Aral Balkan on Application Development & Architecture for the Flash Platform.
3dsense Media School people have brought in Aral Balkan to Singapore. He will be giving us a speech coming Sunday. Look at http://pixelreloaded.com/ for more details. Even if you haven’t registered for the event, do come over. On the spot registration will be available, and I will also be there Thanks to 3dsense guys, I met with Aral Balkan and we talked a lot. It was great talking to...
Read MoreBackground becomes black when defining depthColors style for Tree Component.
It used to work fine before (in Flex 2.0). Now with Flex 2.0.1, it renders as shown below when we define depthColors attribute for Tree Component depthColors="[0xFFFFFF, 0xF2F6F7, 0xEDF5F7, 0xE8F0F2, 0xD3E2E6]" If I find any workaround I will update this post. If you know a workaround please post it as a...
Read MoreEnabling Run Mode Trace in Flex Builder 2.
As you know trace messages are shown only in Debug Mode in Flex Builder. You can follow the steps shown below to see the trace output in Flex Builder all the time. Open Window > Preferences… menu Select General > Editors > File Associations in the Tree Add *.swf as the New File Type Select the newly added *.swf file type and Add “Internal Web Browser” as the...
Read MoreTrace from anywhere, a Flex based Tracer Panel.
Here is an Flex application that generates mm.cfg according to your OS (XP, Vista, Mac)and shows the standard trace() outputs in real time (well! there is a slight delay). I love to replicate the features of the IDE using Flash itself. It all started with my flash 6 reference panel made with flash 6 Here is how this tracer works Here it is to test it yourself...
Read MoreBuilding a XML Editor using Flex 2.
I’m making a XML Editor which can help playing around with E4X and manipulate the XML. Which will be hosted as an online service here and will also be available as a Apollo application later. Here is the alpha version of it. I welcome feature requests and suggestions, kindly post them as comments to this post. The sample XML displayed will give you a clue of what’s coming next ...
Read MoreMXML Quick Reference.
Here is a Flex 2 application which helps to quickly refer to MXML tags and and its attributes. I have plans to integrate it with the Flex 2 SDK help files and make it an Apollo application. I will improve it further and make it available here as online...
Read MoreAdding an icon to all items in the List Component.
List component does not have a default icon. Easy way to add one is to add a Icon function which is very similar to the one we use with Flash v2 components. Only difference is instead of string we need to return a class reference to the image [Embed (source = 'res/image_link.png')] [Bindable] public var image_ico : Class; private function...
Read MoreSetting up Flex 2 SDK on Fedora Core 6 – Part 1 – Installing Flash Player 9.
This Visual Guide can help an average windows user to setup flex 2 SDK and start building flex applications in the Linux platform. Part 1 shows how to install both standalone and plugin version of the flash 9 player. Stay tuned for...
Read MoreCreating a Talking Application in Flash.
Here I will show how to create a light weight talking application in flash. It is one of the Examples I showed in the Singapore User Group Session. Our task is fairly simple, Creating an audio file (preferably MP3) with all the words we want our application to speak. Using that audio in a movieclip as a streaming audio and placing frame labels(to another empty layer) to split the whole audio...
Read MoreWebcam Motion Detection using AS3 – Source Released.
I rewrote the webcam motion detection example in Actionscript3 using Flash 9 Alpha. You can see the demo here. As I promised earlier the FLA is ready for download here
Read MoreService Browser does not handle method table ‘arguments’ metadata defined as key value pairs.
While defining the method table for my ObjectStore service I noticed it. Those who use the JavaDoc style comments to generate the method table may never notice this issue. Arguments metadata can be defined as an array of strings (as created by javadoc comments) or array of array which contains argument name as the key and settings as the value. More on this at amfphp.org ServiceBroswer class...
Read MoreXML Shortcuts V2.2 MTASC Edition released
Now XMLShortcuts meets MTASC I received many requests to make XMLShortcuts available for MTASC (Motion Twin Action Script Compiler). I could not do it with my busy schedule so far, but finally here it is Download package consists of XMLShortcuts.as, an example and help files <a href=”/HelpPanel/?target=XMLShortcuts_MTASC_Edition” target=”_blank”>XMLShortcuts...
Read MoreIs Running in Flash IDE?
When testing my application in IDE, I wanted to use some hard coded test data instead of Every time loading the dynamic data. System.capabilities.isDebugger is the boolean property which is true when we are testing in IDE or special Debug Player. Here is the sample code that I’ve used 123456<pre>if (!System.capabilities.isDebugger) { ...
Read MoreXML Shortcuts component released.
The XMLShortcuts component enables shortcut access to All XML nodes. Biggest advantage of using XML shortcuts is it can be easily added to existing projects with out any modification. Simply drag and drop the component from components window to the stage and then delete it from stage (let it stay in the library). Available Shortcuts: Property Description childNode Get the first child...
Read MoreXML and V2 Tree Example 1.
Rendering XML using Tree component is very simple, because in Flash MX 2004, V2 Tree component is based on XML. Lets explore the possible ways to visualize sample.xml in the coming examples. Create a new document in Flash MX 04, drag and drop a tree component and name it as “tree” Write the following code in the first...
Read MoreActionscript Syntax Highlighting with SE|PY Editor v.0.9.
