negush blog

I’m wishing all of you a Happy New Year, full of new opportunities, success and prosperity.

Here is my wish to all of you, mase with BannerSnack. May all of us be filled with joy and happiness not only this Christmas, but every day of the year.

I’m not dead yet… Just couldn’t find the “inspiration” for writing this past month. Also, I’m working on the design of my future main web page (give me a break, I’m not a designer, I’m programmer).

Anyway, yesterday I was browsing through some Flash/ActionScript sites/blogs, looking for a logo for ActionScript for my new website and/or blog (I’m not sure yet how or where I will embed it – if I will embed it at all) and came across this blog entry from polygeek. Apparently he too would like to see Adobe come up with a logo for ActionScript.

I too feel like there should be some graphical representation of this language (other than the file icon). I know programming languages don’t really have logos, but, come on… what’s another logo for Adobe ? (among the number of logos it has for all the other stuff). And since ActionScript is the language for Flash, Flex and AIR, I feel it should have a rightful place among Adobe’s other technologies by having its own logo.

So far, polygeek’s logo is the best I’ve found (and I really like it) and actually I couldn’t really find another one. So maybe if enough people start using a logo (not necessarily this one) then Adobe will take notice. Who knows ?? Until then, here’s polygeek’s logo: http://polygeek.com/images/family_of_skills/ActionscriptIcon.zip. He actually put the .psd file at our disposal in case we would like to have it. Thank you polygeek.

Now that 2009 has begun, I wish everybody A Happy New Year !

Looking back at 2008 it really was a busy year from the Flash/AS3 point of view and hope that 2009 will bring us more interesting stuff. I’ve started this blog a year ago and unfortunately I cannot say that it’s where I wanted it to be.

Still, after 30 posts and 32 comments, it’s not so bad… (it’s good to be optimistic). Hopefully in 2009 I’ll have more time to write more interesting articles on ActionScript 3, Flash and possibly Flex and AIR.

For the future, I intend to start working a little bit in Flex and AIR too. I’ll be working on a mp3 player in AIR so I could use it on Mac too – I’m not satisfied with iTunes’ playlist functionalities. So I guess this will be my first project with Flex and AIR. But don’t worry, once I’ll get it finished, I’ll make it available to all of you (fingers crossed) :D. I’d really like to get better with Flash/ActionScript 3 (and of course Flex and AIR), but this depends totally on me. So I really have to find the time for extra study and work.

With that said I hope this year will be much better than the last one, both on professional and personal level. And this is what I wish for all of you: surpass yourselves, be better than you were, make greater things, love more, learn more, be more you can be.

Happy New Year !

I’ve been pondering from quite some time whether there’s any reason for me to have a personal website and the blog or simply the blog. Last year, when I’ve started this blog, I had in mind to create my own personal website (in Flash of course) that I would fill with all sorts of stuff. A year has passed and… nothing… I didn’t really have the time to think at my site, let alone to start working on it. Naturally, I started wondering if I would really need a site since the blog could cover all the topics I want. I could have a page with all my personal projects, a page for Flash/Flex/Air resources, maybe even a photo gallery and all this in the blog itself. So I could just concentrate on shaping and customizing my blog instead of creating a personal site from scratch. I mean, the blog is already there. It’s all set up. All I have to do is come up with some nice design (that I could even find ready-made on the Internet) and simply add all the information I want to share… easy as that. Plus, the entire back-end is already in place.

Right now, I think today is much easier to set up a personal website based on a blog, than to create your own site from scratch. Of course you could just purchase a website template, but that would need more tinkering since it usually doesn’t fit one’s needs. So, finally, I took the decision to drop the idea of a personal website and instead just have some sort of welcome page that would redirect to the blog itself and do my magic on the blog. Hopefully I’ll have some spare time to create that welcome page in the next year :)).

Here is a Christmas greeting e-card made by me with bannersnack, a new banner maker web application from JumpeyeComponents.

