If you get hold of any bugs or issues, please follow the issues link and fill out a bug, I will try to fix it as soon as I can.
Feel free to post a comment, if you think this application is helpful or could be improved.

The first step towards that solution was actually creating the small app posted on my blog called the UnicodeFinder. Parts of the code have also been implemented in this new application. It’s simple but yet powerful, I present you Vinayaka(), an application that hopefully will solve all your font embedding problems in the future, it’s currently in an early stage, there is lot of room for improvement. If you have ideas or find any bugs, don’t forget to visit the Vinayaka’s GetSatisfaction page and leave your note.

First of all, the application can be downloaded as it is, I’m currently not providing any source code, why? Currently it’s a mess, I first need to clean up, refactor and document the code, until that is done, I would like to keep the code to myself, if you want to help me out extending or improving, then simply let me know by throwing me an email or by filling an issue on the Google Project page.

Currently Vinayaka only runs on Windows Systems, I’m publishing the OSX version in the course of the next days, so if you are a mac user please bare with me.

Very important:
I’ll be releasing Vinayaka to the public after my talk tomorrow at the SFUG until then no download version is available.
A specific Product page will also be setup during the next 2 days.

Download:
Please follow the Projects page for downloads and issue trackings.

Below some screenshots, so you at least know what is expecting you .

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 5th of January 2011 at the Publicis Office in Zurich, To begin the new year with a bang, we are having Michael Fretz present his newest project involving Arduino and Android, sounds like fun. Myself is presenting a new tool I’ve been working on called Vinayaka, if you want to know more about it, either pop by on the 5th of January or switch on to our live streaming.

Topic 1: Vinayaka ( Tiago Dias )

Topic 2: Arduino & Android ( Michael Fretz )

When: 5. January 2011 / 19:00-22:00
Where: Publicis Werbeagentur, Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich

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

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 1st of December 2010 as usual at the Publicis Zurich office.
If you want to see a cool multiscreen application running on various devices then pop by and enjoy the evening with us.

Topic 1: Showcase Giroflex  (Marcel Vogt / Tiago Dias)

Topic 2: TBA

When: 1. December 2010 / 19:00-22:00
Where: Publicis Werbeagentur, Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich

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

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 4th of November 2010 with a bunch of interesting topics:

Topic 1: Adobe MAX 2010 review  (Marcel Vogt & Tiago Dias/ Publicis

Topic 2: Android AIR Development ( Sandro Ducceschi & Marcel Vogt/ Liip & Publicis )

Topic 3: Giroflex Multiscreen Case ( Tiago Dias & Marcel Vogt/ Publicis)

When: 4th. November 2010 / 19:00-22:00
Where:Publicis Werbeagentur AG, Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich

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

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 6th of October 2010 with an awesome reivew of this years Flash on The Beach by Sandro and a very interesting and for sure useful talk about Android AIR development by Marcel.
Hope to see you all there.

Topic 1: Flash On the Beach Review  (Sandro Ducceschi/ swfjunkie.com)

Topic 2: Android Air Developement – part1( Marcel Vogt / Publicis )

When: 06. October 2010 / 19:00-22:00
Where: Publicis Werbeagentur, Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich

More information about SFUG can be found on:
Adobe Groups

Simple to use, quickly up and running and all needed “basic” features available.
It’s even a default in OSMF, I actually wonder why no one has written about it yet, it’s really easy to use and you can do all the basic things with it that a videoplayer needs to support nowadays and on top of it, it’s only 10k when compiled.

I’ve been using it for the last 2 projects I’ve made, and I couldn’t be happier, let’s have a quick look on how to use it:

_mediaPlayerSprite		= new MediaPlayerSprite();
_mediaPlayerSprite.graphics.beginFill(0x000000, 1 );
_mediaPlayerSprite.graphics.drawRect(0,0,640,360);
_mediaPlayerSprite.graphics.endFill();
 
_videoElement			= new LightweightVideoElement();
_videoElement.resource		= new URLResource( "pathtoyourvideo.flv" );
_videoElement.smoothing		= true;
 
addChild( _mediaPlayerSprite );
_mediaPlayerSprite.media		= _videoElement;

That’s it, no I’m not joking this is really it, you don’t need anything else to simply play a video,  now you might be asking yourself, well that’s cool but how can I control the playback? It’ easy and very intuitive, basically you only need to access the mediaplayer instance which is integrated into the _mediaPlayerSprite, there all public methods like play, pause, stop, events and so on are available for you to use. take a look at some of the functions i implemented to be able to control videoplayback.

public function play():void
{
	_mediaPlayerSprite.mediaPlayer.play();
}
 
public function pause():void
{
	_mediaPlayerSprite.mediaPlayer.pause();
}
 
public function stop():void
{
	_mediaPlayerSprite.mediaPlayer.stop();
}
 
public function get currentTime():int
{
	return _mediaPlayerSprite.mediaPlayer.currentTime;
}
 
public function get videoDuration():int
{
	return _mediaPlayerSprite.mediaPlayer.duration;
}

See, simple, easy and lighting fast.
But keep in mind that the LightWeightVideoElement has limited support, you can play every kind of flash supported videos, you can do everything a basic player needs to do, but as soon you start using SerialElements, Parallel elements and so on, then you should switch back to the default setup.
As usual you can get all the information and documentation from the official OSMF site.

You might have read on one of my previous tweets, where I was screaming about using “special” characters in Flash, with “special” I mean arabic, cyrillic, hebrew, chinese simplified and traditional, as well japanese.

I know,  I know, there is TLF (Text Layout Framework) that handles the whole text, but I’m talking about embedding the font, did you knew that the complete chinese Unicode range helds something around 20’000 characters? You might think so what? Let me tell you that the complete chinese character range is over 7MB big!!! Do you really want to let your viewers download a 7MB file just for the font? No.

