Beautify Code Blog

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

Tobias Oberrauch — 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!

Tobias Oberrauch — 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 [...]

Alpha / Soft Masks in Actionscript

Marvin Blase — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:44:31 +0000

We're all used to the fact that the Flash IDE doesn't support soft masks for any reason. Everyone needing soft / alpha gradient masks must use Actionscript to realize that. Just add a PNG (you want to use as map) with transparency to your library (or load it), export it for Actionscript (in our case [...]

Desktop Reporting for Google Analytics

Marvin Blase — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:10:23 +0000

Wow, somebody thought somewhere that somehow the Google Analytics interface could become somewhat more trendy. And this thought also included making it available from Desktop. Smart idea and even smarter AIR-Application that Desktop Reporting has developed. These guys made it possible to provide you with even more detailed information than the GA-Interface does for pretty [...]

Compile AIR Projects with FDT

Marvin Blase — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:05:20 +0000

An updated and extended version for FDT 4 and AIR 2 has been released! AIR2 AND FDT4 (M3) – A DETAILED WALKTHROUGH Original Post: Admitting that I was surprised pleasantly that even the official Powerflasher-Blog published an article about compiling AIR projects in FDT 3 I recently started to take the challenge and began with [...]

F*CSS – Finally parsing CSS the right way

Marvin Blase — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:52:46 +0000

TheFlashBum: if you need text you need F*CSS. Again just a quick post to mention Jesse Freeman's revolutionary CSS-Parsing library. This one allows you to easily access CSS styles from an external .css file in a handy, feeling right way. On the official page he provides a pretty easy-to-use example and of course the library [...]

FDT – Sandbox Security Violation in OS X

Marvin Blase — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:14:45 +0000

Just found out, that this exception: Only local-with-filesystem and trusted local SWF files may access local resources (which might occur when trying to load a local css-file within a FDT-build) can easily be fixed by passing the use-network param. For sure set the value to true :)

FDT – Seeing no Traces in Console

Marvin Blase — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:36:09 +0000

Hey, just a quick note for everybody (and I know there are lots of you) who's not seing traces in FDT. This mainly depends on a missing Adobe Flash Debug Player for your system. So grab it there: Adobe Flash Player - Downloads. It's the Content Debugging one. After the install (and if I remember [...]

Debug-Class extended – A detailed Trace

Marvin Blase — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:44:51 +0000

We often had to spend a couple of minutes finding out which class traced something like "hey, it works". With this in mind I came up with the idea to give trace the ability to even show which class was tracing. So we've extended our Debug-Class furthermore (there will be an article about dumping your [...]

Redefining the ENTER-key in textfields

Tobias Oberrauch — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:33:28 +0000

This one's showing how to redefine the ENTER-key in textfields to prevent it from breaking lines. PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: textfield.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, keyHandler); private function keyHandler(event:KeyboardEvent):void { if(event.type == KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP && event.keyCode == Keyboard.ENTER) { event.target.text = event.target.text.replace("\r", ""); } }

The constructor returns a value!?

Tobias Oberrauch — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:30:11 +0000

PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: public function create(templateID:int):* { return new Template(templateID).get; } PLAIN TEXT Actionscript: package de.derpunkt.framework.assets { import de.derpunkt.framework.content.Template01; import de.derpunkt.framework.content.Template02; import de.derpunkt.framework.content.Template03; /** * @author Tobias Oberrauch <tobias@beautifycode.de> */ public class Template { [...]

FDT Quicktip #1 – Quickfix with Methodparams

Marvin Blase — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:03:26 +0000

This one's about pressing CTRL+1 when passing Objects to a param. Just let FDT itself add the private var, assigning the param to it and auto-import instantly. Brilliant!

FDT – HowTo Debug in Browers

Marvin Blase — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:22:17 +0000

Hey everybody out there! This is a brandnew and awesome tip for everybody working with Powerflasher's FDT 3. As everybody knows FDT has built in a pretty neat debugger with cool features like Breakpoints, realtime variable watching, etc. - But all that is (as it is usually) limited to the Environment itself. That means if [...]