Labs

With the launch of the new Big Spaceship site comes a relaunch of our Labs blog, and we have invited our design team to join the party. Joining our posts about code and technology will be insights into our design team's approach, experiments, techniques and, perhaps most important of all, the close collaboration between the two disciplines. Stay tuned, and be sure to update the url for our RSS feed in your reader : feeds2.feedburner.com/bigspaceshiplabsfeed

I am getting excited about FITC Toronto, which is coming up in April. I will be giving two presentations this year: one about BSS during which I will be showing some internal projects and experiments the team has been working on, and I will be moderating a panel about collaboration titled "There is no 'I' in Team ... But There is Meat," featuring some seriously kickass panelists: Stacey Mulcahy (bitchwhocodes), Mathew Ray (CP+B), Dan LaCivita (firstborn), and Ulises Valencia (Grupo W).

Get your tickets now. It's gonna be good.

We were curious if we could run a simple test that quickly compares the new Flash10 3D capabilities and Papervision3D.

We are totally aware of the fact that Flash 3D and all other 3D engines like Papervision3D or Away3D are very different approaches.

The Question is more: Flash10 3D or Papervision3D for simple 3D features on a site?

Our quick and dirty test is to create 1000 rectangles, randomly place them in 3D space, animate it a bit and see what is faster.

Some links I've been exploring this week.


TubeLoc (a mashup of YouTube and LocalConnection) is an ActionScript 3 library that serves as an adapter to the YouTube ActionScript 2 Player API.

Lita - SQLite Administration Tool (AIR)

wonderfl online compiler, code snippets, ActionScript

NY Times Article Search API

GTweenTimeline

The Art of System Tray and Dock Icons

PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone,Android, and Blackberry SDK using JavaScript.

If you have been using ExternalInterface calls to Javascript, you might be noticing some random artifacts popping up on your document using a Firefox 3.0 on a Mac. This is most noticeable when using SWFAddress to handle your deep linking. The problem is not actually SWFAddress itself. The problem lies in altering the DOM Window through ExternalInterface calls.

With Flash CS4 you may have noticed some changes to the Library. Adobe has done a good job with it this iteration notably with search functionality, the ability to drag the column headers to any width and the ever so useful ability to click into the Export field and edit directly the class you are exporting.

Except the last one fails if you are adding the class initially.

UPDATED: The last version had a CS3 icon. Now it's CS4. :)

UPDATED: Another alternative: Setting Flash CS4 to offline mode.


<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject("/upload/2008/12/langref/badge.swf","as3langref","217","180","9.0.41","#000000");
so.addParam("menu", "false");
so.addParam("quality", "high");
so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "false");
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "sameDomain");
so.addVariable("appname","AS3%20Language%20Reference");
so.addVariable("appurl","http://labs.bigspaceship.com/upload/2008/12/langref/ActionScriptLangua geReference.air");
so.addVariable("imageurl","/upload/2008/12/langref/preview.jpg");
so.addVariable("buttonColor","ffffff");
so.addVariable("messageColor","4a8e45");
so.write("as3langref");


(or if you get a stupid download error, downloa d it here)

Dear Adobe,

So I installed Flash CS4 Professional. It's nice. I'm happy. Nice job.

... except for one little thing. Y'see, I'm a big fan of having the Language Reference handy at all times. Constantly. It was great the way it was! Maybe a little outdated, fine, but it worked well. And now you've switched it so it always goes to the LiveDocs -- the latest language reference online. Which bothers me for two reasons.

When the iPhone first came out with an SDK, as a developer I was really excited, but apprehensive as I did not know a thing about Objective C. The first couple of days it seems like you need to be a damn 'wizard' to get anything running on the phone, much less practical code. Documented below are my first steps at porting actionscript code to Objective C. I know it's not the 'magic' solution you were looking for, but give it a chance. It's certainly nothing beautiful and you'll have to forgive any inaccuracies, but it's my first go, so cut me some slack.

Some super early advance notice for a couple of speaking engagements. I will be at the first Flash on the Beach happening on this side of the pond, specifically in Miami. Also happy to be returning to one of my favorite events, FITC in Toronto. Both are in April .. save money! book now!

Here are the Big Spaceship slides from Zanders and Daniels Session at MAX :: The Making of the MAX 2008 Website (20mb).

We used the new Acrobat 9 to create the presentation. An amazing new feature is that you can directly import SWF Files into a page, so all dev examples are fully interactive. Make sure that you have the latest Acrobat reader to view it.

The PDF shows a lot of the design and development process and is pretty much self explanatory. I left a comment on the slides that have additional interactive features.

Have fun.