So far I've considered Papervision3D as a product that's still in development - a fun toy to play with for those one-off projects. But I failed to realize how many badass mainstream websites are based on it until I watched the new Papervision3D 2007 showreel.
Flash Player 9.0.28 is the first version that supports true full screen playback for Flash movies. Unfortunately this awesome feature won't be fully supported by the Flash Authoring Environment until version 9 comes out later this year, but with a small modification to your Flash 8 installation, you can already create flash movies that make use of this feature today. Here's a simple tutorial to make your flash movie run in full screen:
This example of combining Flash and Ajax (in this case using the Prototype library) exists only to inspire other web developers to start having Flash and JavaScript talk with each other. Ever since Flash 8 the class ExternalInterface makes it easier than ever before to communicate from Flash to JavaScript and back. In this example I will load Flash using Unobtrusive Flash Object (UFO), then have Flash read an XML file, on user interaction send instructions to JavaScript, use Prototype to load the new content, and to top it off use some fine script.aculo.us animations. Sound complicated? If you can master this, you’re ready to build some wild Flash-Ajax sites.
Andrew Wason from Motionbox Inc. sent me the following workaround, which allows you to activate video smoothing for FLVPlayback components (in this case the instance FLVPlayer):
Flash Video (FLV) Anti-Aliasing
The functionality to have Flash anti-alias video playback has been around since Flash 6, but it wasn’t until Google Video that I found out about it. Flash gives users access to this functionality via the Video.smoothing property. Unfortunately this property is only available to plain Video objects. From my experimentations it doesn’t seem like Media Playback or FLVPlayBack objects use this property.
Have you ever had to write a piece of code to resize or move a MovieClip on the stage dynamically, using onEnterFrames or other dirty methods? If so, you should take a look at MC Tween. MC Tween is a free set of ActionScript prototypes (those little bits of code that extend already existent objects like MovieClips) written by Zeh Fernando. It offers a clean alternative to any home built code: All animations are time – not frame – based, which means a MC Tween controlled animation will run just as long on a slow computer as on a fast computer, since the speed of the animation is synchronized to the computer's internal clock, not the frame rate of the player. In addition MC Tween uses its own objects to assign onEnterFrames to, so the event handler of the object to be transformed remains free for your own behaviors.
At last Microsoft announced that they will cease support and distribution of IE 5 for Mac. This browser has been a burden not only for Flash developers but for the whole web dev community. Microsoft actually recommends upgrading to "more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari". I wonder why they didn't recommend Firefox...
By my standards no website should still use traditional webform GET or POST requests to transfer data to the server. Through AJAX, form data can be sent way faster, since only the necessary data is sent back and forth to the server. Thanks to the hard work of some individual developers, using AJAX to transfer data from html forms has been streamlined and has become very simple. I will demonstrate this by creating a comments form, which will transmit data to the server using the Prototype JavaScript Framework, developed by Sam Stephenson. The data will be processed on the server side and return data to the original html page, where it is displayed.
How often do you run into flash applications that run in a small box in the browser, or open in a popup so that the user is forced to view the application at a certain size? Most flash developers still arrange objects statically in their flash application, so that the application can only run at a specific size. How nice would it be if all flash applications would automatically fill up the complete browser window, without the need for a popup? Here I'll walk you through how to easily create a flash app that automatically runs at in the maximum space provided by the browser and also detects resizing, so you can adjust the position of you objects on the screen when the browser is resized.
My current favorites are:
Essential ActionScript 3.0
by Colin Moock
Over 900 pages of Flash goodness. If you're used to AS2 programming, this book will help you transition smoothly into AS3!
Flash 3D
by Jim Ver Hague and
Chris Jackson
Who honestly remembers the trigonometry to calculate the position of an object in 3D space? This book is full of great codesamples that will save you hours of headache trying to figure it out.
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