Flash Player 10.1 is announced

Adobe has announced Flash player 10.1 and with it comes a whole new era of Flash applications.It might seem that this is just a point release,but do not get fooled away by the point.For me it seems like a whole new Flash world. There are so many great things coming, the details can be found here (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/)
From developer’s perspective Global error handling is a one point solutions for all the try-catch blocks. Wow, I am so excited. Then comes multitouch,accelerometer,orientation detection for mobile devices just to name a few. FP10.1 will support HTTP streaming,another great addition to flash player.This is huge again.Now with Flash player 10.1 we will get direct access to microphone. Wow,simply awesome. Flashplayer will take advantage of Hardware acceleration whenever possible,even for Vector graphics and images(http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/jchurch_flashplayer10.1.html).
Well and the most tremendous part is Full flash player is now available for mobo devices.(http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200910/100509AFPforMobileDevicesandPCs.html)

Last,but not the list is Flash can now make applications for iphone,yeah from Flash CS5 one can directly produce native ObjecticeC code to deploy into iPhone(Obviously one need to go to Apple AppStore for the so called approval,huh!).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3CI5GyNXoA

Overall for me as a Flash developer this seems to be a new era coming to Flash platform.I can feel the freedom and fun. Long-live Adobe and long-live the Flash/SWF team at Adobe.

References :

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/jchurch_flashplayer10.1.html

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/building-mobile-applications-with-adobe-air

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200910/100509AFPforMobileDevicesandPCs.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3CI5GyNXoA

Happy Flashing

Introduction to SQLite on AIR

SQLite is a relational database right inside Adobe AIR environment. While its a full fledged relational database system,the real power of  it comes from the ease of use. There is no server to configure,no server to start. Once Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is installed in your system, you are ready to take  advantage of SQLite database. Actually SQLite comes with the AIR itself. So there is absolute zero configuration as it is clearly noted in the SQLite official site.

Now,all that one need to know is the Flash (Actionscript 3.0) APIs to start talking with the Database.

To begin with any database applications,one need to have a database in a database server,start the server,connect to it and then start putting in data or getting the data. Now in this case of SQLite, we already have the initial set up ready for us. I mean as a SQLite developer on Flash platform one need not worry about the server setup and starting the Database server. All one need to concentrate is, connecting to the Database and puting some data in or getting some data out from the database. For once AIR is installed SQLite is up and running,how cool ! Now the best part is,all the standard SQL query runs in the SQLite Database too. To get started, one need to create a database or connect to it,if already created. Now SQLite API gives us one syntax to do the both,I mean if the database is already present it just connects to it else it creates the Database for us and then connects to it. The syntax is as below

var conn = new SQLConnection();//Connect to the DB server
//adds event listeners to listen for the events
var conn.addEventListener(SQLEvent.OPEN, onOpenConnection);
var conn.addEventListener(SQLErrorEvent.ERROR, onConnectionError);
//connects or creates and connects to the database
var dbFile:File = File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath(“myDb.db”);
conn.openAsync(dbFile);//actually connecting to the Database

Thats all to create and connect to the database. By convention the database files are named with extention “db”,In this example we are creating a Database file named “myDb.db”. The Database is actually stored as a file,as we created now. To make any query to the Database the syntax will go as below

var sqlStatement:SQLStatement = new SQLStatement();
sqlStatement.sqlConnection = conn;//”conn” is the connectino we just made with the above code
var query:String = “SELECT * FROM friends”;//This is actual SQL query we are going to run in the Database
sqlStatement.text = query;
//adds event listeners to see if our query ran properly
sqlStatement.addEventListener(SQLEvent.RESULT, onQueryResult);
sqlStatement.addEventListener(SQLErrorEvent.ERROR, onQueryError);
sqlStatement.execute();//finally calls to run the query in the Database

Thats all to it.

