We're proud to announce that Dreaming has published a few tutorials over at The Tech Labs, these tutorials are exclusive and can be accessed at: http://www.thetechlabs.com/
They include an air contact manager, and two sound equalizer how-tos with one of them showing how to get those cool pv3d equalizers.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
This question popup up today while playing around with AIR and transparent windows. I wrote a simple actionscript app inside flex builder, that draws some sprites (that move randomly) onto a transparent AIR window.
The first time I ran the app (with only one circle), I was surprised to see my Pentium 4 (3.2 ghz) reach 30% of cpu usage to animate that single sprite. It the window had the transparency turned off the cpu usage would be 0-1%.
The second time I ran the app (with 10 circles), the frame-rate dropped dramatically from 24 to 12-fps, and the cpu usage went up to 50%. At this moment I truly believed that what I wanted to do could not be accomplished. I mean, with only 10 sprites moving around the screen all I get are 12-fps...
Having the AIR runtime installed on my mac (powerPC 1.5 ghz) I tried running the app with the 10 circles to have a laugh at the poor performance. When I saw the app running my jaw dropped... My mac was running the AIR app with the transparent window and the 10 sprites moving around at 24-fps. How could this be... I know for a _fact_ that the flash performance is ALOT worse on my mac than on the PC., so how could the mac be behaving so well... It it because macosx uses the gpu to render the windows? And because AIR is using one of those windows it's being rendered by the gpu instead of the cpu?
I decided to google for a while and found out that Windows uses layered windows to display transparent windows and that AIR is using that. I also read that when using layered windows the drawing of the windows goes into an off-screen buffer (probably inside the graphics card)
So I decided to draw 100 sprites inside the AIR app. Guess what happened? The frame-rate was still at 12-fps and the cpu was still at 50% the same values I got when drawing 10 sprites. At this moment I thought that maybe the frame-rate was so low because I have a very old graphics card.
I used another PC with a similar cpu (Pentium 4 3.4ghz) but with a kick-ass graphical card. The result: 70-fps and 15% cpu usage.
My guess is that because AIR is using transparent windows, the OS is rendering it inside the graphics card (remember the off-screen buffer) instead of the cpu.
Can anyone confirm this?
update: After a short discussion with ivan, I reckon that all flash "stuff" is still done in the flash player and is _not_ hardware accelerated. However, the transparency calculations, are done in the graphics card. If you have a good graphics card you don't need to overload the cpu with those calculations and you can use it for the flash calculations.
If you create an Actionscript Project inside Flex Buider 3 beta, there is no option to create and AIR application. However, when you create a Flex Project the option is there.
So how can you create an AIR Application in an Actionscript Project with Flex Builder 3 beta?
A co-worker of mine needed an application that would make it easy for him to take snapshots of .flv files for a content management system, so i came up with the idea of having a go and doing it with air.
So as a follow up i'll make a little tutorial explaining how it works. As Usual you can have a look in the code for the intructions. And should you have any questions feel free to ask them.
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