Many of you might already be using SE|PY a very special open source actionscript editor available for free. We have to really thank Alessandro Crugnola & Team for all their efforts for giving us such a wonderful tool. Long back I’ve downloaded a early version of SE|PY it used to take time to launch and open a command prompt before launching the Editor which made me to ignore this...
Read MoreCompiled components and Actionscript Viewer version 4
With Flash MX 2004 we can create and use Compiled components so source need not be distributed. It is good for many component developers because they need not worry about exposing their code. But when you produce your swf with the component, everything is byte code and can be translated back to Actionscript by the tools like ActionScript Viewer. Compiled components has the extension...
Read MoreFlash MX 2004 JSFL Reference
While the Macromedia’s official documentation for JSFL(The Flash JavaScript API) is not yet released, Steve Webster has put in some effort and created a reference for JSFL. Thanks for your efforts Steve! Have a look at it here!
Read More__bytecode__ and its use
Robin Debreuil mentioned about it in his nice new blog(Welcome Robin!) and further discussed in FlashCoders mailinglist. Using __bytecode(“SomeByteCodeHere”); in your actionscript you can inject some bytecode into swf (It will be inserted at compile time). It can be used to compactly represent some actionscript and hide the code behind in your FLA. But the swf produced is no...
Read MoreUpdated my ActionScript() function
Arrays and Functions can have other properties attached to it. But my .toString() method and ActionScript() function does not account for it. Now I’ve rewritten the code to include those other properties as well. Also now it takes care of the properties with undefined values. Take a look at the new ActionScript() function here. [UPDATE] included the ActionScript 3 version as well It...
Read MoreExtended Textfield to get pixel coordinates of characters
Converting x,y position in a text field into index and vice versa is very useful. Flash Coders with Director background already know the advantage. With this we can create text rollovers, place emoticons and pictures in line with the Textfield. I came to know about it through one of the FlashCoders email, Eric Westra has created a component which extends the Textfield to have the following...
Read MoreCorrection to Object.toAS() version 2!
Ampre’s code has a bug in handling Array of strings (refer to my previous post). Since he is just enclosing the result of original Array.toString() with square backets it returns [a,b,10] when it is supposed to return ['a', 'b' ,10]. Just replacing his version of Array.prototype.toString with the following code fixes it. [UPDATE] included the ActionScript 3 version as well It became...
Read MoreEasy way to highlight the links in flash dynamic text
Yet another transformTags() example. You all know that links in flash text won’t highlight with blue color and underline as it does in browser. If you want to highlight all the links in your dynamic text box you may use the following object as the format object to transformTags to achieve the results as shown below. ActionScript 1.0 ...
Read MoreCreating X-HTML using Flash MX Text box.
Further extending my strippTags code I came up with transformTags code to modify the tags in an xml object which is very useful for many different purposes. One of which I’m demonstrating here. basic syntax is XMLNode.transformTags(formatObject, AllowTagsByDefault) formatObject – generic Object which contains the info on how to modify the tags. AllowTagsByDefault – boolean value...
Read MoreRemoting Helper Component
Many Java, .NET and Coldfusion MX developers are now jumping into Flash Remoting. The problem they face when they are not much familiar with actionsript is in testing their server side remoting script. Every time they have to go to the flash developer for testing. To solve this problem I’ve developed a component called RemotingHelper which allows you to define the GatewayUrl, name of the...
Read MoreActionscript Syntax Highlighting with SciTE|Flash
Many of you might already know how handy it is to edit ActionScript with SciTE|Flash, for those who do not know SciTE|Flash is a text editor from BomberStudios for editing ActionScript, free download is available in their website. One of the nice features which attracted me is exporting the script as HTML or RTF, which can be used to syntax highlight actionscript instead of my ActionScript...
Read MoreDataGrid Component Example.
Finally I received the Macromedia MX Developer Resource Kit today! I’m right now playing with the DataGrid component. The following example is just to show how simple it is to use the data grid component. I’ve created it by dragging and dropping a data grid component and naming it as my_dg. adding a dynamic text box and naming it as my_txt adding the following actionscript in frame...
Read MoreChange Case
Yesterday after finishing the change case ActionScript for flash, I thought why not to port it as an extension for dreamweaver? Because Dreamweaver supports javascript for extensibility which is also an ECMA script like ActionScript. After some search, I found an article written by Bob Berry on “Creating a simple Commands extension for Dreamweaver” in which he expanined how to create...
Read MoreReference XML Viewer Pre Alpha Release!
I can not hold it with in myself any more!!! I’m almost done with the reference viewer. This will be useful for testing your reference documents. This pre alpha version supports “see also” type of cross reference links too ( see the stringUtilsRef.xml for example). Still it is not a complete application, it is just a demo preview only. download from here and try it your...
Read MoreActionScript Highlighting Service
Flash community is very powerful and active around the word. There are many experts from all parts of the world to serve this community As a tiny element of this community what best I can do from my side? After a long thinking I’ve decided to serve the people those who serve the community with my tools and services to help them serve better. Here is my first offering, an online service for...
Read MoreAbout Me
Multi-platform (desktop, mobile, devices etc) and web application development consultant focusing on flash platform
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