So I’ve created a quick app that will enable you to read out the UTF code from the text you need to use, with it you can specifically embed only the characters you need and take the file size down to a minimum. Now there is only a downside of this method, if the textual content changes a day, you need to again import the new characters.
Apart from that, I haven’t seen any bad things about this implementation.

At the end of this post you will find an useful small tool to get all the needed characters.

As an example below with this line you are embedding a font only containing numerals typing 1234567890 will give you a range from U+0030 to U+0039

Embed(source="font_file_name", fontName="font_name", mimeType="application/x-font-truetype", unicodeRange="U+0030-U+0039,U+002E")]

So let’s assume you would like to write this: “Nemusíte oči vidět, musíte vidění” which means “You don’t need eyes to see, you need vision” and only embed the needed characters, you would embed your font like this

Embed(source="font_file_name", fontName="font_name",  mimeType="application/x-font-truetype",  unicodeRange="U+004e, U+0065, U+006d, U+0075, U+0073, U+00ed, U+0074, U+0065, U+0020,  U+006f, U+010d, U+0069, U+0020, U+0076, U+0069, U+0064, U+011b, U+0074,  U+002c, U+0020, U+006d, U+0075, U+0073, U+00ed, U+0074, U+0065, U+0020,  U+0076, U+0069, U+0064, U+011b, U+006e, U+00ed")]

If you don’t know how to use this kind of font embedding, have a read here:

http://soledadpenades.com/2008/10/21/embedding-fonts-in-actionscript-3-using-flex-sdk/

Test ride it your self and have fun

Last week while working on the interface for my new upcoming library I needed a way to save some data on the users computer, altough I’m working with AIR I could easily save an xml or a txt file to the users local computer, but as soon as I would start writing a pure as3 project I would have to rewrite it again, as I can’t be sure that the client will have Flash Player 10 or even the rights to save to it’s local harddisk, some people working at bigger companies are not allowed to save anything to their local harddisk due to security rights.

The solution for this is simple yet effective, you need to use SharedObjects aka. Cookies in Flash.

Shared Objects can do the following:

• Maintain Local Persistence: Saves data locally on the users drive, for example you could save the last application state or the score of the last game, create a local highscore list and many many more applications for local use.
• Store and Share Data on FMS: Basically the same as before, but with the difference that you saving the shared object on a flash media server. Good thing about it, it can be shared throughout multiple computers, the same user using the same application on multiple computers can save its data on a server.
• Share data in realtime: using FMS you can aswell for example save the state of a multiuser application saving the current state of the applcation, every new user will get the current state based on the shared object

More information about Shared Objects can be found HERE

Let me show you a few lines of code and explain what you can do with it.

The most basic example is how to write data into a shared object.

var _so:SharedObject;
_so = SharedObject.getLocal("myLocalData");
_so.data.firstname = "myfirstname";
_so.data.lastname = "mylastname";
_so.data.age = "30";
_so.flush();

In the example above we create a new variable called _so of the type SharedObject, after that we use the getLocal() method to create the shared object, if no shared object does not already exist it will be created. if the call fails or the parameters passed along are invalid, flash throws an exception. Calling the flush() method the data will be saved to the users local harddisk.

Next up lets see how you can read from a persistent shared object.

var _so:SharedObject;
_so = SharedObject.getLocal("myLocalData");
trace( _so.data.firstname); //traces myfirstname
trace(_so.data.lastname); // traces mylastname
trace(_so.data.age); // traces 30

This time we do basically the same as before, but instead of saving data we call data, when calling _so.data.age you are going to grab the sharedobjects property named age which results in 30.

If you rather prefer to save SharedObjects to an FMS, you can use it this way:

var _nc:NetConnection;
var _so:SharedObject;
 
_nc = new NetConnection();
_nc.connect("rtmp://yourFMSserver/yourAppName");
_so = SharedObject.getRemote("myRemoteData", nc.uri, false);
_so.connect( nc );
_so.setProperty( "names", {firstame:myfirstname, lastname:myLastname} );
_so.setProperty( "age", {"30"} );

This time we create a new NetConnection to the Flash Media Server and it’s application, calling the getRemote() method acts the same as using the getLocal() method, but you also need to pass the netconnections URI to be able to save the the sharedobject remotely.
Differently from the local version we use the setProperty() method to save data on the remote Shared Object.

These are the basics for handling Shared Objects, if you have any further questions just drop me a line and I might be able to help you out.

The next SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) takes place on the 20h of April 2010 with the long awaited talk by Sandro about performance tweaks in AS3 and last but not least myself and Marcel Vogt are showcasing two demo apps we built using the the megaphone platform.

Topic 1: AS3 Performance Tweaks ( Sandro Ducceschi / Liip AG )

Topic 2: Megaphone (Tiago Dias & Marcel Vogt / Publicis Werbeagentur BSW AG )

When: 20. April 2010 / 19:00-22:00
Where: Publicis Werbeagentur BSW AG, Stadelhoferstrasse 25, 8024 Zürich

More information about the single topics  can be found here: http://www.sfug.ch/?p=168

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

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

I’m getting the server time UNIX formatted, I was constantly trying to convert the integer to a readable date, constantly getting the wrong year (the default or zero unix year is 1970) but aren’t we living in 2009?

So for future reference and for anyone that might be searching for this.

Unix time is seconds based, Flash time is milliseconds based. got it?
So anytime you get a unix time integer you just need to multiply by 1000 to get the correct time for your Flash project.

Example:

GOOD CODE

curDate                = new Date(Number(dateXML.int * 1000));

BAD CODE

curDate                = new Date(Number(dateXML.int));