I’ve recently updated my application template located in the examples section of my Bumpslide Library. I’ve taken this a step further by packaging this as an archive that is ready to use as a starting point for new AS3 Flash applications.
Download: Bumpslide AS3 App Template
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Until watching Jun Heider’s presentation on the Flex Profiler, I never realized I could use it to profile SWF’s compiled from Flash CS3. I guess I thought there was some special flex mojo in there, but in fact, this is quite simple to do. And, you don’t event need to setup a project in Flex Builder.
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This was one of the best presentations I saw at 360 flex. Straight to the point, technical enlightenment from the smartest guy in the room. If you don’t have a comfortable notion of Flex and data binding going in, this may scare you off the framework entirely. Just remember, data binding is not magic. Take note of the code that the Flex compiler is generating for you, and be aware of how much overhead is being added to your app every time you use it. You may already know this stuff, but Michael just has a great way of putting it all together for you.
Screencast: Diving in the Data Binding Waters with Michael Labriola
There’s been a lot of talk about the potential dead end that is EcmaScript 4. This whole thing seems rather rediculous to me. Your tool of choice will most likely not disappear overnight. And, hell, even if namespaces did disappear from AS3, I might not miss it. When I first heard about this, I thought, hey, this might be a good time to start using haxe. See, haxe looks a lot like AS3, and it compiles down to various SWF versions as well as Javascript, and now even PHP. If I need to write a javascript library, using haxe lets me work with a smarter language and compiler and still support all major browsers. I was curious what Nicolas Cannasse thought of all this, and sure enough he has a blog post about this very topic, except he wrote it 9 months ago.
http://blog.haxe.org/entry/25
Update: he has posted a more timely analysis as well…
http://ncannasse.free.fr/?p=82
For a recent project I needed to create 2D barcodes on printouts as a way of encoding a large batch of data. I settled on the PDF417 barcode format since it was well-known and unencumbered by licensing restrictions. This is the same format used on the back of many drivers licenses. There are numerous commercial libraries and barcode fonts on the market, but there was nothing that supported AS3 out of the box. After some research, I decided to port an open-source java library (pdf417lib by Paulo Soares) to AS3. This is the result of those efforts.
Source Code: pdf417lib_as3_src_20080730.zip
Online Demo: PDF417 Barcode Generator
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