Now to make things easier for my project,I have created a helper class for regular tasks as querying the Database and getting the result. Please find the file at google code repository here. Hope that helps you on your day to day task of SQLite development under AIR and Flash platform.

happy flashing

Flash 3D authoring with CopperCube

Yet another 3d authoring tool for web 3d,CopperCube. Being on beta, its quite good on features and performance is kind of ok. The most notable feature is the ease of use and the swf size. Very easy to use and one can be productive right away. The swf filesize is also small,for 6 boxes with textures,lighting and a first person camera it came to 132 kb. The thing which hurt me is the performance on ie. My browser continuously crashed with one first person camera. Being on beta, I think these issues are to be there. Hopefully a stable compilation will come on the release version. Apart from that, actionscript is supported in it and the tutorial is cool to get started. For a longtime I was searching for a tool like this. The camera can be made to collide with the objects in scene,which is a very nice way to control without any code. Overall a must try for flash 3d game developers.

Get the out put files here.

Happy Flashing

Documentation Tool, NaturalDocs

Designing a software and developing it, is might be one part of the game.But I believe without a proper documentation of a software, the product itself decays in time. I am very dissapointed to see people calling themselves developers (ohh no, very good, experienced developers) do not even know and do not want to know the necessity of documentation. One generally finds the words “fix it man.forget that comment,fix the code.who cares why?” from the know all, Mr Fixit and efficient guy in a typical flash development environment. Obviously we are here to do stuff but then imagine if the same code you are passing on to some guy would come to you without documentation, what would be your reaction to the situation.The general reaction of the typical Mr Fixit is “This is not my code. I am trying to understand some body’s F*$#ing code. This is not the way one should right the code”.
Give me a break, documentation is the key to make a product come out alive over and again with lot ease and good maintaince. For flash projects I always thought AsDoc holds a good palce. It does actually if you are a Flex developer. But what happens if your whole project is Flash only!! AsDoc can not understand “fl” package.Ohh no!Ohh yes. It does not understand the package at all.Then there are work arrounds.Why?! If Flash is a platform and eveything is a tool to produce the SWF, the Flash only projects should get equal advantage as Flex.
Well,then there are some pretty tools who can do the thing sweetly and nicely. NaturalDocs is an opensource project, which does the thing.It supports a lot of languages and produces documentation clean and sweet. It has option even to create a frame based documentation or a no-frame only HTML based documentation. It supports the standard JavaDoc type comments as well as natural english language type comments too. Over all I am happy and satisfied with NaturalDocs as I became productive in it within 15 minutes after download. I must tool for any kind of development documentation. Cheers to NaturalDocs.

Adobe CS4 Event,Mumbai

Yesterday I had been to Adobe CS4 event at Mumbai.It was exciting and pleasure to be in the event. Met a few old pals and got to see new features coming in, in Adobe products. Good to see that Adobe is promoting OpenScreen project even in sales talks. Another interesting thing was Flash Catalyst. Though I am following up with Thermo for a long time,but seeing it in person is a different experience. Gumbo is another cool stuff shown in the presentation along with FlexBuilder 4 (though mentioned that the FlexBuilder 4 IDE is far from the actual release version,but I never expected to see “Fx” componenets). Then it was all Flash CS4 new features tour and Flash player 10 feature list. Over all it was an interesting place to be.

As far as the media server is concerned the most exciting feature came in with Flash Media Server 3.5 (FMS3.5) is dynamic streaming. Dynamic Streaming does the quality decission on the run time, it actually looks for the connection speed of users’ machine and stream the higher,medium or lower quality media ones respectively.

Monster Debugger : An Opensource debugger for SWFs :)

For a long time I was searching for a debugger for my Flash applications. It was a pain to customise my own debugger for every project. Xray is a cool one, but some how my expectations were more from a debugger as far as ease of use and features are concerned. The ease of use and the functionality both are awesome in case of the new Open Source Debugger from DesignStudio De Monsters.This is called “Monster Debugger” and the name says it all. Its an AIR application and the client code is embed inside it. Once downloaded and installed, one can track any SWFs from inside Flash IDE or standalone too. I fell in love with it at the first look itself.Cheers to DesignStudio De Monsters. Keep up the good work guys.

Happy Flashing.

Getting into RED5

Hi, Happy new year to all. Hope this brings with it success, friendship, faith and hope to everybody’s life.
To start with lets start with Red5. For past some weeks I was working on Red5, yeah its just some 2 -3 weeks only. All these time I was only trying to get my first application going and running Flash remoting in it. It took me some time but its worth.

