Peter Elst

After hanging out for dinner with a bunch of talented friends and colleagues (thanks Boulevart!) I called it an early night which unfortunately meant I missed out on the Phlash5 performance.

Playing with Pixels

Day two started out for me with Koen De Weggheleire’s talk. The party the night before didn’t seem to have caused too many casualties cause the room was packed and everyone seemed conscious enough to grasp the basic matrix math required to start experimenting with bitmap data in Flash.

I think Koen did a fantastic job explaining the topic and balancing the theory of color matrices, convolution and displacement filters and showing creative uses of these features. Definitely a talk you’ll want to catch at a future conference if you haven’t explored that area of ActionScript yet.
 
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For me FITC Amsterdam started on Sunday, attending the Papervision3D workshop presented by most of the core team. It was really nice to get an overview of what is available in the Papervision 2.0 “Great White” release.

Although it probably wasn’t the most in depth technical run through of the framework the information we got was really fantastic and I’m sure the attendees got everything they needed to start doing some Papervision3D projects.

For me Carlos‘ and Ralph’s contribution were the most practical and inspirational parts of the day and convinced me that I need to invest more time to experiment with Flash and 3D engines.
 

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I just finished my presentation at FITC Amsterdam, absolutely loved talking about Adobe AIR despite having some unfortunate beamer problems for the first 15 or so minutes of my talk — had some time to improvise and do Q&A with the audience.

The crowd seemed to be very ‘into’ AIR and interested to hear about the different API’s. Trying to cover everything in a one hour session is insane so I narrowed the scope down to the following:

■ Network monitoring
■ Windowing API
■ HTML support
■ FileSystem access
■ SQLite database
■ Drag ‘n drop support
■ Clipboard access
■ Update API

You can find my session notes below:

The source files referenced in my slides are available for download here: https://share.adobe.com/adc/adc.do?docid=53625a8c-e19a-11dc-88fd-81891157ba2a

Next up is Nico Lierman, talking about some more advanced data visualization with Flex and AIR. Looking forward to it!

I’ve been working on some experiments using video and AIR and stumbled across Abdul Qabiz’s work on constructing the FLV download link for YouTube video’s. Its actually surprisingly easy to get hold of the FLV asset once you capture the correct query string arguments.

Based on Abdul’s code I wrote an AS3 class that goes through the process of getting the URL to the FLV, dispatches a complete event once ready and has a download method using FileReference to download the actual file. Without a server side proxy, downloading only works when you run the code in AIR or as a projector on the desktop because of the security sandbox.

Using the class is really easy:

var myVideo:YouTubeVideo = new YouTubeVideo("http://youtube.com/watch?v=74HJVf0X020");
myVideo.addEventListener(YouTubeVideoEvent.COMPLETE, onVideoComplete);

private function onVideoComplete(evt:YouTubeVideoEvent):void
{
  trace(evt.video); // URL to the FLV
  myVideo.download([optional proxy URL]); // download FLV
}

I made a quick example in Flex — you just paste in the YouTube URL, it loads in the video and copies the URL to the FLV to the clipboard (rename the downloaded file to .flv). Click here to view source or download the code.

Look forward to your feedback, enjoy!

There were lots of rumors about the on AIR tour coming to Europe but it was Andrew Shorten who finally confirmed the news during the keynote at Flash on the Beach last November.

No more waiting, the new site is now up and running and all information about the different venues available — onair.adobe.com.

12 cities in two legs of 2 weeks. No huge bus this time, eco-friendly as the team is, they’ll be experiencing the joy of public transport on the old continent and taking the train to the various destinations.

Every city on the tour will have a free full day event, giving you the opportunity to learn just about everything about Adobe AIR and walk away building cross-platform desktop applications based on HTML, JavaScript, Flash/Flex.

If you followed the on AIR bus tour in the US you will have seen that this isn’t your typical marketing event. Its an opportunity to hang out with like minded developers, grab free beer and snacks, there’s even some Xbox and Wii consoles at the ready for when you need a break from the technical presentations.

I’m very excited to be joining the team for a couple of their events, doing a session on SQLite support in AIR.

April 4th, Amsterdam - Beurs van Berlage
April 7th - Brussels - The Claridge

Feel free to spread the word, link to the site, follow the tour on Twitter, put up the logo or check out the Facebook page and forward it to your friends.

For those of you wondering, I will still make it to 360Flex Milan. John and Tom were kind enough to reschedule my talk to the last day so looking forward to catching up with the European Flex community there!

I traveled to London yesterday to do an “In-the-Brain” session on ActionScript 3.0 with the wonderful people at SkillsMatter.

Had a nice group of enthusiastic people turn up, gave away a few copies of my “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0” book and went out to the pub afterwards. This session was a little teaser for the “Core ActionScript: Object Oriented ActionScript in Practice” course that I’ll be teaching with them starting in April.

Thought I’d share the slides for those of you that weren’t able to attend. Nothing fancy but always enjoy looking back at the Flash authoring environment throughout the years. We’ve come a long way!

There’s been a lot of interesting developments with regards to Flash and mobile recently and thought it deserved a post and my ‘analysis’.

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Aral got interviewed on Singularity while attending the LIFT08 conference in Geneva last week. Its great to see such excitement around the project and it gets you to appreciate the potential of an online conference of this caliber.

Of course it was also nice to hear a plug for our very own Multi-Mania, one of Europe’s biggest free multimedia events, right here in Belgium — which you’ll no doubt hear lots more about in the coming weeks!

If you’ve played around with AIR and are thinking about releasing some applications into the wild, you’ll want to make sure you have something in place to push updates to your users when you’ve got a new version available.

The user can download a new version of your .air file, double-click the file and the AIR runtime will notice its an update to an existing application and notify the user.

There is another way to handle the update process which is much more straightforward to your user. You can access the application descriptor XML of your AIR app and retrieve the version number, check that against the latest version number you store in a text file somewhere on your server.

If the version number on the server is higher than the version of the currently installed AIR app, you download the .air app and trigger an update to happen using the flash.desktop.Updater class.

Getting hold of that version number in the application descriptor is however not as straightforward as you might expect and requires the following code:

var descriptor:XML = NativeApplication.nativeApplication.applicationDescriptor;
var ns:Namespace = descriptor.namespaceDeclarations()[0];
var version:String = descriptor.ns::version;

 
I personally would’ve liked to see the version number, name and other commonly used settings from the applicationDescriptor as properties on NativeApplication.nativeApplication. I’m yet to find a need to work with the raw applicationDescriptor XML and it seems needlessly verbose to retrieve a simple value.

Will post a complete walkthrough of using the Updater API along with several other examples after my talk at FITC Amsterdam.

Trust Aral Balkan to come up with some great projects to support the community — Singularity a three-day online conference is coming later this year and Pistach.io is going into beta soon.

Pistach.io is an ad network that targets a specific topical pack of influential websites and blogs. As a company you’ll have the unique opportunity to promote your business by advertising on these sites and get the best exposure possible. As a blog author you no longer have to worry about finding advertisers or negotiating rates.

I’m very excited to have been asked to join the Pistach.io Flash Pack with this blog, if nothing else it’ll be a great incentive to keep giving back to the Flash community!

 
Read more about it on Aral’s blog