Beautify Code Blog

Me & My Music – stereoleben

Marvin Blase — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:14:06 +0000

Hey everybody, this is kinda off-topic but as it’s directly related to me I thought of sharing it anyways. It’s about me and my music – as some of you might know I’m in an electronic rock band called most wanted monster. You can catch us whereever you want to. However, besides this I’ve started [...]

Flash Mobile died. So what?

Marvin Blase — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:06:46 +0000

Today Adobe has published a pressrelease in which they announce to stop the development for Flash in mobile browsers. And again, these discussions start all over again. Was Steve Jobs right? Will Flash now completely die? Has HTML5 finally won? For me, Adobe‘s decision is completely right. Because: What was the benefit of Flash being [...]

FDT5: From Scratch to Device in less than 4min

Marvin Blase — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:11:29 +0000

It’s saturday noon and I’ve got an FDT5 Prerelease version installed (thanks again to Powerflasher). And as I’m about to do some iOS & Adobe AIR performance tests I’m in need of an app.. obviously. So, wouldn’t it be nice to directly check out the new mobile workflow in FDT? It could cost me a [...]

iPads, iPhones, Androids and Adobe AIR

Marvin Blase — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:29:31 +0000

As I’ve mentioned the last couple of months have been very quiet here. I don’t want to excuse or even explain myself but tell you what happened in these months. And one thing for sure, my Flash heart is still bleeding. This article covers some of my latest works and my progress with Adobe AIR [...]

FDT 5 – The Flexible Development Toolkit

Marvin Blase — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:18:03 +0000

Hello everybody, it’s been long since my last post and I do apologize for that. I’m going to tell you in detail what happened during the last months (and make sure to stay tuned as some really cool projects were realized) but for now I only got one big message for you: FDT5 is going [...]

A bit about FDT4 Color Themes

Marvin Blase — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:34:42 +0000

For all you guys out there who feel like me and are somewhat sick of the default Eclipse color theme: There has been released some kind of easy-to-go plugin which lets you quickly change the theme in Eclipse and therefore FDT4 as well. Furthermore you can directly chose between some good pre-defined templates or those, [...]

Flex 4.5 Mobile Project Template for FDT 4.2

Marvin Blase — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:20:41 +0000

With this FDT 4.2 Project Template you can easily create a Flex Mobile application in FDT. It sets up the launch configuration, the application descriptor and the required mobile libraries. Furthermore it automatically creates a simple mobile application pattern for you. The current version is for Android only. Instructions Download and extract the .zip file [...]

Thumbnail Gallery with Milkbox support

Marvin Blase — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:13:58 +0000

An endlessly repeating thumbnail panel with Milkbox support and easy to use? Yes! As I previously posted something about Inertia-Movements I (and some people who have mailed me - thanks for that) had the idea to continue this article and show an example of the repeating thumbnails. The code [...]

How to upload a Webcam image to your server

Marvin Blase — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:52:53 +0000

I know what you're thinking. Not again one of these Webcam server articles.. and you're right! I thought the same and decided to quit any upcoming search for this topic and write a 100% working solution by myself. Lately I was having some troubles with saving an image sent from Flash to my server. I [...]

Auto Flash Class Panel by @matanube

Marvin Blase — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:51:15 +0000

Today Matan Uberstein has released his new version of Auto Flash Class Panel. You can find a nice little introduction video tutorial in his blogarticle, so make sure to check it out. Class and package names are generated form your library folder structure. With one simple click your library is ready for export. Saves you [...]

Using Flex 4.5 (Hero) with FDT 4.1

Marvin Blase — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 10:35:22 +0000

Just a quick note, which might become handy for you as well. When using Adobe's latest Flex SDK, Codename "Hero" in FDT, you need to keep in mind two things. First of all: Download FDT 4.1 Beta, which fixed a bug concerning some NullPointerExceptions. So if you have ever come across messages like these: PLAIN [...]

Compile AIR to native .dmg or .exe files with ANT

Marvin Blase — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:55:26 +0000

An upcoming question in publish- & packaging AIR files is "How to convert them to a .dmg or .exe file?" Easily enough, you do not have to do anything else except using a slightly different ANT build task for it. Instead of passing: PLAIN TEXT XML: <arg value="${publish_dir}/${air_file}" /> <arg value="${app_descriptor}" /> to the ADT [...]

Add Linked Resources (as a src folder) to ANT builds

Marvin Blase — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:03:38 +0000

Here's another quick snippet to add Linked Resources to a compile process built with ANT. You know, you can link a whole directory to be a "Linked Library" in FDT, e.g. Greensock's TweenLite. Doing so means that you cannot use the -library-path argument as it only work with .swc files. Instead of this use -source-path [...]

