I started working with pixelbender and was getting a little irritated with having to write a custom class each time I was experimenting with something on the pixel bender exchange. This gave me a good opportunity to try out the new file I/O capabilities in player 10. I built out a little class that could generate .as files from .pbj files and save them. It’s not perfect. I would like to dig a little deeper and explore parameters a little better, but for what I needed, it saved me a lot of time creating a filter library to mess with. You can grab the source file here

Files are a lot easier to work with in player 10 than I though they would be. Writing to a text file is as simple as fileReference.save(someString, someName) loading is also a lot less painful than I thought it might be. Mike Chambers has written a good getting started guide here.

You’ll need flash 10 to view this:

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.

Just set up the wordpress app on my iphone. Typing on the small keypad is a little slow, but it is a nice option to be able to just jot a bit down on the bus ride home from work. Setting everything up was 0 hassle and the interface is perfectly streamlined. It would be nice to see more of the web taking the iPhone approach of “simple is better”.