Peter Elst

Just noticed Martin Smestad Hansen has released his FunkyTools to osflash.org, great stuff! Remember him talking to me about it at Spark and they’re really cool productivity tools to automate some of those tedious task we all have to deal with when doing Flash projects.

Particularly like his png2swf command that let’s you browse for a folder and it converts all PNG’s in there to an SWF. The other tools he has up at the moment is a must have if you’re doing Flash banners, one creates an invisible button with the correct stage dimensions and the clickTag in place and the other one creates a border around the stage with a given color and width.

Thanks Martin, looking forward to seeing more of those!

Aral Balkan was his usually energetic self and did a great job representing the open source Flash movement at Spark (along with Nicolas Canasse, John Grden, Luke Hubbard and the rest of the community of course).

His first session was on the “Open Source Flash Revolution”. After briefly covering the history of how osflash.org came about he went on to cover some of the amazing open source projects they host and how to go about creating SWF content without touching the Flash IDE (though you still can if you want to). If you’re handling everything through code (loading external assets etc.) you can use the MTASC compiler, if you want to embed assets into your SWF there is Swfmill to help you accomplish that.

Other things worth mentioning are ASUnit (that does a great job with unit testing for ActionScript projects and integrates with the Flash IDE), Screenweaver for creating desktop applications, screensavers etc. (version 4 will have support for Mac), LuminicBox FlashInspector for logging your application and of course Xray which is indispensable for debugging your Flash projects.

Macromedia appears to be very supportive of the movement, with their own “Flash JavaScript Integration Kit” hosted as an open source project on osflash.org and the extremely liberal licence they’re using for their examples on labs.macromedia.com. They also benefit greatly from the active open source community that is willing to share, and of course its good publicity to slowly try and “re-educate” the flash-bashing slashdot crowd

As you would expect there were a few reservations though, and as expected the legal situation of some of the projects hosted there was discussed at the open source panel. A few things became apparent from that discussion:

- The open source Flash community does not want to hurt the commercial interest of Macromedia
- Just because no objection was made to certain open source technology before does not mean Macromedia will not take steps to protect its intellectual property later on.
- We need a point of contact at Macromedia to get official feedback on the position they take regarding certain open source developments.

Of course as with any company legal departments are a slow moving machine, as Mike said it is not their intention to spread FUD.

Personally I would love to see some sort of official statement from Macromedia (before everything is handed over to Adobe) that highlights some clear guidelines on what open source developments they accept, maybe even encourage, and to what they take objection.

Ted Patrick’s first session on the DisplayList API was no doubt one of my favourite sessions of the conference. I thought I was pretty much up to speed with the DisplayList in AS3 but he highlighted some interesting use-cases that I hadn’t considered before (reparenting DisplayList branches etc.)

Can’t really do justice to the topic in a brief summary but here are some of the main things that came up:

- DisplayList holds all visual objects in an application
- you can load things off the display list (i.e. preload images etc.) and only attach them when they need to be visible
- one instance can only be attached at one place in the DisplayList at a time, if you add it at a different place it just reparents (obvious but easy mistake to make if you’re coming from the attachMovie era)
- getObjectsUnderPoint(new Point( x , y )); returns all objects in the DisplayList under the x and y coordinate you specify

On Friday Ted did another great session on flash.net.Socket, binary sockets in Flex and AS3. Unfortunately one of the coolest demo’s (Darron Shall’s FlashVNC) wouldn’t run. But you can download the SWF from his site and try it out yourself (the source is available from IFBIN).

http://www.darronschall.com/weblog/archives/000192.cfm

One great thing that will be a tremendous improvement in helping to secure Flash games etc. is loading in binary data over a socket connection (so straight into the flash player memory). You can basically write code to connect up to any TCP/IP protocol (IRC, XMPP, DNS, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, etc.) and no longer require a middle tier.

This will no doubt be a huge revolution in the way we think about Flash applications on the web!

Chafic had an interesting intro session on Flex 2 (more Q&A really), main themes were “MXML is compiled to an ActionScript class” and “code hinting in Flex Builder 2 rocks!”.

He showed some cool ways of calling AS functions from MXML tags, private and public scope functions, etc. Also a cool example of the @Embed directive that showed embedding a specific movieclip referenced by linkage ID from a compiled external SWF.

Guy Watson’s session went on a bit longer than planned and I only got to Mike’s session 10 or so minutes in. The Flash JavaScript integration kit is a really cool tool for calling ActionScript functions from JavaScript and JavaScript functions from ActionScript, is completely open source and hosted on osflash.org.

