Flash

I’ve just posted over in the Text Layout forums how I went about implementing Squiggly with “pure” Text Layout Framework… so that’s not using TLF/FTETextField or the Spark components. This is really just an overview which should give plenty to help you figure out the steps. I can’t paste the exact code because it’s embedded in a client project, but I do refer to some of the TLF functions throughout that you have to make use of, if anyone can suggest improvements, please drop them in the comments. ...

This post discusses the various workflows for producing SWFs with the standalone compiler that use graphical assets and animations created in Flash Professional (“Flash Pro”). At time of writing the latest version of Flash Pro is CS4, with CS5 briefly out in beta for a short while. Specifically we look at the methods that involve exporting SWCs and using the [Embed] metatag within class files. Recently I posted a bug report regarding the [Embed] metatag, which led me to write this post in order to find out whether people are happy with their current workflows and how well others receive projects when it comes to handovers and maintenance. ...

It appears a new Views module has been released which is causing a couple of problems with the Drupal/Flash stuff, so I’ve updated the post to describe the necessary steps. Hopefully the Adobe DevNet article will also be updated soon with these changes. You can read the updated post here.

I’m pleased to see that an article I wrote for Adobe DevNet has just gone live. “Creating Drupal Sites for Flash or Flex” describes the benefits of using a CMS for your Flash or Flex sites, how to set everything up, getting Flash talking to Drupal, and also covers the various modules available to power your site. Drupal is probably the most popular open source CMS out there, it has an enormous user community, and the best thing of all is probably the fact that you don’t have to write any PHP or SQL to take advantage of this as a result! (Unless of course you want to, Drupal is fully extensible). ...

I was up extremely late last night figuring this out, so I made some rough notes as I went along. Hopefully they’ll save someone a small nightmare. Disclaimer: I haven’t written C code since I was in my teens, and apart from some Objective-C from the comfort of XCode, I haven’t really done a whole lot of GCC compiling on any system, so this may not be the best way to do any of this. ...

The schedule has just gone up, new speakers have been added, and tickets are now on sale. You’ll want to get your tickets as soon as possible because the sooner you get them, the cheaper they are, and they’ll be going fast. There are options for companies that wish to send several different employees over the course of the three days (see Flexi-pass option), as well as student tickets and single day tickets. ...

Yesterday, to much excitement, Microsoft released Silverlight 3 beta, and gave a run-down on the new features at the MIX09 conference. It has been a very long time since I first looked at Silverlight (here’s my post on a pre 1.0 early build I got to use over in Redmond), and I’ve used both Silverlight and WPF since (which will eventually be two in the same IMHO), one app for the BBC was demo’d at the MIX07 keynote, so I’m fairly familiar with the offering and how it compares. ...

There are now two types of font embedding available to both Flash (CS4) and Flex 3 and 4. These are DefineFont3 (classic), and DefineFont4 (supporting CFF and the new text engine.) In Flash, Flex 2 and 3 you’d traditionally embed fonts for use in the TextField class, whether that’s a vanilla TextField, or a component that uses the TextField class and has been set to use embedded fonts. This is DefineFont3 embedding. The steps are usually: ...

I don’t have enough time right now to go into too much detail so I’m afraid this post will just consist of pointers and no real code samples, but I wanted to say that bullet points, although technically un-supported in the Text Layout Framework right now (in terms of <li> tags), are possible. Text alignment is already supported, and you can build a pretty solid text editor that uses these, as well as all the kinds of formatting you’d expect from colour to font weight. ...

In my previous post I posed the problem of using the new Text Layout Framework in an application where you already have an Undo stack/mechanism, for example in PureMVC with the Undo utility (CommandHistoryProxy). The challenge arises because the TLF already has an UndoManager, so the solution must hook into that. Added to that, in an application you’re likely to need to serialize your TextFlow to disk/server, which means de-serializing it, which means you’re storing your data outside of the TextFlow instance and needing to keep this store up to date as the user interacts with the TextFlow via the EditManager provided by the TLF. ...