Topic: Elsewhere on the web

(or, “why I haven’t written anything new here in a looong time”)

Like so many people, my work goes in cycles (from “busy” to “crazy” to “desperate crunch”). If you’re someone who follows this site (if in fact there is anybody who does), you may have figured out that any time I go for a long time without posting, it means I’m near the end of a project (and consequently, that new documentation is coming soon).

Well, that time has arrived. With the public announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, we’re doing something different in terms of the schedule for releasing documentation. This time the documentation has been released ahead of time, before the product actually ships. (Primarily for the sake of search engine indexing — but hey, let’s not complain.)

Of course, a draft version of the Flash Player 10 language reference has been around for a while now, but if you haven’t had a chance to take a look (or if you want to know how things turned out in their final form), you can now view the final Flash CS4 (including ActionScript for Flash Player 10) documentation. Also, this includes several significant additions to the content in Programming ActionScript 3.0, so if you prefer to learn by reading about a topic rather than by piecing things together from the reference, then you’ll find this content useful.

Here are a few top-level links to get you started:

• Programming ActionScript 3.0
• ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components reference
• Using Flash (including what’s new in Flash CS4)

Just for fun, here is the new content that I wrote:

• Vector class (strongly-typed arrays):

  • Vector class in Programming ActionScript 3.0 (new content is interspersed with the previous content on the Array class)
  • Vector class reference

• Pixel Bender (“custom filters” — although it’s a lot more than filters)

  • Working with Pixel Bender shaders (in Programming ActionScript 3.0) - plus other sections that are linked to from there, about using a shader as a drawing fill, a filter, a blend mode, etc.
  • Shader class reference
  • ShaderJob class reference
  • ShaderParameter and ShaderInput class references
  • ShaderFilter class
  • plus new content in the DisplayObject class, the BlendMode class, the Graphics class, etc.

And here are some of the other new topics that I think are the most interesting:

• Working in three dimensions (3D) in Programming ActionScript 3.0
• Inverse Kinematics (IK) in Programming ActionScript 3.0
• Using the new drawing api (aka “drawing api 2”) in Programming ActionScript 3.0

So, what’s next for me? (Thanks for asking!) Since finishing the final versions of the Flash CS4 documentation, I’ve been working on some “quick start” articles around the new features. Those articles will appear in the Flash developer center soon — probably when Flash CS4 actually ships. (I’ve done one on the Vector class and one on the new FileReference functionality for accessing local files without a server round trip. Other colleagues have done cool things with dynamically generating audio and Pixel Bender — so I think it’ll definitely be worth a look.) Along with that, I’m working on new features for the next version of Adobe AIR. I also have a few side projects that I’ve been trying to make progress on as I can sneak in a minute here and there.

This has been around a lot (I even saw it mentioned in my local newspaper) so it’s probably not news to anyone, but I wanted to save this link so I can find it again.

This is definitely an amazing, thought-provoking look at leading a rich and fulfilling life, from someone who knew he didn’t have long to live and yet still showed more energy and excitement for life than just about anyone:

Dr. Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon CS professor, Dead at 47 (TechCrunch)

Wow. I go on vacation and come back to find that I someone has been impersonating me. How did I discover this horrible fact? The 360 Flex folks posted an interview with me, but I sure don’t remember meeting up with them. What’s more, the alleged interview takes place in a Starbucks, and I don’t ever remember going into a Starbucks before. (At least my imposter did his homework enough to know that I don’t drink coffee.)

Okay, so I did know that they interviewed me (although in my memory it didn’t happen at Starbucks), and those are in fact my answers to their questions. (I actually wish they had reformatted them a bit. I think they are a bit tough to understand as they appear in the post but I didn’t realize the context in which the answers would be presented.) In any case it’s quite a silly read, and the other speaker interviews they’ve posted are even funnier. Poor Tom sure puts up with a lot of heckling from John.

Although I’ve never been to 360 Flex before, I’ve always wanted to go. I was fortunate enough to get chosen as a speaker — hopefully my presentation will turn out well enough that they’ll let me come back again =). And I definitely meant it when I said that there are so many presentations I’m looking forward to, that there was no way I could limit my list to just two!

Oh, and I suppose I should make two small corrections. One, i haven’t actually started working on my slides/presentation content for 360 Flex yet (oops!). Two, as of now I’m not planning to include any stick figures in my presentation. That’s not to say I never have, however =)

P.S. I know the issue of identity theft is a real one, and a very serious one. In fact a couple of weeks ago I thought I might had been a victim of identity theft (expected bills and checks were missing from my mail) and it was very disturbing. So please don’t take my joke about someone impersonating me as a sign that I don’t think identity theft is a real, serious issue!

