Category Archives: Flash

New Physics Engine in Flash CS5

By Torbjørn. November 4, 2009


Adobe is steadily letting out more details on new features in Flash CS5. In addition to the ability to publish native iPhone applications from Flash, Flash CS5 will also include a new physics engine. In the video above, you can see how they use a single panel to let designers easily add weight and other properties to their objects. Properties from this panel will be used to “pre-record” the movements on the timeline before the movie is published.

I’m eagerly awaiting to see if the ActionScript part of this engine will provide a full-feautured set of physics tools, or if we still have to use 3rd party tools like Box2DFlashAS3 (which is great btw.) for advanced runtime physics.

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Wrapping text around an image or movieclip in Flash

By Mats Mikkel. October 29, 2009

textwrapping01

Text has always been a bit of a pain in the ass in Flash (luckily, Flash CS5 will include the new Text Layout Framework) – apart from the fact that rich text and custom typography isn’t a problem, it’s really one of those areas where plain old HTML takes the win. Still, I just discovered something that makes life a little easier if you’re going to design a text heavy website in Flash – the ability to wrap text around images (and MovieClips) in a fairly easy way – without multiple text fields, split up strings and whatnot.

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Some thoughts on Flash on mobile devices

By Sven. October 20, 2009
iPhone with Flash

iPhone with Flash

Good news for Flash developers around the world. Finally Adobe is pushing forward to get Flash support on all mobile devices. They have now confirmed that the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will be available for Windows Mobile and Palm webOS by the end of the year and early 2010 betas will be available for Google Android and Symbian OS. There is also a plan to bring Flash to the Blackberry, but there is still no time frame for this beta announced just yet. So what about iPhone? Well, unfortunately there is no immediate solution to run Flash on the iPhone.

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Adwords don’t like Flash’s Math.random()

By Torbjørn. September 16, 2009

gawAfter creating Flash ads for Google AdWords, I think I have stumbled upon some tips that will save other developers from a lot of debugging. Browsing Google’s AdWords documentation, I found these basic requirements for Flash ads:

Flash ads must be 50K or smaller in size and utilize Flash versions 4 – 8. All Flash ads should support the clickTAG variable.

Even if my ads met these requirements, they would not get accepted by the upload tool. The error message I got was “An error occurred. Please try again later”. Thank you. Very helpful!

I started eliminating code, and finally after removing all references to Tweener, it worked! After some more searching, I found another page called Follow our requirements for Flash image ads. It seems the Tweener package includes calls to Math.random(), and by Google’s second requirements page, random numbers are strictly forbidden.

The lesson is: Even if you have found some requirements, it doesn’t mean you have found them all. And please stay away from Math.random(). :)

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Fade dynamic text without embedding the font

By Sven. June 3, 2009

I recently learned a technique that I appreciate a lot. A small and very easy solution, which documentation is very well hidden. My initial problem: Fading a textfield (using its Alpha values) without needing to embed the font. Having a Flash solution that should work with many languages, and in my case with Russian characters. Until I had to take the Russian characters in mind I embedded the fonts and everything was fading nicely. But when I chose the Russian language no text appeared at all…

After googling the web for a while, looking for workarounds I finally found a great solution. Setting the BlendMode on the textfield to BlendMode.LAYER will do the magic!

myTextField.blendMode = BlendMode.LAYER;

The image slideshow displayed on http://www.visitnorway.com now uses this solution and should be working good on all languages.

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…but Director wasn't dead!

By Trond. April 8, 2008

Everybody has written Director off for the past two years. “It’s dead and buried” we’ve been chanting. Well then, prepare for a miracle, because Director has arissen from the dead and has just been re-launched in a version 11.

Features include support for all known and unknown media formats (videos, images and audio), a brand new 3D engine with physics subsets, Lingo is “gone” and replaced with JavaScript as main scripting language, text-renderer, a brand new interface and of course a vast selection of new Xtras (plugins).

Director 11 is not a competitor to Flash due to the lower penetration of the ShockWave plugin (4,5 MB). However, it sails ut as a competitor to AIR, and a serious one as many of the new Xtras are certified with Vista and OSX. Many of the new Xtras have capabilities far beyond the AIR environment.

Adobe is pinpointing the game-industry as well as the traditional video and e-learning markets with this new release. Personally I see it as an actor on the application-market for specialized task-applications as well.

Check it out here.

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Tamarin

By Trond. April 3, 2008

At the moment Adobe is lending both manpower and knowledgde to the open-source project called Tamarin. Tamarin is an attempt of creating a new OO-based JavaScript 2.0 standard up and running. Since both JS2.0 and Actionscript will be based on the ECMA-262-v4 standard it’s easy to understands Adobe’s “goodwill” regarding this project. (Erh… future incorporation of whole or part of Flash Player (AVM2) into browsers, for instance)
However, Tamarin is a joint venture by Mozilla, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Opera etc and will likely pass as the future standard for the long awaited JS2.0 standard. Tamarin will be licenced under GPL, which means free use without modification.

Tamarin will be deployed in Firefox and SpiderMonkey as of autumn 2008, and the rest will follow.

Further reading: Tamarin FAQ

T:)

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