Summary of FAME Tools on BIT-101

I just found this nice summary of FAME (or FAMES) tools on the BIT-101 blog. If you're planning to get into OS Flash Development, it gives you a good idea what you're in for. You might want to read his post before checking out my tutorial on getting started with FAME.

New Flash 8 Beta Player Is Up (v. 8,0,5,0)

Colorer Plugin For Eclipse

I'm very psyched about this Eclipse plugin for one main reason: Word Wrap! It looks like it has some other nice features as well.

Now if only someone could write a plugin that prevent Eclipse from using up all my RAM. Arg!

JavaScripting with Eclipse and WTP

I'm still not satisfied with any of the JavaScript editors I've been using lately, so I started playing around with WTP for Web Development (a new version was released this week). After a few hours, I can see the potential. Unfortunately, I think it has a way to go before the potential is fulfilled. Oh well, what do you expect for a version 0.7.

The Good:
• Java, JavaScript and ActionScript coding can all happen in the same IDE!
• "All In One" install makes it easy to install the various packages (including Eclipse itself). We could using something like this for FAME.
• Outline View does a great job organizing functions and variables
• Code hints for JavaScript functions.

The Bad:
• There's a serious lack of documentation. Not even a readme to be found!
• ASP wasn't recognized as a file format. I had to add it manually.
• Outline View doesn't support JavaScript Classes and Methods.
  
• I would have preferred an "All In One" install that had everything except Eclipse, since I've already got that installed.
• I couldn't get the Preview in Browser feature to work with FireFox from within Eclipse. Only IE.
  

If you're feeling adventurous, this is worth checking out. But if even FAME is too much for you, you might want to wait for this to mature.

Is Flash Really Better?

I've consolidated some of my previous posts on Flash vs. AJAX into an article. I think the number of checks in the Flash column give the impression that Flash is a superior solution. Certainly for many hardcore Flash developers would say that you can do anything in Flash, so you might as well do everything in Flash. But ultimately, it depends on what you are developing.

There is one area where AJAX simply kills Flash: dynamically generated text-heavy applications. And at the moment, these dominate the web. So if you're making an email program, or an online personal organizer, or an online store, Flash doesn't make much sense. It simply doesn't give the same flexibility for parsing and displaying large amounts of text data. Anyone who's had to build a Flash app with Dynamic Text Fields knows what a headache it is. Without writing a bunch of code, there simply isn't enough flexibility available for repositioning or resizing text fields. The problem gets even worse if your app needs to be localized...

I think it's inevitable that internet apps will evolve to be more of an interactive multimedia experience. At that point -- if it's still in contention -- Flash may be poised to take over. But for now, we're still in the stone age.

Flash 8 Gradient Wheel Demo and Code

I've posted another Flash 8 demo, building on my experiments from yesterday.

I set out to do something that would be pretty difficult to do using using simple MovieClips. Basically, I use the matrix drawing technique described yesterday to create a gradient wheel. Then I use a simple onEnterFrame rotation to animate the wheel. Note that the frame rate is a lot better because I'm not redrawing the clip every frame.

View the demo
View the source

If you want to compile this yourself, it should be pretty easy using the FAME setup I described. However, you'll need to grab the Delegate Class from Dynamic Flash, and include it in your MTASC std directory.

It should be fairly easy to modify the code and come up with various other effects. (If you do, let me know.)

I also should mention that I've made a few updates to my Flash 8 Docs, including some descriptions for the Matrix Class. I'm thinking of writing a full tutorial about using Matrices, but I'm still getting my head around a few things. Stay tuned.

Flash 8 Demo - Rainbow

I've done my first full-fledged Flash 8 demo. Remember the NBC peacock?

So I created that kind of rainbow effect by rotating a line segment using a matrix transformation. Now granted, you could create the same kind of effect using plain old MovieClips and rotations, but this seemed like a good way to play around with new functionality.

rainbow demo
big circle rainbow demo

I'll post the code later this week, so be sure to check back on my blog.

The Flash 8 Beta Player is required to view these demos!

One note about how slow the frame rate is - at first I though this was because Matrix operations are pretty processor-intensive. As mentioned by Patrick Mineault:

flash.geom.* is implemented in player actionscript, not ASNative. All I can say is wtf? It sounds like flash.geom.* is going to be used with bitmaps transforms and such, it better damn be implemented in C++ by the time the player is out of beta, as it has potential to be a bottleneck

After further experimentation, though, I've concluded that the main bottleneck here is that I'm pushing the limits of the drawing API. To draw a large circle, I have to construct up to 360 line segments per frame. As the number of segments increases, things bog down. I was wondering if MovieClip.cacheAsBitmap might help here, but apparently not...