flashalisious

So I have been at Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago all week. The whole experience has been really great. What was even better than that was a sneak peek at a new application that Adobe says that it will be releasing sometime in 2008 - code name “Thermo”.

I can not tell you how excited I was about this app. What is Thermo you ask? Well let me tell you from my perspective what Thermo is….

Just a week before MAX I was finally wanting to write my first project completely in Flex Builder. This was a really really frustrating thing from a design standpoint. I would be what the industry is referring to as a “Devigner” Half Designer / Half Developer. I can write some code when it comes down to it and I really enjoy figuring out the functionality of an app but I have always done all my sites or apps in the Flash IDE and laid them out in Photoshop before I move everything over to Flash for animation and coding.

When it comes to doing a project by setting up your design in Photoshop and then getting that design into Flex Builder….. well …. let’s just say it. IT IS A PAIN IN THE ASS! As far as I am concerned.

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FatFreeCart is the free shopping cart widget. It works inside your website, your blog and will even work from your MySpace page. It is simply a copy-paste cart and does not require you to register with us or install anything. It works with PayPal and Google Checkout. It supports product variations, shipping, handling and sales tax.

Now, I know, I know, this is a site about flash. Well I feel that it is important to expand beyond flash sometimes and let people know about cool new free tools like this. I have a lot of customers come to me that have a need for a simple way to take payment over the internet but do not have a tone of products to offer. This is a fast simple way to run a shopping cart on your site. It will make your site look a little more professional than the other guys.

If you are a web developer but you and you really have had nothing to do with shopping cart sites in the past this would be a great way to integrate this type of functionality into your site. Check it out and let me know what you think.

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Adobe put out actionscript 3 (AS3) this year. There are a tone of books and tutorials out there now. So do you dive in or not? The short answer is….Yes. If you want to be able to do some really cool things on your flash or flex projects then you need to start digging in.

AS3 will give you a tone of performance improvements and some are the new features are just great. If you are a new user to actionscript don’t start with AS2. Everything is headed for AS3 in a hurry. There are quite a few changes to the code and the way you code buttons and events are totally different in AS3. If you are a big AS2 user you will feel like this takes a lot longer but you will see and understand the benefit after you start using the new code.

So I guess I am updating my goal. It is Always to “Learn Actionscript” but now it is to Learn Actionscript 3.

There are some great books out there. Check out http://oreilly.com. I would say you need to pick up Essential Actionsript 3.0 and Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook ASAP.

learn more at Adobe Labs

Good luck and keep coding.

See more progress on: learn actionscript

Three new cheatsheets for developers using and getting started with Apollo. All of the new Apollo Classes are on the sheets (and a few updates to existing AS3 Classes). There are definitely some cool new Classes including but not limited to: Apollo Application, HTML, HTMLControl, File, FileStream, Shell, JavaScriptObject, Shell and more.

Although I have been developing in Flash and ActionScript 2.0 for a wile now, I am totally new to Flex, Apollo, and ActionScript 3. These cheatsheets will come in handy for everyone, not just the newbie. Hope to see a paper back in this to keep on my desk sometime soon.

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SWFAddress 1.1is it’s name and deep linking is it’s game. This looks like a great feature to add to any flash based web site. I will help direct the users to a location of your web site that may not be right on the homepage. I think that it is really important that as Flash developers that we do our best to make our content accessible and easy to get to. Below is a link to the article that I found on this. Check it out.

SWFAddress - Deep Linking for Flash
— SWFAddress is a new open source project that provides deep linking and search engine indexing for Flash Websites and applications. In other words, it enables the Back, Forward, and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs that can be sent over e-mail or IM. Recently it reached version 1.0 and quickly gained the attention of top design agencies and interactive developers. SWFAddress started as a small experiment that aimed to enhance a typical Flash Website by presenting the portfolio of a fellow photographer. It adopted all the best practices available on the Internet and became one of the best solutions among the growing number of similar libraries.