journal

Check out the new Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst on labs.adobe.com

If you’ve seen Mike Chambers flashcommand implementation you’ll notice that it only works on the mac.  We have a lot of people at my office on Windows and I wanted to provide them something that could also work on a Windows computer.  Plus I wanted something a little cleaner, easier to learn and a bit more elegant than most of the solutions out there.  So I created FlashAntTasks.  Its a jar file that you reference in your class file that creates flash tasks that compile separate movies.  I’m posting it up on Google code so everyone can enjoy.  So enough with the fluff, here’s the details

WINDOWS USERS – you need to pass in flashcommand the flashapp attribute with the uri to your flash.exe like

You can download the code at http://code.google.com/p/flashanttasks/.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="FlashAntTasks" basedir="." default="Open in Browser">
 
    <description>
        simple example build file
    </description>
 
    <!-- os specific properties -->
    <property name="os" value="${os.name}"/>
    <echo message="Using ${os.name}.properties"/>
    <property file="${os.name}.properties"/>
 
	<!-- Include the Flash Ant Tasks Jar here, also make sure you 
                reference the FlashAntTasks.properties file which is 
                bundled in the jar file -->
    <taskdef resource="FlashAntTasks.properties" classpath="lib/FlashAntTasks.jar"/>
 
	<!-- Project Specific Properties -->
	<property name="html.filename" value="index_full.html" />
	<property name="local.path" value="${basedir}/wwwroot//${html.filename}" />
 
        <!-- make sure to reference the fla dir and your output dir -->
	<property name="fla.dir" value="${basedir}/flash" />
	<property name="swf.output.dir" value="${basedir}/wwwroot/assets/swfs" />
 
 
	<!-- TARGETS -->
	<target name="Compile Additional Swfs">
		<flashcommand >
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/site.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/site.swf" />
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/shared.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shared.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
	<target name="Compile Shell" depends="Compile Additional Swfs">
		<flashcommand >
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/shell.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shell.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
	<target name="Windows Example" depends="Compile Additional Swfs">
                      <!-- WINDOWS USERS: flashapp attribute is required -->
		<flashcommand flashapp="c:\\Program files\\Adobe\\Flash.exe">
			<movie test="true" source="${fla.dir}/shell.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shell.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
	<target name="Compile Shell" depends="Compile Additional Swfs">
		<flashcommand >
			<movie export="true" source="${fla.dir}/shell.fla" output="${swf.output.dir}/shell.swf" />
		</flashcommand>
	</target>
 
 
	 <!-- Open in local browser -->
	<target name="Open in Browser" depends="Compile Shell">
		<exec executable="open">
			<arg line="-a ${browser} ${local.path}" />
		</exec>
	</target>
 
</project>

Lee Brimelow has a great snippets panel find on gotoandlearn.  Great video tutorial on how to install it and walkthrough of all the features.

http://theflashblog.com/?p=480

I hope you all are enjoying your holidays. As Seth Godin wrote on his blog today, “This has always been my favorite holiday. No gifts, no guilt, no doctrine.”  And I definitely agree.  Another thing he mentioned was pretty insightful about bloggers.  He mentioned that bloggers provide helpful info for free with no strings attached.  Bloggers have helped me in so many ways on a daily basis, and I know alot of bloggers read my blogs as well so I’d like to say thanks to all of you.  But it also made me realize that I just haven’t been posting much about what I’ve been doing lately in my life, cause who knows, it could help someone later in the same predicament.  So I’m gonna try a bit harder to get back into the whole blogging scene.  The only problem is that I can’t really talk about the projects I’m currently working on.  Which is kinda weird but I’ll figure a way around it somehow.  

Anyway my peoples.  Happy turkey day.

See the examples here

Merapi is a bridge between applications written in Java and those running in and created for Adobe AIR™ (Adobe Integrated Runtime™). 
Merapi has been designed to run on a user’s machine, along with an Adobe AIR™application and providea direct bridge between the Adobe AIR™ framework and Java, exposing the power and overall calabilities of the user’s operating system, including 3rd party hardware devices.

With a light weight and straightforward API, developers can leverage the OS by writing Java companion applications for their AIR™ applications. Java programs treat Merapi as a bridge to the running Adobe AIR™ application and vice-versa. 

Developers can build their Flex, Flash and AJAX applications for Adobe AIR™, and use Merapi to make them do things that AIR just can’t do by itself.

