The Connect recording of our session can be found here http://bit.ly/dbZBIz

Enjoy and see you next time at the 35th SFUG Meeting on the 25th of May 2010.
Details and topics will be announced soon.

So let’s begin from the ground up, your goal is to resize and save the newly resized files back again into a jpeg. Sounds easy?
It should be but it isn’t!!

First of all I have to tell you that I began my project with Zinc 3.0 which supports bytearrays, it was really cool to work with it, as I was able to use the JPEGEncoder class that anyway writes bytearrays.

Let’s look at the methods available:
setData();
writeData();
setDataBA();
writeDataBA();

You would achieve our goal somehow like this:

var bmp:Bitmap = DisplayToBitmap.draw(bSprite, false);
var bmd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(bmp.width, bmp.height);
bmd.draw(bmp);
 
var jpgEnc:JPGEncoder = new JPGEncoder(85);
var jpgStream:ByteArray = jpgEnc.encode(bmd);
 
var jpgPath:String = persFolder + "\\My Pictures\\myScreensaverThumbs\\" + _arrayCCopy[i];
 
_convertedArray.push(jpgPath);
 
mdm.FileSystem.BinaryFile.setDataBA(jpgStream);
mdm.FileSystem.BinaryFile.writeDataBA(jpgPath);

But since I had to use Zinc 2.5 because of performance problems with the application, guess what? You don’t have the possibility to write a bytearray down to the harrdisk with the writeDataBA() method. So how the heck are you going to write a jpeg?

Let’s look at the methods available:
setData();
writeData();

Yeh, it’s not much, and yeh it didn’t change a lot in Zinc 3.0 besides that you can write Bytearrays.
So what you have to do is basicall write HEX code or Pipe ( | ) delimited strings, do that on a few dozen images and you can go get a cup of coffee and when you back it might be done by then.

var bmp:Bitmap = DisplayToBitmap.draw(sp, true);
var pngBA:ByteArray = PNGEncoder.encode(bmp.bitmapData);
MonsterDebugger.trace(this, pngBA);
var dataString:String = "";
for(var i:uint=0; i < pngBA.length; i++){
    if(i>0)
    {
	dataString += "|";
    }
    dataString += pngBA[i];
}
mdm.FileSystem.BinaryFile.setData(dataString);
mdm.FileSystem.BinaryFile.writeData(persFolder + "\\My Pictures\\myScreensaverThumbs\\" + _arrayCCopy[v]);

Now that you know how to to handle this, let’s think about  a few methods that Zinc 2.5 API provides you with:

bmpToJpg();
Nice little function but it only works if you have .bmp’s on your harddrive, who uses .bmp’s nowadays?

jpgToBmp();
hmm.. sounds better, you can grab a jpeg and convert it to a .bmp file, after that you can use the bmpToJpg() method to save them back, but come on, does that really make sense? After all you are using 2 methods to do a simple conversion and resave.

deleteFile();
Believe me or not, actually it’s quite obvious, you converted a jpeg to bmp and the bmp to jpeg, now you have
1) an original file
2) a bitmap file
3) a converted file
Isn’t that one too much?
Yep, now you have to use the deletefile() method to delete the bmp file which you are definately not going to use.

Now you used 3 methods to accomplish a simple task, that can be done in pure as3 with less lines of code. Now you ask yourself  “Tiago you are talking about Zinc 2.5, that’s anyway outdated” have a look at the methods available for Zinc 3.0. As you see they don’t have a simple “read jpeg / save jpeg” method. WHY NOT?????

But let’s continue, by now you know how to resize and resave images with Zinc 2.5 and Zinc 3.0, but you are probably not only going to convert one single image on the fly, that would be kind of boring no?

Let’s try to get a list of files from a specific directory, to accomplish that we need the getFileList() method, below a simple line on how to use it

var myFiles:Array = mdm.FileSystem.getFileList("c:\\my images\\", "*.jpg");

Sounds simple, you build an array and call the getFileList method pointing to the location you wish and filtering it based on the file ending, at the end you don’t want to get some weird errors because you try to convert a .doc or whatsoever into a .bmp / .jpg

if you don’t believe me, then try this out on your own doesn’t matter which version of Zinc you own

1. Create a folder on your c drive (it’s easier to target then anything else)
2. Drop a few images and rename the filetype of some of the files to .JPEG, .jpg, .jpeg (case sensitive)
3. Run the code above in your project using the path to the folder you just created

Result:
Only the files with the case sensitive .jpg will be pushed into the array, yeh now you know it, this damn thing is case sensitive, so let’s create some more arrays to handle the different filetypes and use some more processing time and memory then needed, the same goes for every filetype you want to push in. In my case I had to get all images with a filetype of (.jpg, .jpeg, .JPG, .JPEG, .bmp, .BMP, .png, .PNG) 8 querys on the filesystem all using the same method, sigh..

