The Rolls-Royce of the FDT 3.0 family, Enterprise, was released a couple days ago. This probably isn’t news to you anymore but I thought I’d mention it anyway.
I’ve got to say I’m very happy with where the Powerflasher team has taken this magnificent tool. Today I find it hard to work without FDT mostly because it makes my work so much faster and I can concentrate on what’s important instead of fixing my human errors. Just the fact that i can work for 30min and then compile without any errors (typos etc) is so nice and definitely keeps the creative process going much better than before. There’s a reason the tagline is “pure coding comfort” 
The newly released Enterprise version brings more advanced refactoring tools + a similar-to-Flex-builder debugger, both of which are very welcome additions.
FDT 3.0 Enterprise sets you back 599€ for the full version (roughly $950) so make sure you try the product in the 30 day trial to see if it’s worth that much to you.
Check out Carlo Blatz’ present the new features of FDT 3.0 Enterprise.
Yesterday Google released an addition I’ve been waiting for to their already impressive set of API’s, now including the Google Translate AJAX API.
Hello. My name is Antti and I am an RSS addict.
Seriously though, I get most of my industry news via feeds. The technology while being so simple really is extremely powerful, easy, quick and effortless; it’s hard to say no. Still, there are a couple foreign feeds i want to follow but i don’t want to translate the texts all the time, so i was looking for a service that translates RSS feeds on the fly. I didn’t find anything useful. FeedBurner does a lot so i could easily see them doing this too (especially now that they are a part of Google…) but nada. So, I built my own little prototype.
This was mostly built for myself but i thought i might as well release it for the public. Feel free to try it out and let me know if you run into issues. If you’re interested I don’t mind releasing the source.
http://www.feedlanguage.com
How about my feed in .. Italian?
I made a quick example to demonstrate the power of the JPGSizeExtractor class i wrote about a year ago. This is a demo that came up from a brief mail exchange with Richard Bacon who was looking at the class.
The example loads 10 images (one at a time), parses their SOF0 headers to get the dimensions, stops the load and draws grey boxes as backgrounds, setting the layout. This way building the layout is very quick and you don’t have to wait for the whole images to load. It’s kind of the same idea as specifying the width and height for images in html to maintain the layout even before the image has loaded.
When all sizes have been parsed the images themselves are loaded. For the demo the images are scaled down to 25% to make them fit better in the small window here. The total filesize for all 10 images is 4169kb. All images are from sxc.hu.
Please keep in mind that this example is of the type “quick and dirty”, and is only meant as a proof of concept. The code for the example was written just to make it work, not to make it pretty or flexible.
The source is available in my fresh public svn (which for some weird reason is in Chinese in Camino?! 
): public.anttikupila.com/svn > jpgExtractorMultipleImages. The files are also available in a zip.
An architectural framework I’ve been using a lot recently has been updated to a new version.
The version (well, not the most recent one but the jump from 1 to 2) fixes a lot of small issues that existed in 1.x, most of which were inconsistencies that caused confusion. I usually downloaded the framework before a new project, fixed the stuff i wanted to fix myself and then started working. It of course always added a bit of overhead in the beginning of a project so this update is very welcome! I haven’t had a chance to verify that all I wanted to change has been fixed but if Cliff Hall has done what he talked about before, I’m happy
I’ve used PureMVC for most of my recent Actionscript 3 projects. It’s primarily meant for flex/air apps so building RIA’s with it is great. Flash is not as obvious since PureMVC doesn’t do any of the stuff that you might want from a flash framework (handle loading, stage manager etc) as it merely defines the architecture for the app. The strongest side i think is the fact that it encourages you to do stuff the right way, instead of quick & dirty. If you haven’t done so yet i definitely encourage you to take a look at the framework. The docs may be a bit confusing (i know they were to me in the beginning) but you should quickly get the hang of it.
PureMVC has gotten a lot of amazing buzz already. If you haven’t caught up with the nitty gritty details yet, Cliff also gives a very good description of what PureMVC is on the flex show, episode 33. Luke Bayes and Ali Mills also did a great presentation back in -07 where PureMVC came out as the “winner”; see it here.
