On Thursday night I have the great pleasure of speaking to the Burlington VT PHP User Group. I will be going into detail on the various ways in which you can integrate PHP with Flash and Flex. I’ll start out talking about the basics like XML integration and then move to more advanced methods like AMFPHP. I’ll even talk a little bit about the exciting work were doing with the folks at Zend. I’m especially excited about this presentation because I lived in Vermont for a winter years ago when I was a snowboard photographer. You can check out some of my photos in this Flickr set. If you are anywhere near Burlington on Thursday night, make sure to come and hear the presentation. Free software will be raffled as always!

Lee

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I just received the second issue of Flash & Flex Developer Magazine in the mail. This magazine is the only one that is devoted entirely to what we do. You can find the first issue in bookstores right now if you live in the US. This second issue is quite a bit better than their first attempt and contains some great tutorials and sample code.

Fellow Platform Evangelist, James Ward wrote an in-depth article on Adobe AIR which covers how to get started with most of the APIs. He provided lots of sample code for you to play with as well. Tyler Egeto wrote a beginners tutorial on the AS3 Display List which is a vital skill to master if you want to really understand the new language. Neil Bergman has a nice piece on using the Socket class to connect to an SMTP server to send mail directly from Flash. These are just a few of the great articles in this issue.

This magazine isn’t quite as polished as some of the tech magazines that come out of the US and UK, but the content is well worth the price. Another thing is that they are looking to you, the Flash community, to help them make it even better. They are actively looking for new authors and beta-testers. So if you have ideas and want to become a published author, let them know!

I will writing an article for their next issue as well as doing a video tutorial. Please show your support for this magazine as I think it is vital that we have a magazine devoted to our community.

Lee

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I’ve been playing around lately with the new sound features in Flash Player 10. I decided to combine my throw slider with these features to create the Flash movie below. You can throw the slider to hear the frequencies change. These changes are also reflected in the graphical waveform. I’ve included the source below. You will need to have the Flash Player 10 RC installed to view this.

You can download the FLA if you want to see how it was made. You won’t be able to actually compile it though as it was made with Flash CS4.

Lee

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This past week I attended Flash Forward 2008 in San Francisco. Unlike most conferences, I didn’t have to travel for this one as I live only about 30 minutes outside of the city. This Flash Forward was also the first under the new ownership of Beau Amber from Metalliq. The format for this conference was very different from past Flash Forwards and this was met with mixed reactions. There was only one track, which meant that there weren’t any options as to which session you wanted to attend.

The crowd at this conference seemed to be very design-centric which was right in line with most of the session content. The theme of the conference was passion and thus most of the content was geared more towards inspiration rather than actual Flash techniques. Again, the reaction to this was mixed based on my conversations with attendees. Unlike most conferences I’ve been to, I actually got to see almost all of the sessions, which was nice. Below are some of the things that stood out during the three days:

Keith and Grant Love Flash
Over the last few years Adobe has been making a concerted effort to appeal to the developer crowd with technologies like Flex. While this is a good thing, the interactive design side of the platform (i.e. Flash) has kind of taken a back seat. Keith Peters and Grant Skinner both gave sessions where they professed their love for the flashier side of Flash. Both talked about how the early days of Flash experimentation were the main catalyst in getting them started out in their careers. I think this resonated really well with the crowd, as most were Flash designers rather than developers. Both had only 20 minutes to present so there really wasn’t any discussion of actual techniques which was kind of a let down. Grant did show some cool experiments he’s doing with swarming behavior. His company is also doing Flash work that will find its way onto game consoles thanks to the ScaleForm technology.

Too Many Flashless Presentations
Generally I really like it when Flash conferences add some sessions that are designed solely to inspire the audience. But this conference had far too many of them and this was particularly bad because of the single-track format. Miha Pogacnik, who is the Cultural Ambassador of Slovenia, started out the conference playing violin and talking about his creative process. Jamy Ian Swiss is a magician who performed card tricks for the audience and then discussed some of the techniques he used to pull them off. Karen Kimsey-House spoke about relationships and how we need to just be ourselves. Lynda Weinman spoke about the trouble with the current educational system in this increasingly techno-centric society. If these had been part of an Inspire track then it would have been great. But I heard many attendees say something along the lines of “I’m already inspired. I came here to learn more about Flash”.

Tinic Rocks!
For those that don’t know Tinic Uro, he is one of the masterminds behind the Flash Player. His blog is a must-read for anyone developing in Flash as it is chock-full of inside information directly from the Flash team. Tinic actually fixed a Flash Player bug live on stage. He started out in Visual Studio and showed the actual C++ source code for Flash Player 10. This was very cool to all the developers in the audience. He then proceeded to show Flash Player 10 running on FreeBSD and also a 64-bit version running on Linux. I can’t say anything more on this so please don’t ask when they will be released . After his session was done he took questions from the audience for a little while.

Some Hilarious Sessions
There were several presenters who I thought were really funny. Stacey Mulcahy, aka BitchWhoCodes, gave her thoughts on project management from a developer’s perspective. She had lots of funny slides and I thought the presentation was very entertaining and also had a good message. Craig Swann showed a series of FAIL photos from failblog.org which I hadn’t seen before. Hoss Gifford showed some hilarious photos of Jakob Neilson, who was a recurring target of many of the presenters. David Carson, who is a famous graphic designer, gave a really inspiring and entertaining talk that had some really funny moments. Philip Kerman gave a session describing how he makes his crazy YoutTube rant videos. He even performed one of them live on stage. Very funny stuff.

