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.
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’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
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).
Loads of new stuff has been happening. As you probably know, Adobe announced loads of more goodies for us at their Adobe MAX conference.
Native 3d support. Although it won’t be (most likely — according to Justin Everett-Church) hardware accelerated it will still mean that in a year or two we won’t see sites that don’t have 3d in them, in some form. I’m guessing the behavior is pretty similar to the basic 3d we see in After Effects today and that this will be an addition—not a replacement—to Papervision.
Improved text support. This one’s a big one. I don’t really need the right-to-left text, even if i can see it’s huge in other parts of the world, but support multiple columns and inline html tables — sweet! In addition you can build your own stuff on top of the api’s, extending the capabilities even more.
Custom filters, blend modes and fills. That’s right. Astro brings support for Hydra, a new pixel shader language that lets you build your own filters that will then run at native (same speed as blur, dropshadow etc) inside flash. Wow! This is pretty amazing. The possibilities that something like this brings us are pretty remarkable.
The best part is that we don’t even have to wait to get our hands on Hydra, as you can download it from Adobe labs right now. I tried it out today and created a levels filter in Hydra which works (as far as i know) exactly the same as in Photoshop. Here’s the result on an image i took in Yosemite:
Levels source code
The language itself is very simple even if it’s pretty far from Actionscript (then again if you’ve used other pixel shader languages such as HSLS for Direct3D, you should feel right at home). I think the hard part is more about getting your head around the way a pixel shader works and thinking of the technique of what you want to do, not so much how to do it.
Check out Aral Balkan’s post from Adobe MAX 2007, along with a video of Emmy Huang’s and Justin Everett-Church’s presentation. Also make sure you get some of your questions answered by Justin in the interview by Lee Brimelow.
I’ve been working with FDT for quite some time. There’s no going back to any tool I’ve ever tried (then again I haven’t worked in Flashdevelop, which many developers working on Windows recommend). Still, FDT is awesome, it has changed the way I work. I simply get more error free code out in less time.
Now FDT3 is now open beta, meaning anybody can try it right away! If eclipse is your tool of choice, go give it a test drive.
http://fdt.powerflasher.com/beta/
FDT3 will be 299€ or 99€ when upgrading from 1.5.
Of course you should realize that it’s still in beta status, so judge for yourself if you want to use it for production work. The private beta has been updated quite frequently and sometimes introduced bugs that made work quite annoying. Keep this in mind
Whoa!
The guys who changed the flash world (by adding a third dimension) and indirectly even the flash player (Adobe added mip mapping) have released their drop-dead-gorgeus open source project Papervision3D as a public beta.
After 7 months of development the open source (MIT licenced!) actionscript 3d engine is available to anyone to use, for free, for anything. It even comes in both flavours, as2 and as3 (the as3 version is a lot faster). Papervision3D will (or has) change the way websites look in the future. I’m sure we’ll see more 3d as it’s so easy to work with nowadays.
So, get your copy, try it out and show off your creativity without having to get your head around the rather complex math lies under the hood!
Closer instructions on how to get Papervision3D and get started in their blogpost: http://blog.papervision3d.org/2007/07/07/papervision3d-public-beta
ps. I even got my 3 seconds of fame by having flame in the showreel
I don’t usually link to other people’s stuff as there are more than enough links to them already. Now i just have to make an exception. André Michelle has once again proven his awesome audioprogramming skills in flash. This thing is friggin’ a-ma-zing. And yes, i’ve had my experiments with realtime audioprogramming in flash. It’s not your everyday walk in the park
Check out live@popforge!
As I said, knowing a part of what’s behind that, i truly find this jaw-dropping. Awesome work once again, André.
Let’s hope the next version of flash will have better support for audio (such as playing dynamically created sounds, as flash now can’t do it (yes, this emulator does it anyway - in realtime)) so that the rest of us mortals can create cool stuff like this too. Those interested in this can continue reading about it at FlashBrighton’s blog post.
Jeez, i feel so inspired i’m about to blow up
http://blog.andre-michelle.com/2007/umz-tzz-buzz-tzz-umz-tzz-buzz/
