Peter Elst

Its incredible what the Papervision3D guys have been doing — pushing ActionScript to the limits in creating a powerful 3D engine for Flash that we could only have dreamed of. Another example of how the community drives the evolution of the Flash platform.

Although their API was easy enough for any developer to get started with, John Grden has now announced a component set for the Flash authoring environment that actually shows you the rendering at design time. You basically just browse to a Collada file, set up your scene and camera rotation, zoom, focus and you’re all set.

The component even allows you to assign new materials (bitmap or movie clip). Unfortunately that doesn’t give you a live preview because the library items are not accessible for the component, but they’ve handled that nicely by just applying a color fill so you can see what material you’ve used.

Read John Grden’s blog post for more information on the Papervision3D components and be sure to check out the video below!

This years edition of the Adobe MAX conference promises to be the best one yet — lots of great products currently in beta on labs that we’ll no doubt be hearing more about and a renewed focus on the community and inspirational sessions.

We all know there has been some criticism in the past as to how the conference positioned itself in terms of content and speakers but Adobe is making great strides in addressing those concerns. With Ted Patrick now involved I have every faith that we’ll see a quality conference like no other.

I’m happy to say I’ve been invited to do a session on OOP with ActionScript 3.0 for the US edition of MAX 2007. Really looking forward to be presenting there and meeting fellow community members and ActionScript 3.0 enthousiasts. Particularly looking forward to seeing Carlos Ulloa and Keith Peters again, two of the most inspirational developers I know.

More information on the Adobe MAX website: www.adobemax2007.com

We’ve got a great meeting coming up on July 5th at our local Adobe User Group here in Belgium. If you’re into pushing ActionScript to the limits this is one event you won’t want to miss!

We will have none other than Ralph Hauwert come over to talk about Papervision3D, followed by Koen de Weggheleire on image manipulation in ActionScript 3.0.

Koen incidentally is taking on the role of our new user group manager, Serge and myself will still be involved and probably help out back stage with the planning of future meetings, securing speakers and sponsors for raffle prizes.

The event is free of charge as always but you do need to register and seats are going fast!

More info on www.mmug.be.

Its been a couple of years since I last spoke at a Flashforward event but am really looking forward to present at the next edition in Boston, MA — September 19th through the 21st.

I’ll be doing a session entitled “OOP for the Noob“, basically a non-threatening introduction to the world of object-oriented code in ActionScript 3.0. I’ll talk about programming best practices, concepts like inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism and cover some basic design patterns you’ll be able to easily apply and take advantage of in your own projects.

The guys and gals at Flashforward were kind enough to hook me up with a discount code for any of my blog readers that want to attend, see below. It’ll be my first trip down to Boston, if you’re in the area be sure to drop me a line to meet up.

Blog Special Offer: As a reader of this blog, you can save $50* at Flashforward registration checkout with this code: PEB239BT.

*Does not apply to Film Festival/Expo Hall Pass

There’s nothing quite like writing a book — definitely one of the most exhilarating yet at times frustrating things you can do. Sas Jacobs, Todd Yard and myself have been hard at work getting the update to Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8 written and we’re now coming ever closer to a release date.

The previous edition was one of the first major book projects I’ve worked on and was absolutely thrilled to see how well it was received by the community. I think it fills in a great niche for those wanting to get involved with OOP with ActionScript. Its not a full-fledged language reference like Colin Moock’s must read Essential ActionScript books but rather provides a down to earth and pragmatic look at OOP principles and how to apply them to your projects.

While quite a bit of the new book is a straightforward port of the ActionScript 2.0 code to 3.0 syntax, there was a lot of focus on improving the code examples and case studies making them more practical and easy to follow.

I’m looking forward to seeing the book released and hope for an equally as positive reader response this time round. If you’re interested in getting your hands on the book sooner than later, it is now available for pre-order (the links below are referrer links and help support this site if you are so inclined).

Pre-order from amazon.com
Pre-order from amazon.co.uk

Over at the Adobe Community Summit with fellow community experts and user group managers, today is Adobe Integrated Runtime training day — join in the fun and play around with the goodies released on labs last night.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) previously known as Apollo
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Adobe Flex Builder 3 beta
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/

Flash Player 9 update 3 beta
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver CS3
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Dreamweaver_CS3_Extension

Enough said, and if you manage to build something cool with it why not enter the Adobe AIR Developer Derby.

With a public beta of Flex 3 reportedly hitting Adobe Labs in a matter of days, Ted Patrick has been giving out sneak peeks all weeks as to what to expect.

Its all exciting stuff, CS3 integration, great new workflow for skinning components, refactoring, a full-fledged profiler, advanced DataGrid component etc. Yesterday however something was announced that is bigger than all this and will fundamentally change the end user experience when dealing with Flex applications.

That new feature is the ability for the Flash Player to cache the Flex framework on the local machine, meaning the file size of a Flex based SWF will be dramatically smaller. The release of the Flash Player that supports this is codenamed Frogstar and will be available along with the public beta of Moxie aka Flex 3.

It appears you can host your own copy of the Flex framework and define it as a failover URL in the unlikely event the Adobe hosted version is not reachable. Just imagine what an impact this has on bandwidth, a drop of several 100Kb in Flex-based apps. I imagine this will also drastically speed up initialization since its coming from the local drive.

Emmy Huang posted some interesting additional information in the comments on Ted’s post. The Flash Player cache is independent of the browser cache, it supports caching multiple versions of the Flex framework, cached default size is 20Mb but this is totally controlled by the user (even turned off all together) through a new item in the Flash Player settings menu. Also at this point only Adobe’s own frameworks (digitally signed) are enabled in this cache.

What this essentially means is that one of the biggest barriers in getting clients to adopt Flex is now lifted, Flex-based SWFs will be in the same file size range as SWFs created with the Flash authoring environment. Combine this with the promise of going open source with the Flex framework I think this can only lead to even wider adoption of the technology.

Keep an eye out on labs.adobe.com for more on Moxie and Frogstar in the next few days.