The Merapi project team, is proud to announce that the private alpha release has been completed and is available to select members of the Flex/AIR/Java community. We’ve had a lot of interest and have been contacted by a variety of individuals who have expressed interest in joining our efforts.

The Other You, one of the sites I worked on earlier this year, is on the Cannes Lions Titanium shortlist!!! We’ll know later today whether or not it wins.  But being on the shortlist is incredible to say the least!  The Other You was an absolutely incredible project.  We used every technology in our arsenal to create this site; Papervision, After Effects rendering servers, text messaging, multiple Flex and html sites, myspace, facebook the works.  And the most incredible aspect of it all was that it was done in 3-4 weeks.  Alot of long nights, seriously, alot….that carried over into the next day…and night…for real….alot.

But it was soooo worth it.

Alright, adding “Flash Killer” to my blog titles is meant to be a joke.  Mainly because Adobe is so ahead in the game its not even funny.  But this thread makes me rethink how I should word my posts…. NAAAA Its still funny.

So Apple pulled a fast one on us at WWDC.  They had a small session on Cocoa for the Web in which they used a javascript MVC framework called SproutCore to create a thick client with bindings just like Cocoa.  I’ve been trying to get a look see as to what all the hoopla is but the SproutCore site is flooded.  Keep ya posted, in the meantime here’s a great article on it and here.

So Firefox is trying to break a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in one day, so go ahead and pledge and set our email up with them so they can send you a reminder!

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Full Feature List

• Animation
  1. Support for animating custom data points
  2. Object Animation support (animating structs)
• Deep Zoom
  1. New XML-based file format
  2. MultiScaleTileSource to wire up your own images and get the Deep Zoom experience
  3. Better notifications when sub-images enter the view
• Controls
  1. Customize the look and feel of controls using Visual State Manager. Interactive control templates were never so easy.
  2. Some base controls are now part of the core platform, rather than packaged into apps. Say hello to smaller app sizes.
  3. Calendar now supports multi-selection and blackout dates
  4. New TabControl
  5. Control properties changes (Background, Tooltip, FontFamily, FontSize…)
  6. DataGrid improvements: auto size, reorder, sort, performance and more
• TextBox
  1. IME Level 3 input support
  2. Text wrapping and multiline selection highlighting in textbox
  3. Scrolling and clipboard support
  4. Document level navigation keys
• Improvements in error handling, reporting
• Parser and Property system
  1. DependencyProperty.Register/RegisterAttached now supports PropertyMetadata
  2. New DependencyObject.ClearValue
  3. Visual tree helper
• Data-binding
  1. Per binding level validation
  2. Support for element syntax for binding markup extensions
  3. Binding to attached properties
  4. ItemsControl extensibility (OnItemsChanged method)
  5. Fallback in value conversion (Binding.UnsetValue)
• Input
  1. Support for limited keyboard input in Full Screen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space). I’ve seen more than a few requests for this on the forums.
  2. Managed APIs for Inking and stylus input
• Networking and Data
  1. Cross Domain support in Sockets
  2. Cross Domain security enhancements
  3. HttpWebRequest and WebClient callable from background threads
  4. Upload support in WebClient
  5. Isolated Storage: default size increased to 1MB and new ability to change quota with user consent. Also a new management UI.
  6. Duplex communications (”push” from server to Silverlight client with no need to “poll” for data)
  7. LINQ -to- JSON serialization
  8. Significantly improved SOAP interop
  9. “Add New Item” template in Visual Studio for “Silverlight-enabled WCF Service”
  10. ADO.NET Data Services support
• UIAutomation and Accessibility support in the platform
• Media
  1. Platform support for Adaptive Streaming (also referred to by people as multi bitrate), the ability for Silverlight to switch between media depending on network and CPU conditions
  2. Content protection with PlayReady DRM and Windows DRM
  3. Basic server-side playlist (SSPL) support
• Localization
  1. Changes to localized application model. You now create one xap per locale, instead of one monolithic multilingual app
  2. Expanded localization languages of runtime and SDK
  3. Japanese SDK Installer and documentation (July 10)
• Several changes to make API and behavior more compatible with WPF
• Tools
  1. Beta 1 projects will be automatically ported to Beta 2
  2. Remote debugging for VB on the Mac
• CLR
  1. A new developer-oriented runtime package with debugging binaries, localized strings, docs etc.
  2. Support for OS fallback logic for resources
  3. CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture isolation to AppDomain level
• DLR
  1. Performance improvements
  2. Various new DLR and IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 language features
  3. Various new IronRuby features