Have you ever ran into a Zinc problem before, let us hear your experience with it.

Let’s be fair, Zinc isn’t actually that bad, their API is huge and you can access a whole load of methods that you would never think about, the first time you use zinc and browse through the API you automatically try out the OpenCDTray method, something happens how cool is that?

But let’s start from the beginning.

It was a nice sunny day in Zurich, and I got an assignment to create a screensaver with a shitload of functionality, (read images from a specific folder (user can’t change the folder), resize the images accordingly, resave them again with the new size and settings. read some registry values from the Users computer, and so on.. so I thought, let’s unpack Zinc and give it a try. yes it was the first time I ever used Zinc!
I ran into so many issues / problems / bugs / headaches / sleepless nights that I thought I need to share this with you guys.

1. Zinc 2.5 vs. Zinc 3.0
When you have the choice of using an “old” version against the new version, your guts tell you that maybe you shouldn’t use the new version, stick with the old one which is in use for enough time to get a good resource to get information from.
So I began to develop with Zinc 2.5 after a few headaches and tons of coffee I finally managed to get my screensaver to work, yay. But let’s have a look at the performance, 30% CPU, 40MB RAM.. well not that bad for so many operations and graphical changes. Apparently there were some issues with the performance and resources on the clients environment, so I decided to jump on the new train (zinc 3.0) and guess what. Zinc 3.0 uses 38% MORE resources then the previous version AND I’m still using the same player version and same settings. Hmm.. does Zinc 3.0 really have that many more base code? After a few coffee sessions comparing API’s and looking into their code. NOPE, they only repacked their old code and gave us a few more methods to work with, damn does that really result in 65% CPU and 120MB RAM? sigh… Ok spend another few hours reverting everything back to Zinc 2.5. Nice…

2. Screensaver Dualscreeen
During the course of development the client asked me if the screensaver is going to work on a dual screen system, I knew from my colleagues that Dual screen is not supported with Zinc 2.5, hmm maybe it works with Zinc 3.0? The answer is NO! Starting to wondering why I ever took the step and use Zinc, a working colleague who already worked on a few projects with Zinc, gave me the idea of selecting an Application deployment with 2 windows instead of screensaver settings, that worked out pretty well on the first few tests, both windows were opening fullscreen, and the “screensaver” was running as expected.. BUT… a few tests later the windows stopped responding to my settings what the heck is going on here… ????

3. Competition
Let’s have a quick look at some other products that are able to create screensavers, but sadly there are no other products that can compete against the feature set of Zinc.. so therefore I just have one single software that in my eyes could reach Zinc in a few months of development.

InstantStorm:
Pure SWF to SCR converter with a dozen of capabilities, multiscreen support and I’m not only talking about 2 screens, literally MULTIPLE screens.
Easy to use interface, dozens of settings possibilities like capture of mouse / keyboard events, settings dialog, transparency support, custom kickass installer, multiple swf files for various purposes like widescreen or preview and much much more, this piece of software is FREE the only downside is that you don’t have some kind of API like Zinc does and the flash player needs to be installed in order to run properly something that you don’t need to do with Zinc as it’s being wrapped into their own containers which already contains the flash player.

4. Support / Bugs
Go have a look for yourself on the mdm zinc buglist, you will find bugs that are older then 1 year and still not resolved, let’s take the multiscren issue for instance, instantstorm A FREE tool is able to display your “screensaver” over multiple screens, why isn’t Zinc able to do that as well? The forum is ok visited and that’s it.. I’ve opened a case 4 months ago and I still didn’t get any confirmation that it has ben read by anyone at mdm.

Bottom Line
It was a pain using Zinc, but like I said before if you are dependent on certain functionality then you will have to use it, until someone else hopefully InstantStorm comes up with a new version that can compete with Zinc. Over the course of the next weeks I will try to post some of the pitfalls and solutions that I came up with while working on this project. Stay tuned for more

The SwissFlashUserGroup will be inviting all Flash designers and developers, project managers, illustrators, and developers of all other programming languages to get together in Zurich to share knowledge and enthusiasm about Flash at the conference Flash At The Lake. The conference will be held at the Rote Fabrik right by the lake of Zurich from 26. to 27. June 2009.
During the two days participants will be able to attend presentations and workshops to learn everything they want to know about the development and management of Flash platform projects. Several workshops will give insight into established workflow concepts and the manifold opportunities that have become possible through the application of Flash, Flex, AIR, Open Source, Video and Wii in Flash projects.

