Monthly Archives: March 2010

9
Testing the iPhone packager in Flash CS5

By Sven. March 24, 2010

Flash iPhone App
A while ago I joined the Flash CS5 pre-release program eager to test the iPhone packager that there has been so much fuzz about. After downloading the latest beta version of the Adobe Flash CS5 I started with some small and easy tests, to test the performance when running a Flash solution on an iPhone.

My first App consisted of an image of the iPhone “homepage” with some basic touch-behavior. Tapping the left side would make the image spin, rotating the Y-axis 180 degrees (.rotationY). Tapping the right side would spin the image the other way, while tapping on the top or bottom the image would rotate the X-axis (.rotationX). I used the Tweener-class to animate the rotation, using a “easeOutElastic” transition effect. The animations where of course quick and responsive on my computer, but how will the iPhone react to this? I worked very fine indeed. I tested on a iPhone 3GS and my old 3G. Both reacted as quick and responsive as it did on my computer. Nice! But hey, this was very basic…

I expanded my tests by using the new Accelerometer Class in AS3, making the image change its rotation-parameters according to how I held my iPhone. This also worked very well and my belief in the Flash iPhone packager continued to grow.

Time to build a real App!
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Posted in Flash, Front-end, Mobile | 9 Comments

On how to play HTML5 video

By Jørn. March 23, 2010

The movie playing on mobile devices

Most web developers agree that the ability to play video on webpages is a must, however the jury is out on how these videos should be played. I’m of course referring to the HTML 5 video format controversy. Throw FlashPlayer into the mix and you’ll end up with a humongous fight leading fast to nowhere. Based on this, focusing on finding a solution, I tried to piece together a player using both HTML 5 video, and FlashPlayer for less capable browsers like Internet Explorer. You can find a demo alpha version of the player here: http://makingria.com/demo/html5/videoplayer/

Browser support

The player supports the following browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 7 (FlashPlayer, H:264 video)
  • Firefox 3.6 (Native playback, OGG Theora video)
  • Google Chrome and Apple Safari (Native Playback, H.264 video)
  • iPad and iPhone (Native Playback)
  • Opera 10.5 (Native playback, OGG Theora video)

How to build it

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Posted in Flex, Front-end, HTML, JavaScript, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

1
Hardware accelerated SVG in IE9

By Helge. March 18, 2010

Microsoft has released an early preview of their upcoming IE9. Be sure to check out the new features at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive

One of the great news is the native support for the vector graphics language SVG.
SVG 1.1 became a W3C recommendation already back in 2003, so it’s about time we developers can start use this great technology.

Speedy performance

IE9 uses the GPU for graphic rendering through DirectX, and this gives good performance, currently beyond what all other browsers can perform.

Currently scores 28% in test

In this earliy build, only some SVG functions are implemented. This results in poor rendering of more advanced SVG files. See the SVG test chart where IE9 Preview 1 gets a score on 28% at http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php
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Posted in Front-end, SVG | 1 Comment

Flex 4 SDK

By Krzysztof. March 9, 2010
Flex 4 Gumbo SDK (download) is a next major step in evolution of Flex. Lately subsequent versions of Silverlight have offered some nice features which was absent in old Flex 3, and there was a necessity for Adobe to keep up (or even take over) with it’s biggest competitor.
Flex 4 introduces a bunch of new features, in my personal opinion the most important are:
  • new set of skinnable Spark components and skinning architecture which leads to better separation between data and view
  • introducing FXG declarative syntax for defining graphics
  • two way data binding

But if you want to explore full list of changes and improvements to framework, there is a “Flex 4 features and migration guide”, which could give you more information about it.

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Posted in AIR, Flex, Front-end, RIA | Leave a comment

Flash Builder – revolution or evolution

By Krzysztof. March 8, 2010

Flash Builder

Flash Builder (which is a succesor to Flex Builder) is currently avialable in beta 2 version for some time now. Since Adobe is still postponing release date of final versions I decide not to wait any longer and try to grasp it’s new features in some application more complicated than samples provided in tutorials that could be found around the webAfter dowloading and installing application we get 60 days of evaluation period, but it can be prolonged using valid Flex 3 license number.

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Posted in Flex, Front-end, RIA | Leave a comment

1
Sizing text AND elements relatively using CSS

By Torbjørn. March 2, 2010

Alternative title: What I’ve been doing is wrong

Different browsers have different “default” styles, which makes it a challenge to even make text appear the same way across all of them. When you want to accomplish this, there is a well known CSS trick that I’ve been using for a long time: Read More »

Posted in CSS, Front-end, HTML | 1 Comment