Labs

Just a reminder that there's lots of APIs out there already for your AS3 (and even AS2) needs.

Adobe's APIs contain corelib, mappr, flickr, youtube and more.
Yahoo AS3 APIs
ebay API

Know some more good ones? Post 'em.

Kind of a Holy-Grail for Flash Developers is to be able to turn a timeline animation into code and reuse the code on other graphic elements. Flash CS3 has taken a nice first step with the Animator class (fl.motion.Animator). Animator is used to tween an object via xml. The xml can be written from scratch (not so much fun) or generated from a timeline tween (much fun!!) via the Comands (menu) --> copy motion as xml.

Apollo has officially been renamed AIR. Now you want to know how to use Flash CS3 to begin developing AIR applications. After downloading the SDK you will notice it does not contain a global.swc file as the previous version did. Reading the docs would make you think you can only use an HTML editor or Flex 3 to develop for AIR currently. Fear not fellow Flashers help is on the way.

Adobe has released a bunch of new stuff on their labs site today, including the first public beta of the Apollo runtime and SDK. This includes the announcement of the official name being changed to Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR.

Also released are betas of ColdFusion 8, Flex 3 and the next Flash Player upgrade.

Check out the TextMate AS3 Bundle from chromaticrain. Just download the Bundle, and dump it in "/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles". Don't forget to set the language menu (at the bottom of the Textmate window) to "Actionscript3."

If you open the Bundle editor you can drag all your favorite commands and code snippets from the old AS2 Bundle or make new ones. Click on the AS3 Language Bullet (The one with the big "L") under the "Actionscript3" folding menu and you can add your own custom class names. This will make TextMate color them like all the native AS3 classes.

I'm going to share a simple test I did to find out what order ActionScript is being executed.

Here's the game plan. I've created two classes called MyClass and MyDoc. MyClass is linked to a symbol I'm placing on the stage once through timeline and once through dynamic instantiation. Remember to dynamically place symbols in ActionScript 3 we need to associate a class with the symbol. MyDoc is my Document class. I'm also placing ActionScript traces in each of the timelines on their respective first frames.

I will be speaking at FITC Chicago next Friday, June 8th. There is an incredible lineup of speakers from the design and tech worlds including my friends Mike Downey (Adobe), Bradley Grosh (GMUNK), Grant Skinner, and Marcos Weskamp, to name a few.

IBM recently published this article by Jeff Vogel, which I think is a must-read for any aspiring Flash developer.

As Jon Grden points out, the market is red hot for ActionScript developers. One of the fundamental issues with Flash developers is that more often than not we don't come from computer science or engineering backgrounds. Most of the programmers here have a significant background in the arts, which oftentimes seems to be at odds with the procedural world of programming. As a result, a lot of these developers spend their time spinning wheels on how to write the most efficient code possible.

The IBM article describes the exact sort of issues ActionScript developers struggle with. It provides practical, useful tips that will make a better programmer out of you. The best part about it? None of...

Coming off the heels of this blog post about dynamically attaching code to frames in AS3, I decided to foray into ending the use of timeline code altogether.

I failed.

But I did come up with a handy dandy script that will certainly come closer.

Click on for the script and documentation.

Seems the community is getting together to show off some Apollo apps:

http://www.brandonellis.org/?p=39
http://www.apolloapps.com/
http://www.apollohunter.com/