MIMS’s UPDATE: I’ll be at Flash and the City in May as well! You’ll be able to tell it’s me cuz I look like the picture below and I’ll probably be standing next to Roger.

I’ve oh-so-hastily put up a rather revolting home for the book right here at http://www.actionscriptbible.com/. There are a few small parts missing right now, and it’s ugly, so bear with me.

In any case, whether you loved or hated the last edition of the Bible, I really urge you to at least give this edition a try. I’ve completely overhauled it, rewriting hundreds of pages, and adding onto it so that it’s bleeding-edge fresh for Flash Player 10.1. How fresh is this ish? This fresh, BOOM:

• Vectors: COVERED
• 3d: YES
• Pixel Bender: YOU BET
• Flash Text Engine: FER SURE
• Text Layout Framework: IN THERE
• Multitouch: SO MANY TOUCHES
• Globalization: MAIS OUI!
• Accelerometer: HELL YAH
• Color Correction: SURE!

What else? I’ve toiled to give you the best way to play with example code ever! And by toiled I mean “stood on MASH’s back!” Because every example in the book (save a few that need HTML features or looser security) uses the amazing Wonderfl service! First off, it’s never been easier to run example code. This is what an example looks like:

See, every example has a URL right next to it. This, Example 36-5, links right to http://actionscriptbible.com/ch36/ex5. So if you have the book open, just type in the URL and boom! You’re looking at the code, the example, you can download it, edit it, and best of all participate with the whole world in forking the code! No FTP to hit, no ZIP to download (though that’s still provided if you want), no software to setup… I’m really happy about this part of the book.

Get this; I’ve even put in a UMLesque table of contents, so you can find the chapter for the right class in a glance.

I know most of you readers are advanced AS3 developers and don’t need an introductory text. But if you need to get up to date with the latest Flash Player 10.1 features, or you want a good reference; if you’re coming from JavaScript or PHP or C# or Java; I shamelessly and unsurprisingly recommend my own book. Get it now at Amazon.

I’m very pleased to announce that one of my latest projects has just gone live. The Deepening – Select Your Own Adventure Edition has just gone up on Atom Films. Go give it a look, it’s hilarious.

The video is a Good Cop / Bad Cop action show where you get to choose what happens next. It was created by the brilliant Duncan Brothers who asked me to help build the Flash portion of it. Enjoy!

deepening.atom.com

…

You didn’t read it, did you. Well, it’s basically a very well-formed rant lamenting the sad state of the Flash program (not the platform). There are so many things that needed to be said here. I have been aware of the sorry state of the Flash IDE ever since CS3 came out but never took the time to construct such a compelling article as Kevin has.

ActionScript has matured from a simple frame-based script to a full-fledged language but the Flash IDE remains a glorified animation program (I am reluctant to even call it an ‘IDE’). Most of us who are serious developers are happy to switch to more powerful programming environment such as FlexBuilder, however there are thousands of users who learned programming on Flash who shouldn’t have to switch just because Adobe decided that we’re all either designers or developers. There should be a sense of responsibility to the huge workforce of artisans and engineers who rely on this product to make a living.

On that note, I am very pleased that they decided to change the name from FlexBuilder to FlashBuilder. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been in a scenario like this…

Flash Guy: “Import statements are a pain in the ass.”

Me: “I know. But using FlexBuilder makes it a lot easier because the imports are automated.”

Flash Guy: “But I’m not working on a Flex project.”

Me: *Hand to forehead*

The name FlashBuilder helps to support the idea of the Flash Platform which encompasses many technologies. Danny Patterson has makes some good points on the subject on his blog as well. Most interestingly, the suggestion to change the name of Flash Professional CS4 to Flash Designer CS4.

I think Adobe opened the flood gates to these types of discussions wheen they decided to treat designers and developers as separate camps but I’m glad they’re rethinking their approach.

According to All the latest news the attack takes control of your browser and attempts to download a trojan. Luckily, I clicked that link from firefox on my Mac which, for the time being, is largely unaffected by viruses. After clicking on the link, when i went into facebook, the site seemed to be disabled in many areas specifically, in the help and change password areas. At one point my password was changed and I couldn’t cancel my account or change the password.
I went on with another computer and reported the issue then requested a password change which was sent to my email. I also tried to take any personal info off of my account.
Next, I went through my files for firefox on the affected computer. I went into /Users/mims/Library/Application Support/Firefox. I backed up the contents then threw them away. I also trashed the firefox preferences in /Users/mims/Library/Preferences and the application itself. I downloaded a new version of the browser and installed it and the facebook corruption seems to be gone.
I haven’t heard anything from facebook yet and trying to contact them was a pain in the ass.
Good luck!

