flashalisious

Ok so “Best” may be a little over stated but this really works well for me.

For around a week now I have been wanting to dig into developing Flash Player 10 applications but the problem with this is there is no debugger version of the Flash Player 10 beta. This really sux if you are a Flex or Flash developer that really needs the debugger when building applications.

On top of there not being a debugger there is just no good way to test for different versions of the Flash Player without uninstalling one version and the installing another. That is a really pain in the ass for sure and personally so frustrating that I don’t bother testing other versions of the player at all.

I tried a couple of solutions that I found by doing some Google searching on the matter. The first is Mike Chambers solution. On Mike’s blog he actually came up with a bash script that you could run from terminal. I followed the steps but I used the latest versions of Flash Player as Mikes post was how to switch between Flash Player 8 and 8.5. The solution I thought would work but I never could get it to work without running into some small issue.

Next I found the FireFox plug-in called Flash Switcher. For a wile there was only a version that worked for Windows but they finally did a version for OS X, or at least that is what it says. I say that several people where able to get it to work. I kept getting a Java Script Error when trying to run it on mine.

Here is my solution. I developed a workf low that I am calling FlashSwitcher X. This solution is basically just an easier implementation of Mike Chambers work around but I set up some Automator Scripts to get the job done.

Download FlashSwitcher X 0.1

Read More on How it works

Please provide feedback. I would really like to know if any of you have success with this tool or if you run into any issues and if you are able to tweek and make this even better.

Click To Play

Flash Player 10 beta, code name Astro is out.

I just checked out a great video by Lee Brimelow on http://gotoandlearn.com that will get you up and running with Flash Player 10. Here is the link. http://www.gotoandlearn.com/player.php?id=73.

You can check out the Adobe Labs site for instructions for setting this up and using Flex Builder if you would like to go that route.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

There has been a lot of buzz about Flex and Flex Builder. This is the IDE for Building Flex RIA’s and also for building pure actionscript 3 projects. After discovering the power of Flex Builder’s coding environment it was clear to me that this would be a great Actionscript 3 editor for my Flash CS3 projects.The following video will walk you through the setup that I use on all my Flash projects. I hope this will help out with your work flow. Let me know what you think.

Bigspaceship uses Flexbuilder for a couple of big AS3 and Flex projects and once you start to develop in Flexbuilder (Eclipse) you maybe don’t wanna go back and use a normal Text Editor. So i was looking for a way to use Flexbuilder for heavy graphical sites that also need the Flash 9 IDE.BigSpaceShip thinks…. http://labs.bigspaceship.com/blog/?p=76read more | digg story

I found this article like most of the articles that I find…. using digg.com. Anyway I am part of a local community of designers and developers known as the615 and over the last few months there has been talk of CMS systems and most importantly how to use them for content management out side of the regularly installed system. I have used wordpress for a lot of my blogging solutions but just started using it as a CMS for my Flash projects. Most recently I used the RSS built into wordpress to feed some dynamic text boxes on the Eddie P. Briley web site that we just developed. The client needed a way to present news headlines and also tour dates and bio information, so each text box on the site that needed dynamic text is feed in from pages that I created in wordpress.

The following article that I found just gives you some good tips on how to use different PHP commands with in wordpress to pull different types of content. The article does not really explain how to pull this content into flash. I would reamed you do some searching on pulling PHP variables into flash to use it as CMS for your Flash or Flex projects.

Nick L.A. wrote some pretty cool hacks on how to modify wordpress themes and wordpress code to use it as a general CMS platform and not only as blogging platform. Tricks are easy to use for non developers. Follow the link to Digg to get to this article. Pretty cool stuff.

read more | digg story

About a week or so ago I launched the new Bluf web site. If you have not heard of this band Bluf you should really check them out. Bluf writes their own original music and the bottom line is ….. they know how to rock for sure!

The guys relied on there myspace page for a log time as for their web site, and still maintain a large following on that site. Now that the bad is looking ahead and there needs grew the felt that a flash based web site was the way to go. This gives them the ability to post there music, videos and also have a really interactive site.

On this site they wanted a look that stuck with the theme they had be using on there myspace page, but after getting to know the guys and seeing them play I felt they where edgier than that. I felt that it was important to take the new site a few steps further. Using a lot of distressed textures and elements I was able to design and implement the site in a way that was simple, unique to the Band, and also really show the fans who Bluf really is. From what I could tell the guys where really excited about the look of the new site and seamed to think that I totally nailed the look and feel they where wanting. Of course I had a little help from the guys. They supplied there logo, some pictures and the red tree element was all Bluf’s doing. The red tree and lighter white background was the starting point and as we moved forward it was clear what the site needed. Hop on over and check out the new Bluf Site and shoot the guys an email and let them know what you think. blufmusic.com

Read on to hear more about Bluf.

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Launched in August of 07 is the new Siren Studio Photography site. This was a great project for my development company to be a part of and believe it or not was my first project to use full browser flash. For you who don’t know you can design a site with flash in a way that the site will scale with the browser as you resize the window.

Kristina Krug of Siren Studio came straight out of the design industry years ago and is now a extremely talented photographer. We used really heigh quality images so the images will continue to look really good even if you are looking at the site on a 24 or 30 inch screen.

I was really proud to be a part of this project. To be associated with that type of talent is always a plus!
You should check out the site when you get a chance. There is plenty of images on her site and it really shows you a wide range of her work. Learn More about Kristina and the companies she has worked with on a regular bases on the next page.

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ApolloHunter.com is a simple site to download, upload and share Adobe Apollo apps! This is a great site to see who is doing what in Apollo development. Maybe by the end of the summer you will be able to see something I have done on this site?

read more | digg story

Welcome to the Wacky World of Jazz and Thelonious Moog. This group came to me about a month ago and supplied me with great illustration work by Wayno. The group wanted an updated site that they could incorporate mp3 samples and also some video. If you like cool wacky synth jazz you should check this one out.

This web site was the first on that I got to use the new Adobe CS3 Web Design Premium that I purchased. The integration between photoshop and Flash was great. I was able to design every page using Wayno’s illustration work in photoshop and then dump that right into flash for building the animations for the web site.

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.