First Decorator screens!

Today our good friend Gabor announced his new baby: Decorator.
Decorator is an Image Generator that exports/print postscript from it. Which means you can print your images a large as you want, without any pixel.

It generates lovely outputs and I can already see the potential to this awsome tool, my living room will love this new way of wallpaper, and the best about it's always unique due to a random seed generator.

I've had the opportunity to try the closed beta, and I must say that I was impressed with the outcome of just a little fiddling with the engine.

So be sure to drop by FlashGuy.de and check the amazing outputs of Decorator.

Giving Flex Builder a Library (SWC)

Have you ever wondered why Flex doesn't have a nice library like Flash IDE?
You'd love to use Flex but not having that nice little library there puts you off?
Well here's how we do it:
First create your FLA file, then create all the items you want inside (they don't need to be on stage just library will do), be sure to tick 'export for actionscript' and 'export in firstframe', also you can change the base class to something else that will add functionality to your movieclip.
Then in export preferences, tick 'export swc'.
Ok so now we have a nice little SWC file, how do we get it into Flex? Easy
Open project properties, go to Build Path > Library Path and add your SWC file.
That's it!
Congratulations now you have auto complete goodness on your AS3 Flex Builder application
Just keep in mind that these elements will be exported in the initial load of your website, so if you want to preload them be sure to use the preloader.

Flex3 and AIR 1.0 are out!!!

These were the news everyone was waiting for, both AIR and Flex3 are out, they're final, ready to be taken by us and pushed to new levels!!!

The details and pricing for Flex3 can be found here and I find them quite accessible for a full version going only for CHF 319.00, it's a bargain for the best Flash/Flex development IDE.

As for AIR it now has a nice little official Adobe link, and they even show an impressive list of clients for a just released product, featuring the likes of ebay and nasdaq.

So get your copy of Flex3 while it's fresh, I know I'll get mine

Ah, also for those of us who live in Europe we'll have plenty of chances to catching the on.air tour here's the link with the dates.

Papervision3d GW Memory Leak

Yesterday I came across a nasty leak with GW, it just wouldn't kill my moviematerials after I removed all the references to them, I tried it all, removeChild, removeListener, weak keys... you name it.

So I finally decided to go have a look at Papervision's destroy methods, and surprise surprise they weren't being called, no harm there, it's alpha these things are meant to happen

So here's what you have to do to force those destroy methods to execute, and clean your memory.

In org.papervision3d.core.proto.MaterialObject3D  set the destroy method from protected to public, do the same to all the materials that you use, like org.papervision3d.materials.MovieMaterial . When you're done with these just the destroy method in your class. For me it looks something like this:

Hope this helps.

WOW meets Papervision3D

WOW was released today, in case you don't know what WOW is let me quote a little description from WOW: "WOW-Engine is a free AS3 open source physics engine written by Seraf ( Jérôme Birembaut ) capable to handle positions in a 3D environment."

We've all been waiting for this moment for a very long time, to have physics
and 3D come together, so without further due here's a little demo I've thrown together in an hour or so.

The code will follow shortly, I just need to tidy it up .

demo

Enjoy.

Minimal component set

I've been doing a lot of forms lately and that, as you most likely know, it's hard boring work. Always fighting your way through components and the woes of skins.

So I set out to find and easier of doing things and found it over at Keith Peters blog bit-101, it's best two features that will save you the hassle of always having to create component, addChild, set x position, set y position, you can do it all in one line. Components that fire events such as click or change, also take a fourth parameter of defaultHandler and that also saves the addEventListener.

So be sure to check them out at: bit-101 blog or download source here.

As3Crypto

This is a bit of old news as the latest version of AS3Crypto came out in November, but I've only had the time to post about it now.

So what is As3Crypto? Well it's the Swiss Knife of AS3 Cryptography, I've been using it for a while now to manage secure communications for highscores and other sensitive data.

And guess what, a new version just (in November) came out, with support for TLS! Yes TLS in AS3, also version 1.3 has a lot of new improvements ( check the list ).

So to wrap things up, I prefer to use AS3Crypto over Adobe's crypto library because it has more features, a nice wrapper class and from my experience it's usually faster. Be sure to check out this great tool to check if your encryption is working well.

Expect a tutorial on how to use it with PHP soon

AS3 Tweener engines, GOASAP and Adobe.

Recently Moses Gunesh has introduced Go:  "a generic set of base classes that should support many kinds of animation systems".

This strucks me as great news as in the past I used FUSE2 and when I moved to AS3 I found myself looking for a similar alternative but not really finding one as good or widely accepted as FUSE2.
The I came across Tweener, and that's what i currently use to power all my projects, it's simple, lightweight and most important easy to use.

Normally this would be the end of the story for me, but somehow Tweener is lacking some funcionalities that would like so i moved to Boostworthy's engine and again I found myself lacking some of the things i had in Tweener. So I kept searching and found Go, that altough it's not an Engine per se allows me to have all the functionality I want by extending it.

Also i found a great tool to ease my decision, and yours, Moses's TweenBencher. It's a great tool to test out all the different Tweener and see their advantages and disavantages. Be sure to check it out.

But most importantly I came across Moses's proposal to Adobe for a Core Animation Library and after reading it I must say that I agree with it to it's full extent. So be sure to check it out, and to make your voice heard if you agree, or not, with it.

Extend Flex 3 trial period

Ted Patrick published on his blog two serials to give you an extension on the trial period of Flex 3. Word has it that it should be enough until the final version comes out.

Here they are:

MAC extension serial #: 1307-0059-4523-4261-9974-9828

WIN extension serial #: 1307-1052-9498-6822-0041-4602

Enjoy

Papervision 2.0 PhongCube Demo

Today a milestone in the internet world was achieved, Papervision 2.0 Alpha codename GreatWhite is out

So here's a little demo on the new Phong shader :) As soon as i have the time tonight i'll put on a much nicer one. This is just to show that altough PV3d just got a new whole set of features it's still easy to use

PhongCube