The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 16h of March 2010 with an awesome topic on restfulX by Rafael Beck and a very interesting and for sure useful talk about performance tweaking by Sandro.

Topic 1: RESTfulX - Flex on Rails  (Rafael Beck/ 19m2.ch)

Topic 2: AS3 Performance Tweaks ( Sandro Ducceschi / Liip AG )

When: 16. March 2010 / 19:00-22:00
Where: Liip AG, Feldstrasse 133, 8004 Zürich

More information about the single topics  can be found here: http://www.sfug.ch/?p=162

More information about SFUG can be found on:
Adobe Groups
SFUG Site

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 18th of February 2010 with a great talk by Mich Heimann on AS3Signals, a new Event System created by Robert Penner, its an alternative approach to the current Event System inspired by C# Events. Last but not least we are going to launch our first Actionscript Code Battle where the aim is to find and discuss various solutions to a given problem

Topic 1: "AS3 Signals  - A new Event System" (Mich Heimann / indieas.org)

Topic 2: Actionscript Code Battle

When: 18. February 2010 / 19:00-22:00
Where: Publicis Werbeagentur BSW, Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich
More information about the single topics  can be found here: http://www.sfug.ch/?p=157

More information about SFUG can be found on:
Adobe Groups
SFUG Site

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 15th of December 2009.

Topic 1: "First Steps with Pixel Bender" (en) - Tiago Dias (Publicis Werbeagentur AG)

Topic 2: "Interactive Spaces with Adobe AIR and Bluetooth" (de) - Andreas Lorenz (dctrl - interactive media GmbH)

When: 15. December 2009 / 19:00-21:30
Where: Publicis Werbeagentur , Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich
More information about the single topics  can be found here: http://www.sfug.ch/?p=141

More information about SFUG can be found on:
Adobe Groups
SFUG Site

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 next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 17th of November 2009 with 2 interesting topics. As usual the first topic will be technology driven while the second is showcase directed.

Topic 1: Showcase: "Lernfragen 2.0"  (Michel Wacker / Liip AG)

The "Lernfragen 2.0" aka the "Frageplayer" project is a Flash presentation layer for the open source Learn Management System Moodle developed to bring a more visual learning experience to the user.

The aim of this rather complex Flex project was to seperate code as much as possible from design profiting from Interfaces and Flex modules. This approach allows using the same logical core for multiple projects that could be skinned very independently from a designer.

Topic 2: State of Mobile in the Adobe Ecosystem (Weyert De Boer, nothing)

In October some exciting new mobile products and news has been shared with the world during the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. Such as, the availability of Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices, on devices like the Palm Pre, Android and Symbian. And the impressive upcoming feature for Flash CS5 that allows you to build native iPhone apps by leveraging the Flash platform engine. Also information has been shared about Flex for mobile and AIR for mobile.

In this session, we dive into the depth of what Flash has to offer on mobile platforms today and in the near future. Weyert will show tips and tricks about how to optimize Flash content for mobile devices and cover questions like what are the exciting changes in the Flash Player 10.1 compared to Flash Lite 3.1? At the end we will raffle a copy of FriendOfED's latest Flash mobile book AdvancED Flash on Devices.

When: 17. November 2009 / 19:00-21:30

Where: nothing GmbH, Kirchstrasse 175, 3084 Bern (map)

Connect URL: If you are not able to attend the meeting in person, don't be afraid. We are transmitting and recording the complete event through Adobe Connect, you can enter the room 15min prior to start. http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/r20345015/

More information about the single topics  can be found here: http://www.sfug.ch/?p=137

More information about SFUG can be found on:

Adobe Groups

SFUG Site

Mondays Keynote

http://max.adobe.com/online/keynote_monday/

Tuesdays Keynote

http://max.adobe.com/online/keynote_tuesday/

Some of the sneak peeks also showed on youtube a while ago, so.. go search for them and be amazed about what could be coming up

Twitter Wall @ Adobe MAX 2009

Normally you would use the yourTextField.setSelection(startIndex, endIndex); method, but like I said before that doesn't really work very well.

You just need to set the focus to the textfield and then set the selection:

Example: (assuming you have a textfield called "tf")

....
tf.stage.focus = tf;
tf.setSelection(0, tf.length);
...

And that's how you solve the textfield.setSelection() problem

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 18th of August 2009 with 2 showcases.

Showcase 1: Talkmaster, Brand Visualisation  (Marcel Vogt/ Publicis Modem)

Showcase 2: Typefinder -   (Philippe Läubli / Software Entwickler, Interaction Designer)

When: 18. August 2009 / 19:00-21:30
Where: Publicis Werbeagentur BSW, Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich (map)

More information about SFUG can be found on:
Adobe Groups
SFUG Site