New Release on Adobe Labs!

December 17th, 2007 Kyle

Flex 3 public beta 3 available on Labs

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/

Adobe AIR beta 3
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

BlazeDS beta
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/

Adobe AIR update for Flash CS3 Professional beta 3
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Flash_CS3_Professional_Update

Adobe AIR Extension for Adobe Dreamweaver beta 3
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Dreamweaver_CS3_Extension


Animating static text in Actionscript 3

October 29th, 2007 Kyle

So I ran into a little problem today and I thought I’d share it with you guys. I created a button that had a static text field inside of it, then I tried to simply fade the button in and out. This worked fine in my test files; however when I tried to put the same code into my actual application, the fades all failed to work. After beating my head against a wall for a few hours (note to self, get foam padding for walls at office), I finally came upon the source of my problem: a font that I had embedded into my library. I have been forced to embed fonts in my library at publish time (go to your library, then click on the options drop-down in the upper-right and select New Font) due to an error with Flash CS3 / Actionscript 3 not actually allowing you to embed fonts via actionscript (as is stated in all current documentation). So what is happening is this: by embedding the font in my library, it is somehow not allowing any static text fields that use that same font-family to be animated in any way (including fades). My only options were to either delete the embedded font from my library (which resulted in all of my dynamically created text fields that use that font breaking), or to simply use a different font-family for the static text fields. I chose the latter (Tahoma is pretty close to verdana, and at a 10 point font size, you barely notice) as it worked well in my situation. Hopefully this will be fixed with future release/updates to flash, but for now those are the only options I’ve found.. Off to find some advil …


FlashDevelop Syntax Coloring

October 17th, 2007 Kyle

If you haven’t heard of FlashDevelop, you may want to check your pulse, then head on over to flashdevelop.org and download the latest Release. FlashDevelop has become the editor of choice for many Actionscript programmers, offering many great features including code hinting, sytanx high-lighting, firefox style search functionality just to name a few. And to make things even better, it’s FREE!

One issue that many users have run into with this application is changing the color and formatting of their code. Well if you’re one of the people who’ve been banging your head against the wall trying to figure out how to change the color settings to something other than the default white background, then it’s your lucky day! The first thing you need to do is fire up FlashDevelop. Next go to Tools -> Application Files, and look for a directory called “settings” inside the FlashDevelop directory. The two files that you are going to be concerned with are ScintillaNET.xml languages/as3.xml (or as2.xml if you are working in AS2 still). Inside these files you will find all of the properties you will need in order to customize the appearance of your code. I’m including a .zip file which contains the color scheme that I am using, along with some comments explaining which properties do what. Enjoy!

Example Files


Actionscript 3.0 Components in Flash

October 4th, 2007 Kyle

Finally! An article (or rather a set of pdf’s) has been put together discussing the process of creating Actionscript 3.0 components in Flash. Go. Read. Learn.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/creating_as3_components.html