Two weeks ago me and my fellow co-workers have started our company blog which can be reached at
http://blog.publicis-modem.ch every open source initiative, project or library that we create will be published there.
I might do a cross link to a blog post or even write a little more about it, but I think you should keep an eye over there aswell, we already released two opensource projects (wallaGo and AS3Square) and there is more to come soon, so stay tuned for some fresh content and don’t forget to bookmark a new fresh blog.

… it feels very bad, why? Just to mention a few reasons, the people, the scenery, the people, the snowboarding, have I already mentioned the people?
yep, besides Flash At The Lake 09 there was no conference that I loved so much, It was such an awesome time talking with some great cool people, it was a laid back conference with
lots of time for networking, snowboarding, and simply having fun. Let me recap for your what happened and how I experienced it.

Day T-1:
Yep, I’ve driven up to Stechelberg a day before the Conference officially started together with Mihai Corlan which I had the opportunity of picking up at the Airport and having
a very relaxed drive to the mountains with some very good talks not only geeky but very inspiring and fun. After arriving at the Location, people started to walk in ( there were already a few though ),
and we had a great time getting to know each other and to learn about what others do, very constructive and inspiring, if it wasn’t for the late night obligatory speaker snowball fight at 3am

Day 1:
First day on the slopes, first day of the conference, after a very relaxing snowboarding day with @riccastelhano, @masdennis, @starnut, @johanlopes and @agens as you can see here, the conference started late but very interesting with the opening speech of @mcorlan on Building Mobile Apps with Adobe AIR, followed by @agens speech on Making Flash Games where he showed an awesome ski jump game which attracted a sick amount of gamers, Peter also presented FunGrid an opensource flash game API, almost at midnight @mcorlan had the last speech of the day/night where he showed some great AIR/P2P examples as well some tips & tricks on his session Optimizing your Flash/AIR Application. Same as last night, it didn’t end very early and in this place I would like to thank Otto & and his service for keeping us awake with some booze and especially to stay awake with us at such late time.

Day 2:
Apart from the usual awesome weather in Stechelberg, just have a look at this awful pics, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and if you don’t have enough of it, here the complete Album. Everybody was pretty much on time to attend @masdennis awesome presentation on Messing with Actionscript and the Kinect then as the Dinner arrived, @fcolaco had a surprise prepared for us especially for visitors outside of Switzerland, the local yodeler group made a show for us and you shouldn’t miss this one, The Yodelers at gotoAndSki(); after their show, the conference continued its normal path and @starnut was up on the stage for his talk titled Hot Wireless Data Fudge where he speaks about all kinds of wireless communication while developing for AIR on mobile and on the desktop, again quite late it was my turn to present Developing for TV with AIR, where @fcolaco grounded me for not behaving don’t remember why though but I think it was okay to do so.

Day 3 & Last Day:
Yep, this pretty much sucks, everybody knew that this was the last day of the conference and everyone was sad about it as well, nevertheless, @dctrl @starnut and me decided to have a blast on the slopes and do some snowboarding the last day, which again was wonderful due to the awesome weather in the mountains, this time we had to start a bit earlier as some attendees were living that night.
First of all @trinefalbe stepped up the stage with her talk on Cognitive Psychology in Interactive Design a very very good talk which I really enjoyed and I recommend this one to all of you designing Flash Applications, Websites, or even if you are not a Flash Developer, have a look at it as soon as her video is online. After Trine we had to speed up things a little and instaed of having dinner @riccastelhano was up on the stage doing his talk on Flash + Arduino: a connection with Feelings, again a very inspiring talk with funny moments and great shows, as well it wakened up the electronical guy in me, just need to get my hands on a bunch of boards and start building my own stuff, I think our good friend Maciek “Feel happy like a pig in the mud” Wcislik aka @inoutin had the same thoughts like me.
Last but not least our very own SFUG co-manager @_sandro was up on the stage talking about Advanced Flash Accessibility a great talk as usual and how could it be different, Sandro released a new opensource library called JAcc that will help every flash developer enabling Accessibility in their Flash Projects. That was it gotoAndSki(); was officially over and everyone was feeling sad about it.

At the end it was one of the best conferences I’ve attended in the past, not only because there was some snowboarding involved, no, @fcolaco and @almeidavid_made a great conference in the swiss alps porting the concept from norway to switzerland, I had a blast meeting all these people, which now became friends, I can’t describe well enough how the conference was, I think the best would be to check out the tweets from the first week after the event by then you will be mad that you didn’t attend this event but you will know where you are going to be next year when it’s time for gotoAndSki(“switzerland”); 2012.

Below some of the tweets that I think really explain how the conference was:

I guess good networking is when you think “I miss this guys” instead of just “I made this business contacts”. Damn #gotoAndSki nostalgia…
@fcolaco

Blog: Two thumbs up for #gotoAndSki(‘Switzerland’) http://www.trinefalbe.com/?p=690
@trinefalbe

Walking through the streets of Lisbon. “Need to catch fresh air”, my brain says. I guess it’s a #gotoAndSki secon… http://picplz.com/FvSV
@imhugo

Me too! RT @RicCastelhano: may I return to the Swiss Alps ?? May I, please? Pretty please? #gotoandski aftermath
@jenschr

Somehow I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook,
I mean it’s really cool to catch some friends if you move around the world and you  have a few cool games which I really enjoyed playing in the past, but it’s a pain if you don’t know how to integrate your cool app with Facebook properly I’ve already done some applications on Facebook with the previous API and sadly I didn’t had the time to scroll through the new API and see if it got any better. I’m pretty sure Michael dug the whole Graph API from front to back, left to right. So why not trust him and read the book

I’m really looking forward to it, be sure to come back in a few weeks to read my review, oh and by the way, if you can’t wait for me to review it, why don’t you catch an e-book or hard-printed copy? Click here to order yours right away.

