Category: Flash

Via Moock.

Mirroring the videos of the demonstration Kevin Lynch, Macromedia’s chief software architect, gave of the next generation version of the Flash Player 8 at the Macromedia Flash conference in Tokyo, Japan.

low bw (5mb 320×240, 15fps)

med bw (14.5mb 320×240, 30fps)

high bw (42mb, 640×480, 30fps)

Flash Studio Pro v2

Managed to make it to the meat of the Flash Studio Pro v2 presentation last night at the AtlMMUG. A nice turnout made it out, so it was somewhat unfortunate I couldn’t stick around and shoot da breeze with all the faces I hadn’t seen/hadn’t seen in awhile.

Without looking at the website, here are my comparisons of what Flash Studio Pro has that the competition doesn’t (3rd party Flash wrappers):
– has an IDE. Screenweaver & mProjector do not have an IDE for actually creating applications. While Screenweaver does have an extensive customization setup, as well as id’able windows, the forms creation appeared pretty hot. Only saw it for 5 seconds, though, so could be full of it.
– supports what appears to be a form of ActiveX controls. Basically, you could put the IE ActiveX control and make a Flash web browser. It works in OSX, though, and they don’t natively support the Gecko engine, so it must be a custom dealio.
– following the above, same goes for embedding windows media. That’s a nice touch considering most peeps gotta use Director or VB for that. So, you could have a Flash video controller that works for things other than FLV’s, like WMV’s, MPG’s, etc.

To me, those were the things that stood out. However, most importantly, after seeing one of the developers actually talk about their product, they seem to have a bright future. They articulated they are at version 2, and have a lot of growth potential, and are very interested in hearing from developers about what they want/need.

I’m sure if I met mProjector dude, or SWFStudio dude(s), I’d maybe have similiar opinions. But I haven’t, and currently I don’t. They have another product, called FlashCandy for full Flash integration via Active Desktop on PC.

Learn More.

Fear Factory

After the meeting, I headed to the Masquerade to catch some bands, mainly Fear Factory. Niiiice change of pace from electronic beats. Besides, nobody listens to techno. FF was pretty cool; the crowd seemed pretty into it, and even leaked some mosh pit violence my way; I only slightly spilled my beer, so overall it was a pretty cool concert. The venue is not gigantor, and since the Chamber shutdown, it’s hard to gather than many all black wearing, death metal loving crowd consisting with a few goths & skinheads thrown in for good measure. You can’t go to a dance club and get guys looking tough, angry, and on-purpose-unkempt whilst the girls having eyeshadow that implies their desired mood coupled with skin grafted leather. …did I mention it was a great change of pace? Even cooler was I didn’t get my beize Express(formerly Structure) wearing arse pounded for breaking the unspoken 0x000000 dress code. I hope they come back to Atlanta soon, that was fun.

I have some pictures of it on my phone, but not sure how to get them off. Tried email, but it keeps failing (Nokia something; has cutomizable covers via inserting under the case printed cutouts). Hopefully her majesty can tell me; I’ve emailed them, but they never make it off my phone.

Sitting here tracing images with my stylus, and using guide layers for the outlines. However, the outlines are loud colors on purpose to help me outline the image. If I want to see my progress, I have to keep turning all 11 of them off manually, and then back on again when I want to continue working.

Not anymore.

I wrote these 2 scripts (packaged as 1 extension), to toggle all guide layers on the current timeline on or off.

One additional thing this does to help is when your animating, and your using motion tweens. Typically, you don’t want to see the actual motion tween while your testing your animation inside the current symbol, so this will turn those on and off, too.

Hope it helps!

JXL Guide Layers Visibility Toggle – MXP | ZIP

I’m a Flash Developer, and I parse XML all the time. Your a Flash Developer, and you potentially parse XML all the time.

I’m not sure how you handle schema’s, but typically I’m making up the XML format as I go, and since the structure isn’t memorized, I’ll typically either open it up on Dreamweaver or Notepad, start coding my parser in Flash, and toggle back and forth when I need to refresh my memory on what the XML I’m parsing looks like.

For smaller chunks, I can just paste an example in my code, and refer to it that way.

…both ways suck. So, I created this panel that allows you to load text into it. I then can load my XML file into it, dock the panel, and refer to it while I’m coding. You can load any text file, but typically one would use it for XML files.

I hope this helps your productivity, too!

JXL XML and Text Viewer Panel – MXP | ZIP