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has recently formed a new special interest group for Flash games and Flash in the gaming industry. This promises to be a great resource for aspiring Flash game creators. Check out their Wiki and user groups if you’re interested in the subject.

In addition, I should mention that this is on top of Adobe’s existing program to give free licenses to students; and that you can always build Flex and Flash apps with Adobe’s free Flex SDK and its open source distribution.

Free Licenses for Education and Unemployed Devs

Last night, I participated in the Iron Flash competition at the LA Flash Users Group in Venice Beach. As in Iron Chef (my favourite television show), the participants are all skilled Flash users pitted against one another with the goal of creating something interesting within a strict time limit and featuring a common “ingredient”. In this case, the ingredient was a set of pictures of ‘pucks’, specifically, R. Blank’s dog Puck, Puck the faun, Puck from the Real World, and a hockey Puck. We had 3 hours to make something out of any or all of the pictures. My fellow competitors were Jon Ruppel of Hooky Interactive and Ben McMaster (also at Hooky) who both made some awesome stuff in such a short time. UPDATE: All of the entries have been posted on the LAFlash site.

It was a great experience, and not just because OMG I WON!!!

My entry was a video game featuring Puck the dog. I was considering other physics based games involving the hockey puck and the dog somehow. Then I thought of using the dog instead of the hockey puck and somehow that reminded me of the sport beloved in Canada, Curling! The scoring system is a little wonky but if I may say so, it’s not bad for 3 hours work. Here are screenshots (click to link to the game) along with the source code:

Download the source code

Runtime Environment

SWF Files
Swf files are compressed, multipurpose packages designed to contain the following data: raster and vector graphics, video, audio, text, fonts, animation, and actionscript code. Swfs can be loaded at runtime whenever necessary and can use both static and dynamic linking based upon the compiler settings. The runtime environment uses security sandboxes for loaded swf files. The security settings primarily limit the extent of filesystem access and cross-domain access that swf files can use. Adobe has provided the swf file format spec and has recently provided the FLV video format spec and has declared that they will provide the RTMP spec as well.

Flash Player & AVM2
The Flash Player runtime is a very light-weight, virtual machine and handles system calls. The Flash Player includes both AVM1 (AS1, AS2, for Flash versions 1-8) and AVM2 (AS3 for Flash 9,10+) which processes compiled Adobe Bytecode (ABC). The term AVM stands for “ActionScript Virtual Machine”*. The Flash Player uses a Deferred Reference Counting (DRC) mechanism combined with a conservative mark/sweep garbage collector. The Adobe VM uses both JIT compiling and code interpretation and may benefit from compile-time bytecode optimizations based upon compiler input parameters. AS3 computational performance is generally closer to Java than Javascript [source]. The player also maintains a variable framerate that reflects the time consumed for each frame update [source]. Each frame update consists of multiple stages that include internal player processing, rendering, and author script processing. The program framerate is the principle metric reflecting application performance.

Development Environment

Actionscript API
The Actionscript API is divided up amongst the Adobe AIR environment, the Flex environment, and the Flash environment and the Flash Player. The source for all the packages are divided up amongst swc files. Swc files are pre-compiled catalogs of classes and assets. They are similar to swf files but they are used for compile-time dependency resolution. Furthermore, the native swc’s predominantly contain code and not visual assets. An overview of the Actionscript packages is kept up to date in the Adobe Live Docs.

The Flash IDE
The Flash IDE was designed for designers, artists and animators. So, it is equiped with a layer system which reflects the stage display list and a hierarchical timeline which reflects the temporal nature of the runtime. The objects placed on the stage are represented by the timeline and can be “tweened” (using runtime interpolated 2D geometric transformations or custom shape morphs). The same timeline is also used for object creation and destruction. All stage instances are confined to a small set of native data types including: MovieClips, Sprites, Shapes, TextFields, Videos, and Bitmaps. The IDE also has a library that contains source objects for all stage instances and even instances that aren’t used on the stage. Flash projects often have several build targets (compiled swf files) that use parts of the project codebase. After Macromedia was purchased by Adobe, the Flash authoring environment has been updated to provide much better interoperability with the Adobe Creative Suite.