First of all to go with Red5 it is mandatory to have Flash and JAVA handy. Belive me, its the same as AS3 development in an IDE such as Eclipse. There are syntax changes but over all its the same kind of stuff. So it is fun developing in JAVA as well as in AS3. RED5 supports JAVA SPRING framework for applications out of the box. Being said that, Spring makes its easy for a beginniner developer to get going in JAVA as all one need to write is a POJO(Plain Old Java Object) and configure one XML file.Cool, so lets get started. Below are the source files, I hope it helps somebody out there.

Source Files One

Source Files Two

Flex Development on Visual Studio

Well, this is came a little late but I think anticipated. Though not from Microsoft itself, but seems developers on Visual studio are also feeling it. After all the noise regarding the new front ends from all around;  AJAX, SilverLight, JAVAFX etc, SWF seems to be on top. Here are two more IDEs for SWF development and that to on Flex Framework and on top of Visual Studio. Amethyst and Tofino.

Amethyst comes in 2 flavors Personal and Professional. Personal Edition is Free as well. According to its makers, SapphireSteel Software, The personal edition will be completely free and may optionally be installed into the free Visual Studio ‘shell’ edition. Amethyst Personal (beta) will be available from Amethyst site in the 2nd week of December 2008. Amethyst Professional will be released in beta in the first quarter of 2009 and the final version is expected to ship in the 2nd quarter.

Tofino is from the company named Ensemble . Its ready to be downloaded from their site and as per the company, Ensemble Tofino is available for free.

Happy Flashing

AIR Performance Issue

This came to me as a surprise while developing a current application in Adobe AIR. Let me give you some back ground of the project. This is basically a game management system along with playing of the games. All the games are made in Flash itself. I must admit that the games are not coded according to any standards. These games are just working fine as per the requirements doc of the client.There is no optimisation any where in the game. All the graphics are having groups, alphas, masks and what not effects as well. Plenty of alpha tweens, motion tweens. On top of this, we have codes, which are just at most 2 classes. One is a document class and another class is attached to a movieclip on library(whereever is necessary according to the developer!!). Ok, at this point I was being asked to make a UI for all the games to show up and playable too on the same interface. I had given a choice and I insisted on AIR as of obvious reasons, that we could give a better and personal experience for the user.I was confident as I worked with AIR apps previously(all data driven applications). Well, everybody seemed happy upon the AIR thing as we were working on transparent backgrounds, irregular user Intefaces, fullscreen SWFs with text input facility etc. I never knew I was calling trouble to myself. Once I put everything together and tried to run the games inside the AIR application, it failed. Yeah, it failed. I tried the most better coded game out of all the games in another machine from the same AIR application.The game ran fine. I got some optimism. I went ahead and tested the same game from other machines through the AIR application.But it failed.
Overall I found AIR is still not better suited for SWfs which has got a lot of graphics, sound, animation, alphas, masks and all those stuffs designers play arround regularly. Agin if there are a lot of addchild, removeChild as well, AIR applications does not respond as expected. AIR applications take up a lot of memory even for small SWFs made in Flash IDE.THe same SWF takes 30% CPU running on FLash PLayer, but Once I call the same swf from AIR, it suddenly takes upto 70% CPU.
Hope it helps somebody out there.

Horizontal Scrollbar in TileList

Well, its a long silence. I am currently developing an AIR application which will contain games. While I was trying to customise the TileList, to my surprise, it behave a little buggy. I was trying to make a horizontal scrollbar appear in the component as thelist is vast. By default Flex have me a vertical scrollbar.My first reaction was, ok.May be the default settings do that.But the only workable HOraizontal Scrollbar came in after I set  direction=”vertical”. After a googling a bit I found this( by Arno Manders), which confirmed me that this is the way to go. Thought I would share it immediately as somebody out there may be trying the same as me.

My final code looks as this

<mx:TileList id=”gamesList”
itemRenderer=”Comp_Thumbnail”
itemClick=”{this.onGameClick(event);}”
width=”658″ height=”220″ verticalCenter=”0″ horizontalCenter=”0″
direction=”vertical”
horizontalScrollPolicy=”on”/>

Happy Flashing