Presenting Rails for Flash at LFPUG

As usual, the London Flash Platform User Group event will be held on the last Thursday of the month; that’s this Thursday, October the 30th.

First up this month are the guys at Unit9, they’ll be taking you through their processes and how they keep everyone in the company communicating effectively for maximum result.

I will be following up with a presentation on Ruby on Rails and Flash; taking you through the steps needed to create a REST-ful Rails application that is read and writeable through a Flash Front end. This will give you an introduction to Ruby on Rails and how this powerful web application framework can make it ridiculously easy for you to kick-start your next, or first, database powered Flash application.

The LFPUG will be held at it’s usual location, Cosmobar on Clerkenwell Road (54-56) and the presentations start at 19:00. For more information on the sessions, and indeed on how to get there, see the official LFPUG site.

See you there!

Are your big integers flipping out?

Mine were.

You see, my integer typed variables were, quite literally, flipping out: positive numbers became negative numbers for no apparent reason and I was pretty sure the logic I was coding wasn’t flawed. After a few hours of tearing my hair out I remembered reading something about there being a limit on the size of an integer in ActionScript 3, could this be my problem? I never thought I’d need to know what those limits were until today.

Here’s some useful information on the range of the int, uint and Number datatypes in Actionscript 3.

If you are dealing with very large numbers, and funky stuff starts happening, remember this:

“The range of values represented by the int class is
-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647″

If you know your number will be an unsigned (non-negative value) you probably want to use the uint datatype (uint) as its maximum is twice that of an int, but only in the positive direction (yep, that makes sense doesn’t it?)

“The range of values represented by the uint class is 0 to 4,294,967,295″

If you can’t make up your mind, just go for the Number datatype as it can take up to 53 bits to represent it, instead of the 32 bits available to the int and uint data types.

“Number is useful in situations where the range of values required exceeds the valid range of the int and uint data types. The Number class can be used to represent integer values well beyond the valid range of the int and uint data types. The Number data type can use up to 53 bits to represent integer values, compared to the 32 bits available to int and uint.”

(all text in quotes comes from the Flash livedocs)

p.s. if anyone has done some tests on the performance of large numbers in ActionScript 3, I’d love to know, so leave me a comment.

CS3 Video Workshop

I just saw that Adobe have put up a great new learning resource for the CS3 suite; the Creative Suite 3 Video Workshop. You can find it in the design center section on the Adobe website, and there are already quite a few videos available.

Go check out the CS3 Video Workshop now.

Two pints of lager and sound in the Video Encoder please…

One of the things I love about the standalone FLV encoder that comes packaged with Flash, is the ability to do all sorts of things with the video when you encode it to the .flv format.
Some of my favourite features are the ability to crop the video dimensions, scrub through and embed cuepoints to trigger ActionScript and edit the video in and out points, among other things.

There’s one major problem I keep running into though; and that’s the lack of sound when scrubbing through video. This means it’s really difficult to insert precise cuepoints based on sound cues without using some other external program to pinpoint the insertion points.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but with Flash Video taking over the world and all, this would be a really neat addition to the next version of the FLV encoder.

No special right-click for Apollo

Apollo, the Adobe desktop runtime environment currently still in development, will most likely not have a special form of right-click context menu functionality.Apollo applications are, in essence, a collection of your traditional web technologies bundled into an installable application. Examples of exisiting technologies you will be able to leverage are HTML, Flash, CSS and PDF. On top of that, you have Apollo specific functionalities that will allow you for example to access the file system or automatically search for updates.When a user right-clicks inside an Apollo application, they will see the context menu of the type of technology they are currently interacting with. If, for example, the application is built in Flash (and it seems most early Apollo examples are) they will see the Flash context menu. Right-click on an html link and you will see the context menu of the Apollo html rendering engine, a choice Adobe have yet to publicly announce. UPDATE: This functionality has since been added to AIR and allows completely customisable context menus. It’s a pity Apollo won’t have an across-the-board right-click context menu, even if it may be difficult to achieve. I think it will confuse some users and diminish the application-ness of the Apollo experience. Things are looking bright though. Apollo will usher in completely different types of applications and programs.

