Today I spend a considerable amount of time trying to change this (10000000) into this (10.000.000). Because I don't think anyone should have to go throught the same ordeal here's a little function that will do it for you.
References:
Dreaming in Flash interviewed Rob Bateman, The Chief architect and co-founder of the Away3D engine, on his views about the upcoming release of Flash Player 10 and how it will affect Away3D.
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Flash and Flex frameworks.
Lately I've working on three big projects that would require the usage of a framework, and not wanting to extend my own framework, that consists mostly of accumulated libraries over time, I decided to give the most prominent ones a go.
So I started by checking out what was on the market, I found as-hive, pureMVC, Cairngorm and Mate ( there are a few more but somehow I didn't feel they were mature enough to be used.
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Adobe just released the beta version 10 of Flash Player, codename Astro!
You can get it over at the labs, and check out it's cool demos!
The biggest thing they also released as a beta was Pixel Blender, formerly Hydra, the new language that will enable us to write filters using the GPU.
Also they introduced a new parameter that enables us to take advantage of the GPU capabilities of the the user, this is truly a great day!
I can't wait to start playing with both Pixel Blender and the new native 3d features!!!
Links:
Demo - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html
Labs page - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
Pixel Blender - http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Pixel_Bender_Toolkit
In the last month I thought Adobe had protect the loadBytes method from the loader so that only “regular†files like mp3, jpg, etc could be loaded, lots of good library’s like Benjamin Dobler wav reader stop working. What I think it is that in last version of flash player Adobe turn allowLoadBytesCodeExecution to false. If you see Adobe documentation they have written “Note: This API is likely to be replaced in a future release of AIR.†If anyone knows what really happen let me know. Now the good part, to solve that is simple, you only need to set allowLoadBytesCodeExecution to true.
I usually work in desktop application and we like it or not flash is optimized for the web so normally we have to put complete event ever time we load anything, and it’s logic, because for the web things have to be asynchronous but for desktop applications they not.
We have already load text and xml files synchronous and done some things with sql lite synchronous, I think for now images and sounds can’t be done, because even if you get the bytes, you always need to invoke loadBytes method from the loader and put a complete event listener, fuck! lol, I hope that in the next release of flash the loader have an synchronous method of load the bytes.
There it’s a class to load an xml file synchronous.
How to use:
var configXml:XML = XmlLoader.load("Config.xml");
Internal clock in flash player sucks a lot. I am doing a project that needs to have a lot of precision in the time intervals. The project is like a music sequencer, so the timer have to tick always at the same time, because if not you listen like an empty space between sounds. I have done some tests with the event OnEnterFrame and the Timer function, and the results are the follows: if you start a timer with 3000 milliseconds the results will be: 3045, 3072, 3000, 3305, 3079, 3063, 3081, so you have like 80 milliseconds of difference, it’s not good enough. I have done the same test in c#, and the results are 3000,3000,3000,3000. It’s a little bit sad, if anyone knows a solution, please comment.
Just read on Aral's blog that flash is going open source, this is great news!Â
As Adobe will be opening up the AMF and the porting APIs for the flash  player. This means that we'll see flash in even more platforms and flavors, and will give projects like haXe a great boost!
Some reference links:
http://flashmobileblog.com/?p=91
http://aralbalkan.com/1332
This week a friend of mine was making me questions about the binary sockets in flash, so I remember to post an example about it. I have been using a lot of XmlSockets for the last 2 years with the latest versions of flash, so it was really easy to implement binary socket because they are very similar. Binary sockets are really a great improvement in flash. I have seen a lot of implements like joysticks servers, connections to mail servers and so on; there are some examples on byteArray.org.
This example is a simple chat, it have a C sharp server and a flash client. Just click on socketServer.exe to start the server it will be listening on port 8000, then start client.exe and hit connect button. The server will accept multiple connections, so you can start more than one client, if you are testing it in different machines, just check IP address of the server and write it on the client Ip text Field and hit connect button.
The source code for client and server are on the example zip, it was done using Visual c# express 2008 and Adobe Flash 9.
Socket Example With Source Code