The FlashChemist!

Git is a distributed version control system much like Mercurial and BitKeeper (Commercial) and unlike CVS and Subversion. Git is distributed, that means the complete source repository is distributed across developer machines and server machines, build machines, etc. Most of the commit and diff actions happens locally so they blistering fast compared to SVN’s over-the-network commits and diffs.

I was in search of a Flash Builder plugin for Git and the search was quiet easy: EGit

Installation also pretty easy. Here are the steps.

Go to the download page of Egit : http://www.eclipse.org/egit/download/

Copy the URL of main site from page (which is http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates)

Go to Flash Builder, click Help >> Install New Software

Add the copied url to the Window which opens (as seen below)

Make the selections as shown in picture (you dont need to install the source). Complete the wizard and Flash Builder will take some time to install the plaug-in. When the installation is done it will ask you to restart Eclipse/Flash Builder, which you should do.

After restart, go to Window >> Other views. You will be able to find the Git Repositories view from the list.

This is it, and now you can continue and clone an existing Flash/Flex GIT repository and start working.

AMF Explorer is an  AMF data viewer which can be used to view the deserialized AMF requests and responses. The addon lets you see the requests and responses in the ‘Net’ panel of Firebug. You need to have Firebug addon installed in your Firefox.

Here are the URLs.

Addon Page

Home Page

This lets you see the AMF data as you used to (I used to) see using the Charles HTTP proxy application. Charles is not free and the evaluation version shuts down in every 10 minutes or so. Give it a try. Its still version 0.6 so more features may be pending.

Update: Few screen shots.

I was surprised by the fact that there is a limit to the maximum font size you can set in Flash. Yes, there is a limit and the magic number is 127 px. Collin Moock says, ‘The limitation is based on historical requirements placed on Flash Player by the operating system’ …

He mentions about a solution in his blog post here, which is really a work around, and it may not work well for you in all the situations. It basically to  resize the text field(scaled it proportionally).

Or read about font rendering using the FP 10 Drawing API here in Polygonal Lab (AS3 Data structures fame). There should not be any limitation to font size because it uses the drawing API and so vector shapes. But, obviously, it will not be a text field.

While this is an ideal choice of making AIR desktop applications for those who does not want the Flex framework, I am still surprised that Adobe didn’t add this option to its new IDE product, Flash Builder 4.0. Flex/Flash Builder being the best AS 3.0 editor so far, this option is really missing.

There is a bug in the Adobe JIRA – https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-9303 . But honestly, this looks like a natural choice for Adobe (!?)

I was using a hack for making this work with Flex Builder 3.0 and same works for Flash Builder 4.0. Its is a simple method though:

In the Flex/Flash Builder IDE, select ‘New >> Project’ and select ‘Flex Project’ option.

From the Wizard, please select ‘Desktop Application (Runs on AIR)’, give a project name and click ‘Next’ button instead of your usual ‘Finish’ button.

The next screen prompts for defining the folder for debug. Leave it as is, unless you want to, and click on ‘Next’ button.

The next screen is where you have to do some magic. Here it is.

Change the file extension of ‘Main Application file’ from .mxml to .as — nothing else.

Now click your favourite ‘Finish’ button, and you are set. But, if you run your project, it doesnt show up; this is because the visibilty option of your native window is set to ‘false’ by default. So, open up your application XML file (That will be in the root and named ProjectName-app.xml), and uncomment the sub node of the node and set it to true. Here is how it will look like:

Now, you have your AS3 AIR project, and you have access to all the AIR API’s, and your ’stage’ attribute will have the AIR related properties.

Workaround, still works nice. Adobe, we need this option from the wizard.

Here is an interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch at the Web 2.0 expo. Few of his comments goes like this

‘We will try to make the best HTML 5 tool in the world’

‘We don’t want to play technology game when Apple is playing Legal game’  about Apple coming up with SDK Licene 3.3.1

‘With Flash CS5 iPhone exporter, we proved that we can make same application work on multiple platforms, and Apple didn’t like it’

Watch it here.

See this awesome demo of a multi touch social media visualization for Pespsico, done with Flash Player 10.1’s new multi touch capabilities.

I have been searching for a sample of pure as3 project sample (using Flex Builder 3.0), for a new assignment. I have been using PureMVC multicore for my module Flex/AIR based applications, but never did a pure as3 project.

Here is the link to the beautiful tutorial by Actionscript 3.0 design patters. The source is available for view or download. The downloaded file is a Flex Builder archive and can directly be imported into Flex Builder workspace.

Well, I didnt know that there is no stopAllSounds() in AS3 compared to AS2 world. But ofcourse you need this method most of the time to stop all the sounds playing in a movie irrespective of the source or hierarchy.

The stop all sound functionality exists, but moved to a new safe place, called the ‘SoundMixer’ class. Why in SoundMixer? No idea.

SoundMixer.stopAll()

is going to do the trick for you.

I always used to feel that why playing sound in AS 3.0 is so complicated. You have to use Sound, SoundChannel, and SoundTransform to write a basic Audio Player. At times SoundMixer tooo.