Flash in PSP

A great article by Jeff Nuzz about the Flash Player and game development using Flash in PSP for all PSP users who loves Flash.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/articles/psp_games.html

Flex 3 beta is out

Adobe released Flex 3 public beta on labs. The major changes in this version are

• Support for the new Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) (formerly code named Apollo).
• Code refactoring.
• Memory and performance profilers.
• SWF file size reduction through persistent framework caching.
• Advanced datagrid.

Know more and download it from here.

Trim class for trimming strings

A simple Trim class that I always use for trimming strings in Flash. Put this class in the classpath of flash (Normally in Windows: Hard Disk\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\language\Configuration\Classes) and you can call Trim.exec(string) whenever you wan't to trim any string.

class Trim {
public static function exec(str:String):String {
var j:Number = 0;
var strlen:Number = str.length;
while(str.charAt(j) == " "){
j++;
}
if(j > 0){
str = substring(str, j+1, strlen);
if(j == strlen){
return str;
}
}
var k:Number = str.length - 1;
while(str.charAt(k) == " "){
k--;
}
str = substring(str, 1, k+1);
return str;
}
}

Silverlight from Microsoft - A competitive technology to flash

Microsoft says "Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web."

Being in the very early stages, I am not sure how competitive it can be to most widely used Flash. We have to wait and see. Know more about Silverlight.

Flex to be open source

A very good news from Adobe to all Flex and Open-source lovers. Adobe is moving all the development of flex to an open-source model.

Get more details on this from Adobe Labs.

Adobe Flash 9 Public Alpha

Flash 9 public alpha is available for download at Adobe Labs.

This release is an extension of Flash 8 with AS 3 and Flash Player 9 publishing support which enables you to test the AS 3 features.

Flex 2 is out

Much awaited Flex 2 is out and you can get access to it from here.

Arabic to Roman converter function

Anyone looking for Arabic to Roman number conversion function in flash? You can download it from here.

I have written the function as I needed it for my current project and i thought of posting it online if anyone requires it. You can pass the number to the function and it will return the uppercase roman number.

Apollo - Desktop Flash

There is an article on CNET about a project code-named Apollo from Adobe. Apollo will be a desktop application and I guess it is a revamp version of Macromedia Central.

According to Kevin Lynch, chief software architect and senior vice president of Adobe's platform business unit, Apollo is designed to give developers a way to create applications that can render Flash animations as well as HTML and Acrobat files (PDF). That approach preserves the benefits of the Web but allows room for programs that can't be included now, Lynch said.

Read the full article at http://news.com.com/2100-1007_3-6071005.html

Xray - Great debugging tool for flash

Today, I found an excellent debugging tool for flash called Xray. It's available through OSFlash.org, an open source portal for flash projects.

Using this admin tool you can go through all the objects, movieclips, variables, etc and its values in your flash movie at runtime. This works when your flash movie is published in the FlashIDE, run through local flash player, or through web browser. This means that you can debug your application at runtime from its intended location.

The communication between this tool and your flash movie happens through LocalConnection class.

Click here to know more about Xray and its usage. You can also download it from there.

Generating GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) using AS

Today when I was searching the web for a class in ActionScript which generates GUID, I found an excellent class which is the part of ASCrypt library extension from Meychi.com.

I found it very useful for generating unique id's in ActionScrpt. Based on the above extension I combined the required functions into a single class for my usage. So, if you are interested you can download the class from here. You need to place the class in your working folder and say GUID.create() in your code which returns GUID as a string.