Finally got Flex setup to publish out as player 10 and started looking through the documentation. Some really key things are now available. File I/O and pixelbender give the option to make some really serious apps that rival their desktop counterparts. I’m really looking forward to building out some stuff for free sound collective that manipulates sound at runtime. It seems like Adobe knows how to keep it rolling. Give it out slowly so the masses have a bit of time to digest, but dish out just enough so that developers stay interested.

One of the nice things about flash has always been the ability to get something up and running quick and dirty like. I’m not sure why I always loved ascii generators, but I do and one of the designers at work has been talking about ascii stuff so I decided to build one out. 15 minutes later I had one up and running. I do wish flash was a little faster sometimes, as I can’t get quite as high of a sample rate as I’d like for a full screen experience, but overall it does pretty good. I am guessing pixelbender will really help with this kind of stuff. You can grab the class here

Danny Miller wrote a great little class called EventManager. If used properly it keeps track of event listeners and their relationship to objects, easing a major pain point in AS3. Working at an ad agency it is hard to expect freelancers who are killer at scripting animation to create cleanup code for all of their clips. I have tried a lot of strategies for getting loaded clips to load and remove properly but I feel like it has thus far required a lot of micromanagement. Being able to pass off this class as part of the shared shell package removes all of that. I can just request that all event listeners are added via the manager, then cleanup can stay in the shell freeing up phone calls and giant error logs in the debug player.

After fiddling with AIR a little bit I decided to look at another option: zinc. This thing rocks. I had a standalone up and running in no time at all, and best of all it does not require an installer to run your swf. I really think that there is real value here. Having access to the mac shell and file system with no need for an installer is pretty darn handy, it also is probably the make or break of getting a widget on a users desktop. This will come in super handy for all kinds of things from mp3 players to rss readers.

All I did was make a little flash app that loaded an xml file and some images of all the employees at my job. Then I opened up zinc and made a new file with the .swf. There are good deal of settings but the transparent window stuff is the part that was immediately appealing. The only drawback I saw is that you only seem to be able to set transparency on mac via a color channel. That makes for only being able to have solid alpha transparency. Hit publish and you have your app up and running. This was real chore trying to achieve with AIR and CS3 although it is probably easier with Flex Builder. The tutorial I saw used stylesheets.

Was wrestling around with papervision and issues with the clickable objects not updating in the interactive scene manager unless the mouse was moved. Did some internet searching…. DOH! There’s a newer nicer version of papervision3d called great white. I kinda thought that folder was just an example of how to build their frontpage ocean scene. This solves a bunch of issues with interactivity and seems faster. If you grab the latest subversion release you’ll notice it in the branches folder under great white. There’s alot an effects folder that is looking kinda interesting.