Peter Elst

Talk about one proud moment, can’t believe I’m actually listed there. I would never have imagined seeing this happen when I first started fiddling around with Flash some years ago (much less being listed between Mike Chambers and Peter Hall, though that is just alphabetical coincidence :) ).

Its absolutely incredible to realize I’ve contributed in my own little way to this latest and greatest release of Flash — it might very well be the last one released under the Macromedia brand, a company that has changed my life in numerous ways, which makes it even more special to me.

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flash/video/team/

This about says it all, without a doubt the best Flash release ever … best Flash development team ever. Thanks guys!

I’ve seen quite a few people posting about Flash 8 apparently not supporting Flash Remoting and wanted to blog something about that. As far as I’ve seen the only issue is that the Flash Remoting installer hasn’t been updated to install itself in the Flash 8 directory.

If you’re comfortable with working with the Flash Remoting AS2.0 classes the solution is easy, just download the Flash Remoting source code and then follow the instructions described here to copy the classes to the correct location on your hard drive (of course using the Flash 8 install directory rather than Flash MX 2004).

If you do need the FlashRemoting connector component and already have it installed with Flash MX 2004 what you can do is just copy the SWC over from the [Flash MX 2004]\en\First Run\Components\Data Components\ folder to [Flash 8]\en\Configuration\Components\Data\ then reboot Flash 8 and it will be listed in the components panel.

[update] You can get hold of the NetConnection Debugger and Service Browser panels by copying them from the [Flash MX 2004]\en\First Run\windowSWF\ folder to [Flash 8]\en\First Run\windowSWF\

[update 2] Macromedia now has the Flash 8 Remoting components and classes available for download. http://www.macromedia.com/go/flash_remoting_fl8

IFBIN has launched its site today, they provide a service offering high quality Flash and Flex examples to clients that license their content. To achieve this Ted Patrick has teamed up with some top notch developers in the Flash community, be sure to check out the site for some great examples already posted!

www.ifbin.com

I’m very excited to see United Digital Artists bringing a top notch Flash conference over to Europe. The first edition of Spark (not to be confused with Sparkle ;)) will take place at the Paradiso in Amsterdam on November 16-18.

Ticket prices look very reasonable and the initial list of confirmed speakers is no doubt promising: Aral Balkan, Guy Watson, Grant Skinner, Chafic Kazoun, Daniel Dura and several others.

As one of the first major conferences after the release of Flash 8, you just can’t afford to miss this!

http://www.sparkeurope.com

I’ve just finished watching the video up on channel9.msdn.com about Sparkle and must say I’m extremely impressed, but who would’ve expected any less with people like Sam Wan and Manuel Clement on the team! :)

Its obvious that these guys have put in a heck of a lot of work in the IDE and it really shows. They’ve no doubt also looked at Flash very closely and identified a number of key areas that could be improved. The timeline with all the properties looks pretty much like the one you see in Adobe AfterEffects (and if I was a gambling man I’d put money on us seeing that in future Flash versions as well).

What was funny is the way the camera guy reacted with amazement to some things we’re all so familiar with for years now: “so you mean, you can just scrub the timeline and it updates the screen in real-time!?”

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually get very excited about design features in Flash but this really is a great little enhancement. When you use the color picker in Flash 8 you can now set the alpha transparency for that color in the same panel rather than having to open up the ‘Color Mixer’ panel.

I really like the color matrix filter introduced in Flash 8 and prompted by some other posts earlier today, I thought I’d release my little color matrix preview tool (actually another windowSWF panel) that should help you with creating a color matrix array. Have fun with it!

Ivan Todorov of Blitz shared some of their guidelines on project directory structures and naming conventions on his blog. Its always very interesting to see how people organize their projects and they seem to have a very effective system going there.

Also worth noting is his step-by-step guide on version control with SubVersion, I’m still using CVS for most projects but am seriously considering on finally making the switch mostly because of the more efficient storage of binaries which of course is very important as a Flash developer when working with FLA’s.

I’m really late blogging about this but its just too good not to mention — Screenweaver has gone open source! Originally developed by the Rubberduck team, Edwin van Rijkom took over development of this great tool for creating Flash desktop applications and started working on the foundations of Screenweaver Core, a library that acts as a wrapper for the Flash player activeX and can be used with a host of programming languages including Python, Visual Basic, C++, etc.

I was involved as a beta tester back in the Screenweaver 3 days and am very happy to see the software becoming available again, not to mention for free and as open source. I’m definitely going to see if I can get involved in making this project another success. Thanks Edwin!