Happy Holidays folks !

Adobe just announced their Flash Platform, which now includes both Flash Player and Adobe AIR, the tools for developing content for the players, the Flex framework (not the builder… that’s the tool), all sorts of servers to be used with Flash and third party stuff… From now on, this all this will be referred to as Flash Platform. Also, the diagram representing the entire Flash Platform shows the design tools (After Effects, Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop) that can communicate with he development tools of the platform, through the FXG format. The development tools of the platform are of course Adobe Flash and Flex Builder and a new tool for those who tend to be more design centric than code centric in their work – Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo).

Catalyst will be announced by Adobe at the Max conference (which is going on these days). Also, the newest version of AIR is out – AIR 1.5 – which has been much improved from the previous version (better performance, Flash Player 10 and Webkit support) – go on and download it, if you didn’t already. Gumbo (the new Flex Builder 4) will also be available for preview and presented at Max. It seems that the new Flex Builder will have lots of improvements that will be followed (hopefully) by a new lightweight and scalable framework.

Finally managed to install this neat syntax highlighter plugin for Wordpress. I wanted to do that for some time but didn’t really have the time for that. Now, it’s done… I’ve installed it… See the proof below.

import fl.controls.Button;
 
/**
 * This is a simple function that creates a button on the stage. Really, there's
 * nothing interesting about it.
 */
function foo():void {
	var newButton:Button = new Button();
	this.addChild(newButton);
	newButton.x = 100;
	newButton.y = 100;
	newButton.label = "Hit me!";
	newButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickHdl);
}
 
// This is when you know that the button was clicked.
function clickHdl(evtObj:MouseEvent):void {
	trace("Can you read this ?");
}
 
// Calling the main function.
foo();

Maybe I’ll find some time to customize it a little

It seems that Flash has a limit for the font size. Normally, it displays the text with a font size of up to 127 px. So I tested it to see if there’s any workaround for this limitation and the easiest thing to do is set the size of the font to less than 128 px and then scale the text field until the size of the font suites your needs. This is what Colin Moock recommends in his article.

However, it seems that there is an exception to this font size rule: if you add a text field to the Stage using the Text tool in design time and not using code in runtime, it lets you use font sizes greater than 127 px (I’ve tested it with a font size of 300 px) ONLY AND ONLY if you DO NOT USE the “Render text as HTML” option. I’ve tested it with all three types of text field: dynamic, static and input; with and without embedded fonts; with single line and multiline; with and without border; using device fonts, bitmap fonts and anti-aliased fonts. And it worked with several types of fonts.

So, if you would like to use font sizes greater than 127 px and your text is static, just place that text in design time and don’t use it as HTML text. You can even update the contents by code and the font size will be kept, even when using the htmlText property to set the new text. But it seems that as soon as you use the “Render text as HTML” option on the text field, the font size limit kicks in. When you use code to create and set the text field, that rule always applies.

The new Flash Text Engine from Flash Player 10 no longer has this limit when using the new TextElement class, but the limit is still applied to all traditional text, according the Colin Moock’s article.

Today, Adobe posted some pretty important news to the Flash/Flex community: they are currently working with Google and Yahoo! Search to improve the way .swf files on the web are searched and indexed by the search engines.

It seems that by now Google already has made some important changes to its search methods and its crawlers can now better search and index the contents of a .swf file. Also, Yahoo! is not far behind. According to Adobe, the crawlers will actually run the contents of a .swf file and get any text and links they find. At least for beginning. Later on, they will help the search engines find and index more content from the .swf files.

The best part is that developers do not need to modify their Flash/Flex contents to be better indexed by the search engines, the crawlers are able to work with any version of the .swf files on the Internet. In this case it’s possible that after more and more Flash/Flex content being indexed by the search engines, the ranks of Flash/Flex web pages will increase enough in relatively short period of time.

This is indeed great news and hopefully we’ll see the results in a short time.