In Flash 8 we of course have ExternalInterface which can do synchronous calls and get return values but if you need compatibility with players lower than 8 this is definitely the way to go. Setting it up is relatively easy, and there’s a tutorial on how to do it in the osflash wiki.

http://www.osflash.org/flashjs/docs/installation

Some things that came up in the session and are worth mentioning:

- to get around the maximum size of objects you send between JavaScript and Flash you need to split it into chunks (this is also on the todo list to possibly automate this in future releases of the kit)
- for Flash to JavaScript calls you don’t necessarily need all code in place in the HTML, using one function that evals an argument you send it you can dynamically write Javascript code to the page (cool idea!).

Despite his cold, Guy gave an excellent overview of the new AS3 features. I’ll run through some of the most notable things he mentioned:

- Flash Player 8.5 has two AVM’s (ActionScript Virtual Machine), old SWF content runs using AVM and AS3 using the new highly optimized AVM+
- AS3 classes need you to define a package, no more long class names
- you can have multiple classes in the same file as long as they are contained in the same package identifier
- you still need the folder structure to reflect the package
- trace() is now flash.utils.trace()
- empty variables now return null instead of undefined
- no more attachMovie etc. you can simply do new MovieClip() and it actually created a new movieclip instance *hoorah!*

var m:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
m.x = 100;

- this.addChild(new MovieClip()); vs this.createEmptyMovieClip(”test_mc”,1);
- underscore properties are no morein AS3 (x vs _x, y vs _y, alpha vs _alpha)
- drawing API is now in flash.display.Graphics
- all instances of MovieClip and Sprite have a graphics property

var s:Sprite = new Sprite();
var g:Graphics = s.graphics;

- no more mx.utils.Delegate needed, ‘this’ now always references the instance in which method was defined
- getURL is now navigateToUrl(new URLRequest(”http://www.flashguru.co.uk”));
- URLRequest class can specify HTTP headers etc.
- LoadVars and LoadVariables now all handled through flash.net.URLLoader
- EventType class with constants (e.g. EventType.COMPLETE = “complete”), compiler can handle this versus using a string
- no more loadMovie in AS3 this becomes flash.display.Loader (for loading in gif, jpg, png, swf)
- you can load external stuff off-stage (in memory) and add them to a DisplayList later when you want it to show

var l:Loader = new Loader();
l.load(new URLRequest(”somemovie.swf”));
this.addChild(l);

- everything except object subclasses EventDispatcher, no more nasty mix-ins
- some other new features: DisplayList API, regular expressions, runtime error checking, sound spectrum analysis, retrieve full class info at runtime, new keywords and statements, more drawing API methods (drawRect), Timer class, create visual objects from binary data, E4X, low-level data access

Erik Natzke just finished a great opening session here at Spark Europe. He started out with a 5 minute demo reel of some of his work and was happy to see he’s been playing around with the Bitmap API and SoundSpectrum in AS3 to do some of his cool animations native to the Flash Player.

Didn’t realize he was involved in developing comtastic.com, as apparently was Branden Hall. Guy Watson up next talking about AS3, looking forward to it!

Tomorrow morning I’ll be catching an early train to Amsterdam at 5.30 am (ouch) to arrive well in time for the Spark conference. As we’ll apparently have free wifi at the conference I’m getting my blog set up to do some live blogging.

You can follow along with my notes by clicking through to the “Spark conference notes” page and I’ll try to condense those into a more or less readable form if I have some time during the breaks. I’ve also hooked up Todd Dominey’s excellent SlideShowPro component on that page to my Flickr account so will try to get my digital snapshots through as things happen.

Fabchannel will also be providing a live broadcast of some of the sessions including Kevin Lynch’s keynote, so be sure to check that out:

http://spark.fabchannel.com

I’ll be over at the Spark conference in Amsterdam next Thursday and Friday and just noticed they put up the schedule. Here is my initial selection of sessions I’m planning to attend:

Thursday, November 17th

- Erik Natzke: Blended Art and Science
- Guy Watson: Introduction to Actionscript 3
- Mike Chambers: Flash/JavaScript/HTML Integration
- Chafic Kazoun: Introduction to Flex 2.0
- Ted Patrick: Managing the DisplayList in AVM2/AS3
- Aral Balkan: The Open Source Flash Revolution
- Kevin Lynch: Macromedia Keynote

… and of course the Spark all-night party

Friday, November 18th

- Ted Patrick: flash.net.Socket for Multi-user Applications in Flex 2
- Macromedia Flash 8 Dream Team
- Actionscript 3.0 Panel
- Flex 2.0 Panel
- Open Source and Flash Panel

You can find the full schedule for the Spark conference here. If you’re going, feel free to post the sessions you’ll be attending!

I took a couple of minutes out of my day to update the MXNA screensaver I created last year (its been broke ever since the MXNA webservices were upgraded). Enjoy!

Download it here