FDT to be updated in October

The guys at Powerflasher are releasing an update for the Flash Development Tool (FDT) in October. This is great news for anyone using FDT, there hasn’t been an update for quite some time (Oct of last year.)

This release brings FDT up to version 1.5, the last before ActionScript 3 support is added. More importantly perhaps, another developer has been added to the team, which is great news for us as it seemed things were a bit quiet over at Powerflasher for a while.

FDT is an Eclipse based IDE for editing ActionScript code. It is currently the most advanced ActionScript editor on the market and I highly suggest you give it a try, even if the first week of using it might be a bit painful. For me personally, figuring out that I had to import the Flash 7 or Flash 8 libraries into each project to allow code highlighting almost made me give up on it, but after some perseverance I’m glad I didn’t. It’s a big FDT-newbie pitfall for those using Flash 8 (the first version to split classes into seperate folders.)

(via MX Traveler, link to original announcement)

Flash to JS: Special characters

Just a quick note for those sending string variables with special characters from Flash to JavaScript in FireFox.

I came across a problem whereby strings with special characters would not be sent to Firefox properly. In Internet Explorer everything worked fine, but Firefox was having none of it; any string containing a special character was not passed to JavaScript. No garbled messages or weird characters, just plain old empty nothingness.

It turns out a ‘bug’ in FireFox decodes the string before it is sent to JavaScript. You can find out more about the problem on the FlashCoders list here.

The solution on FlashCoders involves double escaping the string you want to send, like so:

FYI, I’m using the Flash/JS Integration Kit to send the variables.

LFPUG Meeting: Localisation and AS3

Tonight I will once again be joining the rowdy pissed-up bunch at the London Flash Platform User Group where we will hopefully not be outstaying AKQA’s welcome with our random shouting, gibberish and general tomfoolery.

Dave will be talking about Flash localisation and Tink will be taking care of the Actionscript 3 goodness.

It looks like we’ll be streaming this one live over Flash Communication Server; a first for the LFPUG. You can catch the live stream at http://www.lfpug.com/live

Flash/JS Integration Kit gets a big thumbs up

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on a major project whereby our team needed to pass values to HTML.

Initially we used a plain old getURL ActionScript function when we needed to pass values to JavaScript. This worked fine untill we tested its cross-platform compatibility. Not soon thereafter, our hopes and dreams were dashed when we ran into trouble with Safari; even though the documentation claimed that Safari supports this method.
This method also meant it would be difficult to get values back from JavaScript, should the need arise in the future, and knowing how things usually go, it probably will.

So we did what any smart developer would do, we turned to the Flash/Javascript Integration Kit, developed by Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers; back when Macromedia was still Macromedia, and Adobe was, well, Adobe.
It works a treat and we were able to swiftly wipe any cross-browser concerns aside and move on to more important things.
I can heartily recommend its usage to anyone integrating Flash with JavaScript. The documentation was concise and easy to follow.

You can find the project’s homepage at osflash.org/flashjs,where you will also find a link to the kit itself.

Flash on Rails: Part 2

I finally got Flash consuming dynamic Rails content for the first time.

I first used FlashVars, variables passed as a parameter inside the html object tag, which is arguably the easiest way to provide Flash with dynamic content. I created a variable in my Rails Controller and give it a string value. This variable was then available to my View, an rhtml file located in the app/views folder. I placed the Flash movie in the public folder and embedded it in the view rhtml page. I had a bit of a hard time getting my head around the paths in Rails, but I suspect it won’t take too long to become accustomed to them.
Once I pointed my browser to the Controller path. The Flash movie came up and my message was displayed. You can access variables passed to Flash in this way by looking in the _root level of your movie.

After this initial success, I turned to creating an xml object in Ruby. I used Builder to piece together an xml string in my Rails Controller and requested it in Flash using the LoadVars class.
The xml loaded nicely, but somewhere along the line an extra tag became appended to the end of my xml output:

I suspect this is the leftover remnants of some sort of automatic string conversion utility in Rails, but for the moment I can only guess as to why it’s there.
Nonetheless, I have made my first real connection between Ruby on Rails and Flash.

Time to crack open a beer…