Chromeless AIR Applications – A Designer’s Look

Marvin Blase — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:55:33 +0000

Hey, first of all - some of you may have noticed this is the third AIR related article in two days. I'm very excited at the moment due to the fact I can finally compile them with FDT4. Anyways, I want to store my process and failures, hints and tips to always know where I [...]

Using SWCs within AIR packaging with ANT

Marvin Blase — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:30:47 +0000

In addition to AIR2 and FDT4 (M3) – A detailed Walkthrough I encountered a problem when trying to use external SWCs like e.g. an assets library in your AIR package. In other words: If you're using an SWC with all your graphical stuff exported from the Flash IDE you simply rightclick it in FDT and [...]

AIR2 and FDT4 (M4) – A detailed Walkthrough with ANT

Marvin Blase — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:06 +0000

Hello, someone might remember an older post on Beautify Code which has shown how to successfully create an AIR application certificate, publish the project and then package it to an .air file, which can be installed and run. Now here's the 2010 update, working with AIR2 and FDT4 (using an ANT-Build) and some major changes. [...]

www.WeLoveFDT.com | An FDT Community Feed

Marvin Blase — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:27:43 +0000

Hi, I'm very happy to announce that www.WeLoveFDT.com has just been launched! Powerflasher just wrote the following: Recently a new community-project has been launched which combines most of the active FDT blogs like Aiden Tailor, Matan Uberstein, Marvin Blase, Francis Varga, Alan Klement and many others. WeLoveFDT fetches their feeds, filters them for FDT related [...]

Automatically select all Text on Focus

Marvin Blase — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:34:39 +0000

Hi, I've just tried to get the following to work: There's a dynamic textfield on stage which holds some text. I wanted to achieve a "Select all the text as soon as the user (single-)clicks on it" - this surely is a bit unorthodox, but there was a reason for that. At first I didn't [...]

#Poll How do you compile & package AIR apps?

Marvin Blase — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:42:07 +0000

Just a really quick post. If you've got 10 seconds of time please take part on this poll: How do you compile & package AIR apps? I'm trying to figure out different workflows at the moment.. :)

SWF Compile META Tags

Marvin Blase — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:30:12 +0000

As the latest FDT version ( Beta 4 ) does not set compiler arguments concerning SWF-size, framerate etc. by default I started using SWF-Metatags to specify these settings. I'm talking of these things: PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: [SWF(width="910", height="610", backgroundColor="#FFFFFF", frameRate="40")] Just set this tag above your class opening in the one you're going to compile. [...]

FDT QuickFix Templates for Flint Particle System

Marvin Blase — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:32:02 +0000

I've just started working with the great Flint Particle System and am already too lazy to always write down it's Constructors, as you can imagine when seeing the following: PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: var lZone:LineZone = new LineZone(new Point(5, 10), new Point(40, 30)); Phew.. :) These Zone-Constructors have made my fingers hurt, so I wrote them [...]

FDT – Pure RobotLegs Comfort Wallpaper

Marvin Blase — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:53:41 +0000

On public demand ( ) here's a "Pure RobotLegs Comfort" Wallpaper with the motif known from the latest post in the trivialities-category, namely a synergy of Powerflasher's FDT and RobotLegs. Yet the following resolutions are supported: 2560x1600 1900x1200 1680x1050 1280x1024 1280x800 Here's a .zip file containing every resolution: rl-comfort-wp.zip (2mb) If anyone wants changes or [...]

Hiding Posts from Index page and RSS feed

Marvin Blase — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:33:38 +0000

I somehow feel responsible for my RSS readers and my Index page. E.g. I don't want to spread out trivialities but I've got a section which is covering these topics. So I thought of how I can keep posting minor important stuff without bothering my readers. On my search I stumbled upon a plugin called [...]

My daily use of Assets in FDT

Marvin Blase — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:02:13 +0000

Hey, yesterday I had to explain to someone why and how to use Assets in Powerflasher's FDT. I thought of summing it up to show how I (almost daily) deal with that topic. For those not knowing: When talking of Assets I mean Classes & Symbols which are exported to a SWC file from Adobe [...]

Some Flash Developer’s thoughts on Chrome

Marvin Blase — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:01:55 +0000

Don't get me wrong, I'm using Google Chrome for some months now and definetly wouldn't change to Firefox or the like anymore. Mainly for reasons of speed as no browser ever reached Chrome in that. But as someone using Flash everyday Google Chrome has some really annoying bugs / missing features which definetly have to [...]