Flash At The Lake is an event organised by the community for the community. Next to international speakers of the Flash scene such as Aral Balkan (UK), Peter Elst (BE), Mario Klingemann (DE), Serge Jespers (BE), James Ward (USA) and DeMonsters (NL), there will also be several presentations by local Flash professionals, sharing their experiences with Flash and enriching the conference proceedings.
The conference will be topped off by an open Showcase Night where everybody can show what Flash is really made of: cool projects, fancy designs and ingenious experiments accompanied by groovy music will make sure that visitors will have a fantastic time in the competition for the coolest flash project.

Tickets and further information can be found at: www.flashatthelake.ch

Klok is a wonderful tool that helps you keep track of your time, it’s made for freelancers, individuals, for people that workout on different billable projects. I could even think that it could be used by a small company to track time of their workers.

1. IT’S SIMPLE!
I’ve tested and used a lot of timetracking software throughout the past years and no other timetracking tool was that easy as Klok. Drag & Drop the defined project into the weekly / daily grid and you are done, you can change the time by dragging the top or bottom bar of the entry, done!

2. FLEXIBLE
Let’s say you work on different projects like webdesign, Flex development or Video editing, you never have the descriptions that you really need to comment your tracked hours, Klok gives you the possiblity to create your own Project templates and define subcategories.

3. STOPCLOCK
Wouldn’t it be cool to just track your time realtime, Klok enables you to do that with the help of a simple drag&drop.
Drag & Drop your project or activity to the title bar and Klok stops the time that passes by until you hit the stop button, the entry is automatically created and you can move on to the next project.

4. REPORTING
What’s more important than tracking your time? You would like to BILL your time to your client, Klock does a pretty solid job, you just click on “weekly timesheet” and you can drag & drop the table to your desktop an Excel file is automatically created for you, not enough? Then click the  “Reports” tab and you get a nice pie chart of all the projects that you worked on during the current month, past month or any user defined date range.

Am I completely happy with Klok, well yeh kind of, there are a few bugs and issues that are a bit annoying like for example the zoom slider of the weekly grid, if you work past midnight and the stopclock is running the entry will be closed at midnight and the stopclock stops working. But all in all it’s a great Project and I hope that Rob McKeown continues the development of Klok

You can find Klok HERE

UPDATE: I’ve just seen that Rob has released Klok 1.5 as a beta version, some of the bugs mentioned above that I encoutered have been fixed, which really makes me look forward to this nice little AIR application

I’ve just been interviewed on actionscripthero.org thanks to Pablo & Peter for the interview and for the opportunity to share my thoughts with the community.
Looking forward to an awesome 2009 full of innovation and new interesting projects
yeh I know it’s early for an outlook for 2009 but I’ll be going on holidays very soon, and I will be away for a long time.

You’ll find the interview on the frontpage or on the direct link to the Interview

Let’s do something  against it!!!

ASSQL bases it’s functionality on sockets to access the mysql client port 3306, the flash player sends a request to a socketserver which serves a policy file which is basically a crossdomain.xml with a little bit more information inside. Sadly the applications provided by Adobe and ASSQL are not ready to work out of the box, basically you need to write your own socketserver that serves the aproppriate Policy File, the PHP Daemon solution that is provided on the ASSQL page (http://ammonlauritzen.com/blog/2008/04/22/flash-policy-service-daemon/) is not an option as it needs certain php extensions that are not available on a windows system, apart from that (mt) doesn’t allow any kind of daemons running on their gridservice (gs). As the application that I’m creating is going to be hosted on (mt) for the first few months I had to leave the idea of working with ASSQL on this project. Which now turns me back to AMFPHP.

As said before using the ASSQL library isn’t an option anymore for me (altough I would like to see a proper implemented solution and a well formed documentation on this matter) my next option recommended by Dan aka. PolyGeek was the usage of AMFPHP which I already had a look at but somehow something kept me of dealing with it, anyway last night I promised my self to dive into it and try to wrap my head around it, I was so delighted about it, that I’m spending most of my time now figuring out how this whole thing works and more important what the implementation process for my application will be.
Something that I’ve noticed right from the beginning is the lack of tutorials and articles about AMFPHP 1.9, yeh I know it’s still beta but anyway there should be at least a few good simple examples to bring people up & running with it, a basic hello world example is nice but it would also be nice to see some more complex examples easiyl explained. Over the course of the next weeks, I’ll be consolidating all my functions into AMFPHP services and will try to get as much as I can from it.

