AS3 Apex

If you have ever seen my blog gfxcomplex.com, I have been writing about amfphp vs ZendAMF for some time. I have some opinions about how amfphp was left to fall apart in the shadow of Zend AMF, but I shall leave that to my own blog to go into details about that. Besides that I have some good news, there looks to be a new group of people dedicated to bringing life back into amfphp. I’m not sure who did this but there is a new release of amfphp 1.9 uploaded today 2-2-10.

I have not yet looked into it to see what has changed, I would hope the patch to the regular expression problem that newer php versions caused. It feels good to know there are people still hard at work with amfphp, it has always been a good solution for flash to php.

Today at vimeo there was a blog post that stated that vimeo had launch a new video player via  html 5 support that did not use the flash player.  For the most of only a few of the newest browsers are supporting html5 so there was a few people complaining that they could not see it working. But the thing that bothered me was the general resentment people had towards the current flash based video player.  Now I don’t know about you, but the flash video player that vimeo currently uses was the thing that interested me the most about vimeo. Strangely, I was the first person to post a comment in support of the current flash player which caused a few people to replay with negative remarks.  The part of that being “strange” was the blog post was immediately removed right after that even though there was a fairly large number of comments in that blog post.  Was the removal due to the large amount of flash bashing? or perhaps due to complications that may arise  from insinuating that they would be doping the flash based video player in the near future? I can’t really tell you one way or the other, but this is a disturbing trend that I’m seeing more and more as fanatics state that html 5 will in some way be the death to flash.

Edit: So it would look that the blog post is still there, but because of some bug it not showing up all the time.

In this months issues of FFD there some in site into the export for Iphone.

Enjoy a free copy at.  http://ffdmag.com/download-1-2010

Please come and join us online for an intro into the Gaia framework .

http://www.as3apex.com/meeting/an-intro-into-the-gaia-framework-for-flash-online-meeting/

The guys over at precentral.net have been reporting live on the news coming out of  CES 2010 Event. One bit of info I thought you out there who own a Palm pre would like to know is that you will be seeing a new app in your app catalog for the Flash Player 10.1 which is gonna change things in a big way for mobile devices and what you can do with them.

Please join me in a Connect Pro Meeting.

Meeting Name: An intro into the Gaia Framework for Flash
Summary: I will introduce you to the Gaia Framework for flash.

For you out there who does not know what the Gaia framework can do, this will be a great intro for you. I will show you how to define a site xml that will generate all your flash file you will need for you and how to use the custom events in gaia to have a working navigation with current page nav highlights. In short we are gonna build out a simple full flash site.
Invited By: Josh Chernoff (josh@gfxcomplex.com)
When: 1-9-10 at  2:PM
Time Zone: CST

To join the meeting:
http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/as3apex/

—————-
If you have never attended a Connect Pro meeting before:

Test your connection: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/common/help/en/support/meeting_test.htm

Get a quick overview: http://www.adobe.com/go/connectpro_overview

Adobe, the Adobe logo, Acrobat and Acrobat Connect are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

Flash is about to change things again very soon with the release of CS5. I’m sure you have all seen the Iphone export for flash, but did you know that the palm pre will be one of the first to support Flash player 10.1 in it’s full version?

With a new year comes new opportunity, goals and decisions. One of my goals is to show st.Louis as many of the possibilities that the flash platform has to offer. Become an active member of our group to learn what flash can do for you and your goals in 2010. Beyond just networking with your peers, you will see new ideas and standards that will help you to become a better Flash developer or designer. Our group has monthly meetings and many great give-a-ways from books to full software packages. We are supported by Adobe and are the first to get info about all that is flash. We are currently looking to better accommodate meeting times, Please take a moment to select a day of the week and time that fits your needs the best. Our meeting are normally the second Saturday of the month but may change depending on the requests of our members.

Please take our quick servery.

Due to very poor attendance (“only 1 person for the last 4 meetings”), I am shutting down the usergroups face to face meetings  until there is at least 3 rsvp’s submitted to this post.

please include your name, time and day of week  you can attend meetings.

If there are enough requests I will hold face to face meetings again. Until then I have plans to hold Online meetings.

- Josh C

we will be hosting the next St. Louis meet up at Urban Eats at 5:pm Saturday October 10th.

Robert Penner, the god father of the tweening equations is jamming the air waves with his new signals library. The new library is aimed at providing a better event dispatcher/handler system for AS3. The library was inspired by C# events and signals/slots in Qt.

Here’s some basic info about the library.

The Concept

• A Signal is essentially a mini-dispatcher specific to one event, with its own array of listeners.
• A Signal gives an event a concrete membership in a class.
• Listeners subscribe to real objects, not to string-based channels.
• Event string constants are no longer needed.

Features

• Remove all event listeners:
• Retrieve the number of listeners
• Listeners can be added for a one-time call and removed automatically on dispatch:
• Any object type can be dispatched to listeners. But using IEvent will enable full functionality.
• A Signal can be initialized with an event class that will validate event objects on dispatch (optional):
• If the Signal’s event class is specified, each listener is checked on add() to ensure it declares at least one argument.
• Signals can be placed in interfaces to indicate the events dispatched by a class.
• Events can bubble recursively through .parent independent of the display list (experimental).
• Code was developed test-first.

I know that people are creatures of habit, so it will be interesting to see if this takes off as a new standard. Even still Penner has been very open to discussion about the library on his blog and has already made adjustments to signals from suggestions by the community. I’m very excited to see what comes from all this good hard work.

Any day that smart people work hard to make good reusable code for the community is a good day! So here’s to you Penner/Community – Cheers!

http://code.google.com/p/as3-signals/