MicRecorder, a tough helper class

Marvin Blase — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 23:30:22 +0000

Thibault Imbert (@thibault_imbert) just came up with a really interesting helper class to easily record your microphone input via AS3. Thibault used the new Microphone Object which comes along with the Flash Player Version 10.1 - so having a look at the code is a good start to get in contact with it. You can [...]

Two Inertia Movements

Marvin Blase — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:58:10 +0000

Hey, I recently had to deal with Inertia-Movements again and had a look for some older scripts to re-use. I found two which I quickly wanted to share. Inertia movement is an effect you may know from many galleries or navigations. It's the "move your mouse left and the clip [...]

Flattr Invitation-Codes

Marvin Blase — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:27:16 +0000

I've registered myself at Flattr yesterday and therefor got some (I think there are three..) Invitation-Codes left. Whoever is interested just drop me a comment. The more people it use the more useful it becomes, so don't shy to try (wow, MC beautify is here.. :)) If you don't know yet what Flattr is, here's [...]

Trying to get back to business

Marvin Blase — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:09:40 +0000

Hey everyone, long time no hear - but there were some very busy weeks which kept me from anything concerning Twitter, Blogging, etc. But now as some projects have been finished I'll try to get back to business, starting with a new blog design at first :) For those interested what I've been working on, [...]

Trace all DisplayObject’s children

Marvin Blase — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:35:14 +0000

Just cleaned up my development folder as stumbling upon that little script to trace every children (and it's children) in a specific DisplayObject: PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: traceDisplayList(allCon, "=>"); function traceDisplayList(container:DisplayObjectContainer, indentString:String = ""):void { var child:DisplayObject; for (var i:uint=0; i <container.numChildren; i++) { child [...]

“I will kill your Timeline Tween when changing my properties”

Marvin Blase — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:34:27 +0000

I stumbled upon some.. well, let's say "feature" of handling Timeline-Tweens within the Flash IDE. The following "feature" might be somehow confusing and it's a bit tricky to fix. I'm talking of a Timeline-Tween which gets broken when changing the clip's properties while tweening. I had to face this the last time a designer build up [...]

How to first setup TweenLite v11

Marvin Blase — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:38:18 +0000

Hey, as I recently had to tell someone how and why to use TweenLite v11 (or any other Tweening Engine in AS3) I wanted to share that two minutes conversation with you. I think there will be following some other articles about TweenLite here - i guess there will be more Q&A talks concerning specific [...]

Converting a character to ASCII code number

Marvin Blase — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:09:59 +0000

As ord(character) is somehow a privilege of Flash Light and AS1 here's a small AS3 workaround to get the ASCII code number of a specific character. PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: var charCarry:String = "C"; var asciiConvert:int = charCarry.charCodeAt(0); trace(asciiConvert); // 67 You can look up the complete ASCII code table here.

So Germans don’t like Chrome / Safari?

Marvin Blase — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:23:18 +0000

We recently checked the latest 1000 visitors' Browser (on each domain) and found out, that Germans tend to use the Firefox instead of using Safari or Chrome. Here's the result: Beautify Code Firefox IE 7+8 Safari Chrome .de 71,4% 9,6% 9,3% 5,5% .com 57% 7,8% 16% 16% So what we can see is that international [...]

The finer Art of Loading (#2): It’s all about timing

Marvin Blase — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:56:32 +0000

Hey everyone, in the last chapter we made it to load a SWF and unload it on demand. Let's continue here and imagine that we're having three SWFs, each of them having some content which should be shown on click. A typical usage would obviously be a Flash Website consisting of multiple SWFs. What we're [...]

Check Flash Player Version

Marvin Blase — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:51:33 +0000

Just a quick snippet to determine the visitor's Flash Player Version (incl. OS and Version RC) in Actionscript 3. The detailed trace of all information covers Operating System, Major Flash Version and up to the 4th release version, e.g. 10.0.42.34 - the latest release yet. You can easily copy and [...]

Array Protoype | removeValue(value:*)

Marvin Blase — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:44:05 +0000

Another prototype I had to use recently and again the Internet didn't provide me any 100% working solution. So here's mine to remove a value in an Array and then automatically change it's keys, so if the value is in the first key everything will move up by one. (0 will be deleted, 1 will [...]

Must Visit AS3 Events & Conferences (#as3mustvisit)

Marvin Blase — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:26:40 +0000

Hey everyone, we (@hfug and @beautifycode) just thought of a calendar which shows every Actionscript- Event/Conference/Meeting worth visiting in 2010. Whenever you know anything you can simply post it via Twitter the following way (e.g. FFK10): 13.04 - 16.04 FFK10 in Cologne, Germany #as3mustvisit and we'll add it (later surely automatically) to the calendar. The [...]

