The Things That Had Better Be Fixed In Flash CS4

I remember when Adobe bought out Macromedia, and then when they announced that Flash 9 would actually be Flash CS3 how excited I was imagining that all the crap parts of Flash would be replaced by their Illustrator and Photoshop equivalents.  And then Flash CS3 came out and I was completely underwhelmed.  I haven't been following the announcements for Flash 10 at all because upgrading is inevitable and if there are flaws,  I'll learn to live with them.  That said, here's a list of the things I can't wait to see the back of, feel free to add your own.

  • the solid white background of the textfields when you edit/select text
  • the default color pallete and swatches
  • font families and weights being handled differently than Photoshop
  • when you add a motion tween to a drawing object it automatically creates two symbols.  Why two, and why doesn't it give you the option to name them as they're created?
  • the help window's random ordering of classes/topics, and the useless search field
  • the pen tool.  this is the big one i expected in CS3.  let freehand rest in peace
  • the AI/PSD importer's tiny, tiny thumbnails.  this might be useful if every layer of every psd and ai file was labelled every time, but this is the real world
  • the AI/PSD importer's bitmap transparency artifacts.  this is redundant because the reason we need the asset to be transparent is 99% of time because we want to animate on a layer above different asset, and as soon as it is moved artifacts tend to shatter the illusion.
  • that weird one when sometimes if you change the position of a shape numerically you get the old "Invalid size and position" alert, and then it freaks out and draws a stroke around the shape for no reason
  • how when you cancel an export it takes at least the same amount of time to cancel as it does to complete and the progreses bar still progresses to the end
  • shape tween
  • the actionscript editor
  • new library folder/symbols can't have the same names even though they are different things
  • and my personal favourite, adding new frames at the end of an animation crashing the whole program
Apologies for the rant.

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Are you the next PaperKing of the world?

 

The people over at Papervision3D are holding a contest so start your engines. Yes that was a pun.   

http://blog.papervision3d.org/2008/07/02/paperking3d-the-papervision3d-contest/

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Oh no, Beta!

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

Adobe have released a public beta of Flash Player 10 'Astro' with all the new bells and whistles including native 3d and inverse kinematics.  You can see some feature demos here http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html 

 

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Papervision Plant3D Class

A very cool class by Den Ivanov that generates a random 3D plant in Papervision 

http://www.cleoag.ru/2008/04/23/papervision-plant3d-class/

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SOHCAHTOA

Keith Peters BIT-101 Blog has been running a couple of weekly AS maths challenges.  For those of you that are in to trigonometry there's a chance you could win a copy of Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! 

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The Keyboard Knight Rider Would Have

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AS3 and xml namespaces

Over the past few days I've been encountering problems reading XML nodes where there is a default namespace defined in the xml.

   

For example:

var example1:XML = <RootNode>
  <Child>This is the child</Child>
</RootNode> ;
trace(example1.Child); // traces 'This is the child'

var example2:XML = <RootNode xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
  <Child>This is the child</Child>
</RootNode> ;
 trace(example2.Child); // traces nothing

The simple solution would be to not  include the namespace definition in the xml, but when the xml is server generated that isn't really an option.
Roger Braunstein writes that the problem is that example2.Child returns null because it is searching for a non-namespaced node where all the nodes exist in the xmlns namespace (I'll take his word on that) and that a solution is to define the namespace in an .as file and then set your xml reading code to use the namespace eg:

//xmlns.as
package
{
    public namespace xmlns = "http://tempuri.org/";
}

 

//in your xml reading class
use namespace xmlns; 

var example3:XML = <RootNode xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
  <Child>This is the child</Child>
</RootNode> ;
trace(example3.Child); // traces 'This is the child'

 

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Jesus's Coding Conundrums #1

When defining variables in a class, which do you put first?

(a) private static const
(b) public static var

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F1 Overnight Website Challenge

A cool idea to create websites for not for profit companies as part of a friendly competition.

Is this going to be the precursor to web development as a sport? :)

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Flamingo Drive

No it's not a lap-dancing club.
It's one of the most addicitve "hit something as far as you can" type flash games I've played.

http://www.yetisports.org/download/yetisports5.zip
http://www.yetisports.org/download/yetisports5.hqx

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