Lee Brimelow has just pointed out that the Flash Player 10 documentation is available for download on Adobe Labs. I’m excited that this is public, so I can start talking about it more — I’ve been working on the documentation for several months now =)

On a personal note, the screenshot that Lee posted for the Vector class documentation was written by me. So that was fun to see =)

Back in November 2005 (yes, 2.5 years ago!) I wrote an article about how data types and type checking work in ActionScript. ActionScript is different than many languages, in that the ActionScript compiler can be used for compile-time type checking (or not), and at runtime it is a strongly typed language, but it also has features of dynamically typed languages. This allows for some flexibility but also means that you have to be careful about testing your code (because the compiler won’t always catch everything).

My conclusion (not original by any means) was that unit testing is an important tool for ActionScript developers. I’ve tried a couple of ActionScript unit testing frameworks (ASUnit and FlexUnit). And finally getting to the point of this post, I was interested to learn today that the crew at Digital Primates is releasing an open source unit testing framework for Flex, known as “dpunit”.

(via Jesse Warden via Twitter)

The first details of the overarching “themes” for Flex 4 (“Gumbo”) have been posted on the Flex open source wiki. Four themes are listed (“Design in Mind”, “Accelerated Development”, “Horizontal Platform Improvements”, and “Broadening Horizons”) although currently only “Design in Mind” has any details.

And what nice details they are!

Here are a few highlights that stood out to me:

Flex applications however have gained a reputation for looking too similar to each other, as many developers choose to use the Flex default look and feel (known as Halo)…we have found that it remains too challenging to create a truly custom experience. It is therefore a priority for Gumbo to make easy customization of Flex application experiences the norm instead of the exception.

Major features…component and skinning architecture…make it easier to describe experience-oriented features such as states and transitions

Perhaps the most revealing part for existing Flex devs is the aptly named “Caveats and Reassurances” section:

Gumbo will remain compatible with Flex 3…Over multiple releases post-Gumbo we expect to deprecate the Halo model…Halo and new Gumbo components can co-exist…new MXML features may require some changes to your existing markup. However, you can make these decisions on a file-by-file basis

But my favorite line of all is in the “Related Work” section:

Provide a tool in which design-oriented users can easily customize the look of individual components or entire applications. Yes, this is Thermo. We’re not discussing it here.

Of course, this is all fairly in line with what’s been talked about previously, such as Thermo, MXML-G, Ely’s presentation about a new component structure with separation of model and view, etc. But it’s nice to see more information…and what’s not there but is hinted at is even more tantalizing.

I’ll definitely be watching that page for more information about “Design in Mind” and the other Flex 4 themes.

(via email from Matt Chotin — also see the announcement on the Flex team blog)

There’s been plenty of blog play about Google’s recently announced Apps Engine, which provides scalable server hosting for web apps.

I found a couple of posts that were very interesting from a different perspective than just the “hey free web hosting” angle, that I wanted to save/share:

• Alec Saunders discusses Google App Engine as an example of the competition between Microsoft and Google, and why Google “gets it” but Microsoft doesn’t.
• Jacob Brunson thinks this is an example of Google “changing the world” — an innovative idea coming from inside Google rather than being bought by them.

And one more link that is a coding-focused one, but I wanted to save it anyway. =)

• Ronald Schouten has a great list of resources for learning Python and Django (Python being the language you must use with Google Apps Engine, and Django being one of the most popular Python frameworks for web apps).

Lots of big releases for Adobe AIR and Flash Player today. In no particular order:

• Security update for Flash Player (“9.4”) (also see the DevNet article)
• Security update for Adobe AIR (“1.0.1”)
• New public Flash Player bugbase (also see the DevNet article)
• Adobe Media Player 1.0 (with a lot more content now that it’s final — if you’ve tried it before but didn’t bother with it because of lack of content, it’s worth another look)

Note: I added AMP after this post was already published, since it wasn’t yet public at the time.

Peter Elst, an excellent Flex/Flash developer and speaker, just finished touring as part of the on AIR Europe tour. He’s posted his slides and sample applications from his presentation, “Introduction to SQLite in Adobe AIR”. Looks like it was a great presentation, and even without hearing him he’s got some nice samples to dig through.

(via Twitter from Peter himself)