Gordon – An open source Flash runtime written in JavaScript

Marvin Blase — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:57:00 +0000

Tobias Schneider also known as Tobey Tailor published his Flash runtime engine, written in Javascript. On the related article he provides 3 great examples. Get in touch with this great project.

Actionscript 3 – multiload vs. procedural

Marvin Blase — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:38:24 +0000

Recently I've benchmarked the difference between a multi- and a procedural-loading. I've taken images with a size ranged between 500kb and 1mb. Here are the results... files 10 50 100 250 multiload 619 ms 2821 ms 6253 ms 17189 ms procedural 488 ms 2545 ms 6153 ms 16260 ms ...and here are the source files. [...]

Embedding Flash – XHTML valid and no Javascript!

Marvin Blase — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:10:39 +0000

Once again I got in trouble with embedding a flashmovie in html. This snippet helps you to embed your flash in a crossbrowser-way. And the clue is - it's javascript free: PLAIN TEXT CODE: <object data="stage.swf" width="400" height="300" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:400px; height:300px;"> <param name="movie" value="stage.swf"/> </object>

Merry ChristmARs!

Marvin Blase — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:38:15 +0000

Another project left my table and this time it's an Augmented Reality one, namely the Christmas Card by DER PUNKT gmbh. Many of you (to be honest me as well) don't like AR for it's uselessness but I think this one checks at least cute and is worth a view. Behind the scenes Away3D, 3D [...]

Redirecting non-www to www-domains

Marvin Blase — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:32:37 +0000

You know you can access your domain with or without a www. Besides Google Flashmovies don't like that kind of double-accessibility as security-sandbox-violations will appear. E.g. a flashmovie embedded on http://beautifycode.com cannot access http://www.beautifycode.com when not directly allowed via crossdomain-policy. To completely prevent this (and Google will thank you, too) you can easily redirect your [...]

Embed Tags in FDT

Marvin Blase — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:32:04 +0000

Just a Quickpost if you're encountering error-messages in FDT while using Embed Tags for library-items or files directly. I've struggled with this sometimes: Error: Unable to transcode sample.jpg This is because your path doesn't fit. Believe me, it's true - you have to target relative to your src-folder. So e.g. PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: [Embed(source="../assets/sample.jpg")] private [...]

FDT Bloggers | A List at Hawaii Flasher User Group

Marvin Blase — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:29:16 +0000

Just a quick-post introducing the Hawaii Flash User Group which started a list with Blogs dealing with Powerflasher's FDT. Besides it covers some cool topics about changing FDT's Skin, Splashscreen, etc. - as well as some walkthroughs for installing and setting it up. If you're blogging about FDT as well just leave a comment on [...]

Array Prototypes: insert(index,value) & remove(index)

Marvin Blase — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:39:20 +0000

I've been searching the net for a couple of minutes but didn't find a working prototype in AS3 / 2 which fit my requirements. There were lots of prototypes but I wanted to remove an Array-key by just passing it's index. And I needed the other way around: inserting new keys to where-ever I want. [...]

Five holy Firefox-Plugins for Flash-Developers

Marvin Blase — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:45:38 +0000

You all may know the following conversations: "Somehow I can't see the Flash-File" - "Which Flash-Version do you've got?" "The Loading-Bar takes ages" - "Your bandwidth is driven by a hamster?" "I can't see the changes you've made" - "Press Ctrl+F5" "The image is missing, isn't it?" - "Hmm, let me see." These questions often [...]

Sparkasse Karlsruhe – Virtual 3D Fly-Through

Marvin Blase — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:45:37 +0000

Just released and worth a look: Karlsruhe's Sparkasse near Europaplatz lets their customers experience their office in a virtual 3D Fly-Through. Developed with different helperclasses for controlling and hotspot-management, a self-written caching-system, 3D Studio Max and Flash CS4. There is only a German version available but it should be pretty self-explaining. Sparkasse Karlsruhe - A [...]

The finer Art of Loading (#1): Simple load & unload

Marvin Blase — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:21:11 +0000

This one-of-will-be-many-articles is covering the first steps of loading and unloading SWFs properly in Actionscript 3. The follow-up articles will discuss dynamical loading-managements, bulk loading and general questions about caching, the garbage collector and the likes. Well, as said we'll just talking about simple load and a clean unload, as I want to give beginners [...]

JActionScripters’ latest wonder: SiON Synthesizer

Marvin Blase — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:29:51 +0000

Currently there are several brilliant guys working on different sound-modification libs/scripts in Actionscript 3. Lee Brimelow and André Michelle came up with some pretty cool examples some weeks ago and as I am working with Synths in my band I'm always pretty interested in the techniques my modulars (Kaoss Pad #3) are using. Anyway, I [...]