I've come to realize that I'm always a bit hesitant to change. I was late to get a cell phone, late to join Facebook, late to join Twitter, and often late to look into developments within the Flash community. Lately I've been trying to change how often I tune into Flash community developments. As of late I've stumbled across two projects that struck my fancy: Robotlegs and Signals. Robotlegs is a lightweight MVCS architecture that is very focused on dependency injection. Signals is the result of Robert Penner's frustration with the Flash Player's native event system. Thus he has created an event system inspired by C# events and signals/aslots in Qt. Both looked like interesting projects so I decided to dive into them further. I'll start with robotlegs.

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AIR, ActionScript 3, Design Patterns, Flash, Flex, Frameworks      4 Comments »

I just received a couple copies of the Chinese translation of Adobe AIR -Create Modify Reuse. It's pretty exciting to see your book translated into other languages, even if you can't read them.

I'd like to donate them to a High School or College. Would anyone in academia like a Chinese or Spanish translated copy of our book? I'd prefer to hear from people who instruct New Media or IT courses, or is involved with a school's library.

I will only ship these to a school address. No home addresses. No student dorms and housing. Please email me at aircmr "@" nobien.net.

AIR, Books      No Comments »

The latest project I've been working on at Rokkan has been umbro.com. When the project first came to us there was quite a bit of discussion over what technology to use, specifically HTML vs. Flash. The client, naturally, was concerned about SEO but also wanted a nice "rich" experience. Sure, there's been a little bit of talk lately over the fact that Google can now index certain types of content with regards to SWF files and the files which they load, but its still sketchy at best. Not to mention you have to pay close attention to how you setup your text fields 'n such. Hell, when is the last time you searched on Google for something significant and got a result that takes you to a specific page of a Flash site/app? I honestly can't think of that every happening to me.

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ActionScript 3, JavaScript, Server Side Scripting      6 Comments »

So I have this dilemma. It's unbelievably frustrating. I want to believe a feasible workaround exists, but after hours of messing around, I couldn't come up with anything. Allow me to explain, maybe some of you have an idea of what to do.

I'm working on a Flash site that needs to handle various languages and lots of dynamic text. In order to facilitate this, I've decided to implement runtime font loading and embedding. Each font is exported into its own SWF file and a class is attached to it. For instance, I have ArcherBold.fla which has one font item in the library named ArcherBold that is set to export for ActionScript and the class fonts.ArcherBold (which extends flash.text.Font) is attached to it.

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ActionScript 3, Flash      8 Comments »

2K Games and Rokkan launched the Mafia II website today. Very heavy experience with lots of HD video. Pretty cool stuff. Keep an eye out for new chapters to be rolled out in the near future. Shouts to Charles, Faisal, Errol, Bryan, Andy, Kat, Jessica and Mat for doing a great job.

ActionScript 3, Flash, Video Games      No Comments »

So you're going to be in town for Flash on Tap and you're a fan of the beer. As I said in an earlier post, I will not be attending. But that doesn't mean I can't help out. Here's a list of places to eat and things to check out concerning Beer in Boston. Once I got going on it, it turned into a decent size, so if you leave Boston unhappy with the beer selections, it's your problem.

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Beer, Flash, Flex      No Comments »