What is your experience with AMFPHP? Do you use it with Flex or Flash, how easy was it to gear up and be able to use it on a production environment? Do you have any special sites where you go grab informations about it?

Looking forward to your reactions.

Email is one of the communication methods that had become undispensable in the past years, if you don’t have an email then you old-school.. It helps us communicate with the wide wide world and keep friends, family & clients connected.

Now to the bad things of email:

• Overloaded Mailboxes
• Junk email

just to mention a few..

Ok let me come to the point, during the past 3 weeks  I wasn’t able to reply to emails from my blog visitors, neither from colleagues asking me for help, I was so busy working for clients and for partners that everyone else stayed behind.
The good thing about this whole situation is that I’ve learned a lot of new processes and possibilities to work with, which I’ve written down on my neat new moleskine notebook.

Thanks for hanging around on my blog! I hope you enjoy it in the future as well.

• Papervision3d
• Tweener
• BulkLoader
• boostWorthy

Keep in mind that all credits goes to the project owners, I’m not affiliated in any circumstance and I respect the work that these people have done to the flash community.

If any of the owners of these projects have something against me publishing their docs here, then please let me know and they will be removed instantly.

All in all it was a great week and I finally got the time to sit back for one hour and read through my 743 unread posts on Google Reader. Here a short list of interesting topics/articles:

- Silverlight vs. Flash, yeh the most known words in the blogosphere by today, who’s going to make the race? I’ve found a well written article/review from Doug looking at a few applications created with Silverlight. Honestly that post was one of those I was waiting for. Doug thanks a bunch for the time you spent writing it.

- FlashEnabledblog.com – Became a top rated source for me, Carlos is doing a great job getting the news and awesome tutorials from all around the web, I know how much time that costs, 2 thumbs up for him.

- Scale nine – As I’m in the middle of a “personal” Flex Project I need to get something funky, nice looking and sexy on my RIA, Scale Nine is the place to go. All you Flex / RIA guys go check it out.

- Rob Adams, wrote a very extensive article on the ADC about the concept of designing a Flex Application.

- Thibault Imbert aka. bytearray.org – Thibault wrote a complete Actionscript 3.0 book (in french) and somehow it didn’t get published, after so many hours of work that is definitely frustrating, from the latest post I can see that he might have a chance to publish it electronically. If someone reads this with a greater knowledge of french then mine, feel free to give me an insight as well.

- Igor Costa, “Lots of Free Icons” – Oh my God… Finally a source which I can really use, Igor posted a whole bunch of freeware Icons to use for your web & RIA apps.

Last but not least I was very happy to see that Benjamin Dobler (www.richapps.de) has been featured at the ADC on the Developer Spotlight. Benjamin is one hell of a crazy dude creating very cool applications using the ByteArray functions in Flex / AIR.
If you want to know more about Benjamin’s Applications check out this video Interview with Serge Jespers

Today I’ve been questioned from two friends why I’m using Twitter?
Twitter may seem to you “not geek” that it’s way to tell people what you are doing, (which is true partly) but the really cool thing about it is that you can learn from a lot of twitters around the world, I’m following a bunch of people lately and to be honest you can learn a lot from them, I even considered shutting down my IM since it’s anyway blipping around whole day long and distracting me from work. I’m currently using Twhirl on all my computers and Hahlo.com on my iPhone.
Either if I get a message about a new blog post, or a friend that needs some help on a particular issue, new ideas or just random rambling and yeh… knowing what your friends are doing.

Is it completely useless?? I don’t think so.. For example: Twhirl is a very good example on how twitter can be made cool, no more constantly sign-ins and big ass browser access to view what others are doing, a simple desktop app (Built with Adobe AIR) does it work very good (if not better then the original) and I’ve already seen a few similar clients out there doing the same work.
If you new to AIR, this is your chance to start writing your own twitter client and start learning the dev process of AIR.

At the end to profit from using twitter, you need to follow the right people, being followed is nice, makes you feel popular.. altough it’s not important to be followed, as I said it makes more sense to follow people and learn from them.

What do you think, why are you using Twitter?