Of course for more info there’s always puremvc.org.
I have to support this.
Thanks to all the people who have made the impossible happen with all the amazing audio stuff available but now I think it’s time for Adobe to step in. The issue with SOUND_COMPLETE is of course big (especially with backwards compatibility) but frankly Sound.loadBytes( ) is all I want. The latter would also reduce the need for SOUND_COMPLETE, which is usually used in hacks/workarounds.
Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE
Update: Adobe has requested to remove the word ‘Adobe’ from the domain because of potential legal issues. The new domain is make-some-noise.info. Read more here.
I’m sure this is not the first place for you to hear this but Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is now shipping!
I love AIR. Recently I’ve been working with building a CMS tool for a site we’re working on at AKQA. Compared to a traditional CMS that would be online (built in flex or traditional web technologies such as html & javascript) the big thing here is that i was very easily able to add the functionality of saving changes to files. With it the the administrator can administer the site when being offline and then just upload the changes when an internet connection is available. The administrator can also save multiple versions of the content which is very handy especially in this particular application (which i unfortunately can’t say more about).
It’s cool with AIR to be able to build your own desktop apps that just are useful (instead of having a grand commercial purpose); I know I regularly find features I’d like to see in existing apps. Knowing Actionscript 3 and reading a little documentation is all that is needed to build and app that does a better job yourself;)
I see myself doing a lot more AIR stuff in the near future. The performance is still far away from a regular desktop app built on system level languages but instead we get the simplicity of Actionscript to do powerful stuff. With Actionscript also of course working online we can build online and offline applications that save the same codebase. Sweet stuff!
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
I’ve got to say that I got this warm fuzzy feeling when I checked my RSS feeds today and saw the Red Bull Flightlab site mentioned on a couple sites. After checking out the piece myself I’ve got to say that it is hands down the best use of 3d I’ve seen online so far.
redbull.com/flightlab
The biggest thing here is that it doesn’t feel like 3d is used just because it’s 3d, but for a reason. The rest of the site holds up to the high standard it sets too. As frosting on the cake the site supports deeplinking too and has a fully functional browser history. A big hand to Lessrain.
Read their blogpost about the creation too. Good stuff
Feeling like you want to get more out of your career? Maybe you’re a student and want to get a kickstart? Maybe you’ve worked a couple years and want to try something new? Either way, Hyper Island might be the choice for you.
Hyper Island is now having it’s first international recruitment tour so if you’re living in the states or the UK and want to chat with some people who work there or have studied there, now is your chance!
The schedule is the following:
Los Angeles: 5th–6th of January (sorry about the late notice..)
San Francisco: 12th–13th of January
New York: 26th–27th of January
London: 2nd–3rd of February
Me & Christian Olsson (from Hyper) will be in San Francisco on Saturday to chat with people interested in Hyper Island, come and say hi! If you’re interested, contact tour@hyperisland.se (check the details on Hyper Island’s blog post first).
Any questions? Shoot.
My tool of choice, FDT 3.0, has been officially released. No more beta! I was in the beta test program and it has been very exciting to see the progress of this wonderful tool. As I said before, if you haven’t tried it out; please do so. There’s a free 30 day trial too.
http://fdt.powerflasher.com/
FDT 3.0 packs a whole bunch of features which put the older 1.5 to shame (I won’t even try to compare it to flash, or even flex builder). Features include advanced code completion, an automatic formatter, quick fixes & assists, templates, organizing imports & automatic importign, launchers, semantic highlighting and much, much more. The biggest one though is definitely AS3 support which works like a charm. In short, it has changed the way I work. If Actionscript is the language that brings the bread to your table, go give FDT a spin.
I was kind of surprised to see the split into different versions. While I understand this step as a good “excuse” to make some extra cash (which is well deserved), i find it kind of annoyed. I own a license for FDT 1.5, which I bought when I read that the upgrade will be 99€. Now, however, I’m reading this is just for the basic version which is kind of disappointing. 599€ for the enterprise version is still quite a bit more (i definitely want the debugger and advanced refactoring tools).
