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Tag Archives: Flash
Adobe has released to the public BETA’s of the newly rebranded Flex Builder which is now called Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst the design tool for interactive development between designers and developers.
You can jump to the labs to read, download the applications and watch the videos. I strongly recommend watching the videos!
Personally I’m pretty darn excited about Flash Builder 4 and the new features, a lot of them are great time savers for coders, testers and rapid development.
In response to the many wonderful questions I am getting from people regarding topics like actionscript, flex and flash I have opened some discussion forums on my web site www.uibuzz.com where you can ask away and we can discuss solutions and share content with the World!
I have set-up some basic categories like Flex, Flash, ActionScript, web development and photography as they cover most of my posts here on my blog.
You can find my forums at this link, I look forward to discussions with you all.
I am wondering what to do, I have been getting a lot of questions lately on code problems people are having with Flex, Flash or ActionScript. Clearly comments with questions on threads makes this difficult to catch and discuss sometimes, and I want to try and help everyone that asks for it, this was part of the reason I created www.uibuzz.com.
So I wonder, would creating some forums to help people post and respond to questions be the answer? I can set some up with very little effort, I just want to provide the most effective ways to communicate with people who take the time to send me questions. I appreciate that you all take the time and value my response enough to ask me for help, and I will continue to do so in which ever form helps the most.
And a question for all, I know there is some way I can link a WordPress post to a forum to start a thread, anyone know how or what the plugin is?
I have received many responses to my original post to the ActionScript 3 code for loading external text or HTML, and a user encountered a situation loading the data across scenes. So I thought I would go back and revisit the code, this time making it modular with a class.
Here is the link to the code samples for download and walk through.
I have uploaded a new set of sample files and example code for a more elaborate timer class that will countdown from a specified number of minutes or seconds and display the current count in a text field.
The class file and code is in ActionScript 3, rather than repost the code visit the post by clicking here.
Firstly, to all those at Adobe who are being laid off I want to say thank you for all your hard work. With a special thank you to Mike Downey who I pretty much consider the guy who ‘made’ the Flash platform what it is and helped get the community behind the technology. I have used Adobe products daily for many years now and owe a lot of my skills and career to their tools enabling me to do what I do.
So I read somewhere (probably numerous places on RSS feeds) that Adobe blames the lower than expected sales of Creative Suite 4 for the layoffs. Honestly, I can believe that but don’t blame the workers for the marketing department demands. The simple fact is that like the other big software vendors there seems to be a perceived need to release a new version every year (in this case more than 12 months but less than 2 years) regardless of the demand or feature completion.
I have brought the CS4 upgrade, but not because I have a desire to do so, more because of the way older versions like Camera Raw are immediately dropped from the update plan. Understand that I do like many of the new features as my previous posts would show but it is not like I would have to stop work tomorrow if CS4 did not exist.
I consider the following to be reasons why CS4 sales are lower than expected.
1. Economy, that is a given.
2. Price, the Creative Suite is at best $599 for an upgrade.
3. The products are mature and it is harder to put those ‘must have’ features in.
4. Is there really a need for so many versions? Did you not learn from Microsoft and the X versions of Vista disaster. Make the product line simple for people to choose from, two versions are only really needed, web or print.
5. Take 2 or 3 years between releases and really do something impressive rather than just putting in features that made the yearly deadline and make people feel like the price tag is worth the upgrade.
At the end of the day I think software vendors have to learn that people won’t just buy something because they made it (Vista being the perfect example), people are a lot smarter than they used to be and ask themselves if they really need it or if the price tag is worth it.
I used to hate Flash photography but my Canon Speedlite 580EX has made it a pleasure to mess with.
Yup, it drives me crazy too. When developing and testing all the time in the browser Firefox drives me crazy as it seems to love caching the files even though they are newer than the one in the cache, clearly it is as you just published it to test right?
Well thanks to this post on Flex Pasta there is a very easy solution to the problem. A big thank you to Brian for uncovering a solution to the pain.
Adobe has released version 1.5 of the AIR runtime. You can download it from this link. After some initial questions over the speed I have to say that I am now finding myself comfortable using AIR applications, tweetdeck is a perfect example of what can be done, I use it all the time now for my twittering and that today also received an update.