Just 17 more days to gotoAndSki(); the swiss edition in Stechelberg, a good time to present what I’m going to talk about during my session called “Developing AIR for TV”.

During these 45 minutes, you are going to learn how to develop AIR content for Television, starting from a simple videoplayer using the new StageVideo classes (StageCraft) to a simple Remote Controlled Slideshowviewer, up to a P2P multiplayer game which can be played with different control devices like the TV remote that comes along with your TV device or with any Android 2.2 with Adobe AIR powered Device. All these examples and a few more hints on optimization and design considerations are being showed during this session.

I hope to see a bunch of you up in the mountains of beautiful Lauterbrunnen, gotoAndSki(); tickets are limited to approx 100 attendees, and as far as I know there are not much comfort tickets left, so if you want to experience an awesome event with the beautiful swiss alps and a bunch of flash / flex guys having fun in the slopes, then jump right over to the gotoAndSki(); site and book your ticket now.

See you there!
Tiago

• No double unicodes.
• Automatic generation of embed code, easy for you to copy & paste directly into your application.

One thing that I can’t handle for you is to define the source of the font with it’s according fontname as defined in your system, but hey if I find a way around this, I will update it.

And again if you would like to play around with it, here the app. Have fun!

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 Open Source Media Framework went live a few weeks ago with it’s first release 1.0, I already worked with various sprint versions of it, and lately created a final project using OSMF.

Something that I was missing was the capability of displaying a Sprite or Text Element inside a Serial- or Parallel-Element.
So I’ve wrote a simple class named “InteractiveDisplayObjectElementt” that will handle this need:

public class InteractiveDisplayElement extends MediaElement
{
private var displayObjectTrait:InteractiveDisplayObjectTrait;
private var _sprite:Sprite;
 
public function InteractiveDisplayElement( displayObject:Sprite=null)
{
   super();
   this.sprite = displayObject;
}
 
public function set sprite( value:Sprite ):void
{
   _sprite = value;
    updateSprite();
}
 
public function get sprite():Sprite
{
    return _sprite;
}
 
private function updateSprite():void
{
   var sprite:Sprite = new Sprite();
   sprite.addChild( _sprite );
 
   if ( displayObjectTrait == null )
   {
      displayObjectTrait = new InteractiveDisplayObjectTrait( sprite );
      addTrait( MediaTraitType.DISPLAY_OBJECT, displayObjectTrait );
   }
   displayObjectTrait.setSize( sprite.width, sprite.height );
}

Extending the MediaElement class enables you to create a visible displayelement that can be attached to any kind of OSMF container including the serial & parallel elements, this is aswell the class being used for all kind of non-loadable elements.
So basically we are passing a Sprite to our new element to be placed in it, as soon as it’s set we call up the updateSprite() method that will add the passed sprite to the displaylist and assign it to the InteractiveDisplayObjectTrait (class following below)

The second class built was the InteractiveDisplayObjectTrait, this was only to keep the structure and logic of OSMF kind of in “place”, with it you can set the size of the element separately.

internal class InteractiveDisplayObjectTrait extends DisplayObjectTrait
{
  public function InteractiveDisplayObjectTrait(displayObject:DisplayObject, mediaWidth:Number=0, mediaHeight:Number=0)
  {
    super(displayObject, mediaWidth, mediaHeight);
  }
 
  public function setSize(mediaWidth:Number, mediaHeight:Number):void
  {
     setMediaSize(mediaWidth, mediaHeight);
  }
}

With it you are now able to use simple as well complex sprites in your Composition elements, below an example of how I tested the newly built class.

...
var aniHolder:Sprite = new Sprite();
sp.addChild( aniHolder );
var ball:Sprite = new Sprite();
ball.graphics.beginFill(0xff0000,1 );
ball.graphics.drawCircle( 0, 0, 8 );
ball.graphics.endFill();
aniHolder.addChild( ball );
 
TweenMax.to( ball, 2, { x: 400, repeat:-1, yoyo:true, ease:com.greensock.easing.Bounce.easeInOut});
 
var _spriteElement2:InteractiveDisplayElement = new InteractiveDisplayElement( aniHolder );
layout							= new LayoutMetadata();
layout.left = 400;
_spriteElement2.addMetadata( LayoutMetadata.LAYOUT_NAMESPACE, layout );
_pararellElement.addChild( _spriteElement2 );
...

What do you need to know about the code above? Well as you see I’m only creating a red circle that is being added to the aniHolder sprite, with the help of tweenmax I’m animating the circle to bounce left to right and viceversa, then I create a new InteractiveDisplayElement (the class we created before) assign a layout to it and add to the ParallelElement (this could also be a serialelement or a simple mediacontainerSprite).

What I liked most was as expected the live editing feature, you can just select a component which is completely off the stage and align it properly just with a few clicks and at the same time you can test your application by accessing functions that are not even made public.

Guys, you did a wonderful job! Thank you very much for this great app!

For a more detailed list of available videos and more check out this site:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/?sdid=DXGFC

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.

With assql you are able to connect directly to a mysql database without any php / asp scripts running along with your Flex frontend, ok fine probably it’s not a best way of doing it. But I think this is one hell of a good start to speed up AIR/FLEX development in ease.

I’m going to rewrite the basic functionality of my project to include this library and see how it performs and most important if it really works as I hope it does.

I hope that people continue to develop it and that more developers come into the game to enhance this cool project, who know’s maybe Adobe will embed this project into Flex 4?!

By the way speaking about Flex 4, codename “Gumbo” you can preview the upcoming Flex version on http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4 what’s new about Flex 4?

Below Ely Greenfields video showing some of the design features of Flex 4:

Have fun watching and keep an eye on assql