to see how its done I had a brainstorm. It is possible to use this code to create an image file from scratch? Using the new Bitmapping tools in Flash 8 you should be able to capture and image from a user's webcam and cache the image data. Then export the data to a new file using a mix of the file upload PHP and a dynamic PHP image creation page. Now we have a fresh file on the webserver that contains our newly captured image. You don't want to keep the file on the server? Well one of the file upload samples includes an uploaded files in directory limit. Your application can save the file and email it to the user (again via PHP or even via ASP or JSP if you want) then delete the image from the directory. All this could be created using this pre-existing code. Of course if you don't want to start from scratch yourself, you can take a look at Sephiroth.it's sample: Export JPEG with Flash/PHP. If a developer were to use the export code to create an image from a camera feed and then use the file upload example they would have a quick and dirty photograph saved to the server!
Friends of ED has been releasing competently compiled web design books made with collaboration from some of the best for quite a few years now and when they offered a few books to the Flash Insider team to read I jumped at the chance. The first book I cracked open was the latest in their Essentials series, Flash 8 Essentials. The Essentials books are meant to grab current and future web designers and give them a quick dip into the latest web design software. This book was written a quick guide to Flash 8 and includes enough tutorial and code to get most designers and developers up to speed. The writing style of this book is similar to a motivational seminar on Flash. This helps the reader become extremely excited about the new version and can make you feel like you can do everything in the book. 
Yahoo! Yippee! Etc! Yahoo has just released two new APIs for its mapping service. Web developers can use the new
Yahoo Maps AJAX API and the Yahoo Maps Flash API to create their own Yahoo maps in any web-based (or just web
connected) application. Now Neave will need to roll the Yahoo info into his 
The simple answer is yes, but how. Two sites released their versions of 
