FlashGuru Consulting

Astro: Flash Player 10 - Available Now!

Guy Watson — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:07:28 +0000

Today Adobe have released a beta version of Flash Player 10 to the masses. Its available to download now on Adobe Labs, there you will find various demos that showcase some of the new features in the player.

The latest player features some of the most requested features since the release of the last version of the Flash Player:

Bi-Directional Text Support - People have been asking for this for years.

3d Effects - Move DisplayObjects around in 3d space with Actionscript.

Dynamic sound generation - Andre Michelle, eat your heart out.

FileReference runtime access to files without sending the file to the server first.

Typed Arrays - AKA Vectors (An array that contains only data of the same type).

GPU Blitting/Compositing - Faster rendering old and new Flash Movies.

Custom Filters - Get more info about Adobe Pixel Blender, a new programming language that allows you to create your own super fast filters by manipulating pixels.

I am very, very excited about this release primarily because its now easy to create truly localized worldwide websites in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and all the other languages that have been tricky business in the past. I dont think it is as ground-breaking as Flash Player 9 which was a huge leap forward, but there are still some pretty hefty game-changing features in this one. I have on concern already and that is that i am worried that the 3d Effects are going to be misused/overused now its so easy and we will have another Skip Intro era.

Adobe MAKE SOME NOISE

Guy Watson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:31:58 +0000

Andre Michelle is leading a campaign called Adobe MAKE SOME NOISE that is calling for Adobe to take some action and fix a pretty big problem with the Actionscript Sound API in the latest Flash Player and also to rally together support to show Adobe that alot of people need/want more control over sound with Actionsript in the next version of the Flash Player.

Andre does some really cool stuff with Flash, some of which im sure you have seen in the past. Alot of his commercial work of late seems to be advanced sound manipulation applications, for which he has had to hack his way around the limited sound api that exists today. A recent Flash Player dot release broke most of these applications.

Show your support and blog about it! Spread the word please.

Site is being updated!

Guy Watson — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:57:02 +0000

Sorry for the mess people, im re-jiggerising things around and getting the first magazine article together. It turns out wordpress doesn’t like to have two seperate instances running on the same server, using the same database, in seperate folders (it gets seriously confused), also why cant i rename any of the standard wordpress files? i hate having my root folder look a mess with files like wp-comments.php and so on…

There is a lot to do, ive got over 600 old posts to tag, there is the links to sort out for the sidebar, advertisement spots, search pages, archives pagination and the asides blog. It’s all fun and games.

Delete Empty Keyframes

Guy Watson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:50:31 +0000

This Command will delete all empty keyframes on the selected layers. This is useful when you get a messy file from your designers and want to tidy it up a bit.

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Auto Save

Guy Watson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:47:39 +0000

This extension adds a new panel to the Flash Authoring Tool, that enables you to specify an interval for automatically saving the document you are presently working on. Intervals can be set in minutes or hours.

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JSFL FileSystem API

Guy Watson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:46:40 +0000

This extension adds a new FileSystem object to the JSAPI which contains 23 new JSFL functions that allow you to modify/access the local FileSystem in your JSFL scripts. You can for example write to the registry using JSFL, execute external applications and so on…

Documentation is provided for each of the new functions in the Help Panel.

As of Macromedia Flash MX 2004 7.2 a new FLfile object is added to the JSAPI. It provides some, but not all of the functionality found in this extension.

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Create Frame Sequence

Guy Watson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:44:45 +0000

This extension adds a new command to the Commands menu in the Flash Authoring Tool that will take the frames you have selected and add them to a new layer in the order you selected them, one by one.

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Batch Run

Guy Watson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:40:56 +0000

This extension adds a new command to the Commands menu in the Flash Authoring Tool that will open a list of flash documents, run a jsfl script for that document, and then optionally save that document and close it. All of which is customised through a GUI.

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Add Stop Frames

Guy Watson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:34:16 +0000

This extension adds a new command to the Commands menu in the Flash Authoring Tool that will convert each of the selected frames into a keyframe and add a stop() action to it.

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Duplicate Layer

Guy Watson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:32:22 +0000

This extension adds a new command to the Commands menu in the Flash Authoring Tool that will create an exact replica of a layer above the currently selected layer.
Assign the Command a Keyboard shortcut for maximum effect and ease of use.

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