Can You Be Too Green?
This conference made an effort to be green which is of course a respectable thing. Personally I think it was a little over-the-top though. They wanted people to re-use their paper cups by writing their names on them and leaving them on the beverage table. If you were done with a drink you had to pour the remaining liquid into a big bucket. This was all a little much in my opinion and was a little nasty as well.

Natzke Always Inspires
Erik has given this same presentation at a few conferences that I’ve been to this year but I always seem to miss it. His presentation years ago at another Flash Forward is what got me hooked on Flash to begin with. This session focused on the techniques he uses to create computational art. His presentations are always great as they incorporate music and video very nicely. The best part about it is that he released the full source code for everything that he showed! This was great especially since there was so little code shown during the conference.

Cool Sound Sessions
My old colleague from frog design, Jared Ficklin, gave a very entertaining session on sound visualizations. It wasn’t limited to just computers though as he showed various physical visualizations like the flaming Rubens Tube. Jared’s presentation style is great and is always entertaining. Robert Hodgin showed some really nice visualizations and actually performed one live with a musician. The only problem was that he never talked about what technologies were actually used to make them.

So to wrap up, I applaud Beau on trying to do something different, but I think it was a let down on a number of levels. First you can’t expect to satisfy both designers and developers with a single track. People need options so that they can customize there schedule to match their interests. The 20-minute presentations also didn’t work as they simply didn’t allow any of the presenters to go into detail on anything. I had many people tell me that they came to learn about the latest and greatest Flash techniques and for the most part, there were none to be found. For us speakers that attend most all of the Flash conferences, this was actually fun because it was something different. But for people who only get to go to one conference a year, this was seriously lacking in content. But Beau was open about the fact that this was an experiment and that he is open to suggestions on how to make next year better.

Lee

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In this post I hope to address some of the concerns raised by Keith Peters in his recent blog post. In the post Keith brings up some existing applications that will be broken because of the new security enhancements to the FileReference class. I for one had no idea that this issue existed so thanks to Keith for bringing it up. Let’s first take a look at exactly what has changed.

In previous versions of the Flash Player, you could programmatically call the FileReference.browse() method to open a file browser dialog window which enabled users to locate a file on their system so that it could be uploaded to a server. Many existing applications use this feature including various WordPress and Flickr uploaders. In Flash Player 10 you can no longer spawn this dialog window programmatically and it must be initiated by a user click. The attempt to launch the dialog with code will throw a security exception, effectively breaking these existing applications.

There are other important changes in the FileReference class like the new ability to read and write local files. My initial reaction was that the new security features were added because of these new features. But actually these changes were coming anyway due to some existing security concerns surrounding the FileReference class. Let’s a take a quick look at what some of these concerns are. Please bear in mind that I’m not going to go into too much detail about what all the security implications are but rather give a high-level overview.

HTML security guidelines do not allow the opening of file dialog windows without user interaction. The new changes in Flash Player 10 will move Flash in line with general web security guidelines. So why are there security concerns with doing this in the first place? Well for one, developers can do things like repeatedly open the dialog forcing users to choose a file before being able to continue. This can essentially lock the user out of the application. Another potential concern arises from the situation where there are multiple SWF files on the same page from different sources. The user seeing the file dialog window does not necessarily know which SWF spawned the dialog. I will let you use your imagination about how this could lead to some bad things.

These concerns and others have made it vital that we implement the need for user interaction to launch the dialog. So then what will happen to existing applications that rely on the programmatic launch approach? In short they will have to update their applications to account for these changes. That being said, there are some workarounds available for applications that are launching Flash-based uploaders from HTML content. One such workaround is to create the HTML upload button in Flash rather than HTML so that the user will initiate the upload request from Flash. Similarly, another possibility is to overlay a transparent SWF button over the HTML content so that again, the user clicking happens in Flash and not in HTML. We are currently reaching out to partners to help them find the best solution for them.

Keith mentioned some well-known applications that will currently be broken because of the new security features like WordPress and Flickr. If you know of other applications please let me know in the comments section so that we can connect with them to help them find the optimal solution for their application.

After hearing the internal reasoning behind the new security enhancements I think they make total sense. There are just too many security concerns that arise when you allow developers to spawn native dialog windows programmatically. But we will definitely step up our efforts to ensure that existing developers get the help they need to update their applications accordingly.

Lee

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I just finished uploading a new tutorial that shows you how to create a regular slider and then take it to another level by adding throw physics to it. Trust me, this is not you parent’s slider! Most of what I’ve learned about animation physics comes from Keith Peter’s excellent ActionScript Animation book. Check it out at gotoandlearn.com. You can see the final result below.

Update: There was a slght bug where the slider wouldn’t come to a complete stop when moving to the left. This was because vx never actually reached zero. This is easily fixed by adding the following line of code. I updated the tutorial files with the fix.

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I just finished uploading a new tutorial created by Mike Chambers that shows you how to get setup with Adobe AIR on Linux. It’s always been my goal to include tutorials by other authors but there has always been the issue of quality control. This obviously won’t be an issue with Mike as he knows more about the Flash Platform than I ever will. It’s an honor to have him come on board to do some tutorials. I’m also working on one right now that should be out tonight. Check it out at http://www.gotoandlearn.com.

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