Adobe Flex Builder
Flex Builder is an Eclipse-based Actionscript IDE for writing and compiling swf files. Flex Builder is primarily designed to build “Flex” projects which can be written in an interface tagging language known as MXML. MXML is a declarative XML langauge used to define interface elements in a project. MXML files provide the “view” in the MVC software design pattern. Flex Builder also provides plenty of useful features like code completion, syntax formatting, active debugging, memory profiling, and project building that expose errors and warnings during development time. Because the Flex framework is not bundled with the Flash Player, Flex projects must statically link to all swc assets specific to Flex which amounts to greater than 500kb. This is very unnatractive for most users, thus Adobe has provided means by which the download can be significantly decreased. Flex Builder is also used to deploy applications for the Adobe AIR platform. Adobe AIR is a desktop runtime that combines webkit with the AVM2 portion of the Flash Player. AIR can be likened to a closed source Java SE runtime but provides a smaller learning curve and greater accessibility than what comes with the Java ecosystem.

Compiler
Since Adobe has launched the Flex platform they have provided free access to their Flex and Actionscript compiler and SDK. They have also provided open source projects under the Mozilla public license. The compiler (mxmlc) provides an impressive amount of flexibility and customization for swf compiling. It can be configured with command line options or a configuration XML file.

* correction 09-12-2009, I had previously stated that the term AVM meant “Adobe Virtual Machine”, this is a mixup. It actually means “ActionScript Virtual Machine”. Thanks dbam.

By the way, this tip may be common knowledge to Flash users. I use FlexBuilder almost exclusively these days but recently have had to dip back into the twisted world of the Flash IDE so please refrain from leaving any comments about how I shouldn’t use the timeline.

The Problem

Say you have several different buttons for a site that each look of behave slightly differently but all share the same underlying functionality. In this example, I’ll be using a crude set of video controls. I want each of these different controls to respond to rollovers by showing the label beneath the icon.

Each  control has different icons and text so they’re going to need to be kept in different symbols. One solution might be to try to cram all the icons into one master symbol and change between the different icon frames using code. But that’s sloppy and unnecessary. Another solution might be to create 4 different classes that each implement the functionality or each extend a class with common functionality. This is a much better solution, but requires you to create 4 AS files for what functionally is just 1 type. You cannot use the same class for multiple symbols in your library though. Fortunately, Flash offers another solution that may be a bit less intuitive.

The Solution

If you needed to create the same sort of control components purely using code (using Flex for example), your first step would likely be to create some sort of base class that implements the common functionality of the 4 controls. Here’s an example of a base class for these 4 controls.

package {

	import flash.text.*;
	import flash.display.*;
	import flash.events.*;

	public class AbstractVideoControl extends MovieClip {
		// you'll need to create this text field on the timeline
		// and set the instance name to "label"
		public var label:TextField;

		public function AbstractVideoControl() {
			label.visible = false;
			addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, onMouseOver);
			addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT, onMouseOut);
		}

		protected function onMouseOver(event:MouseEvent):void {
			label.visible = true;
		}

		protected function onMouseOut(event:MouseEvent):void {
			label.visible = false;
		}
	}
}

Note: In many non-ActionScript languages, there is a construct called an “abstract type” which  is simply a base class that cannot be instantiated on its own, only extended. In Flash, proper abstract types don’t exist, but we can consider a class Abstract if it shouldn’t be extended. More on that at Wikipedia.

Next, let’s make our controls extend this class. For each symbol, check the Export for ActionScript box in the symbol properties. Since Flash can automatically generate classes for symbols when an .as file doesn’t exist, the only thing you’ll need to fill in is the Base Class field (later, you can create a class for PlayButton if you need one). Make sure you use the fully qualified name if you’re using packages.

Moar

I found this technique was very useful for when I wanted to animate TextFields on the timeline. Timeline animations, as you probably are aware, only work with MovieClip symbols. That means that even simple animations on text require the text to be contained in a symbol. I created an AbstractTextFieldWrapper class so that I could easily work with animated type without having to create new classes every time the format changes.

package {
	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	import flash.text.TextField;

	/**
	 * This class allows you to create an animated text field on the
	 * timeline and still set the text of the field without creating a new
	 * class for each text field that does this.
	 *
	 * @use In the flash library, create a new movieclip symbol containing the
	 * 		textField. Make sure you set the instance name for the text field to
	 * 		"textField". Make the base class for the symbol
	 * 		"AbstractTextFieldWrapper".
	 * 		In another class, use the type AbstractTextFieldWrapper insatead of
	 * 		TextField for your text field variable.
	 */
	public class AbstractTextFieldWrapper extends MovieClip
	{
		public var textField:TextField;
		public function set text(text:String):void {
			textField.text = text;
		}
		public function get text():String {
			return textField.text;
		}
	}
}

The jolly souls at Big Spaceship have launched a really interesting gallery of gorgeous Flash pre-loader animations. Check it out and submit your own!

I caught word that KitchenSync was used for some of the animation! *Blush*

AS2 EventDispatcher

Note: I just wrote about this in my previous post about converting AS3 to AS2 but I wanted to repost it for easy search purposes.