GE has applied Augmented Reality to an actual campaign with Plug Into the Smart Grid. The basic ideas are the same as in the original, but their 3D models are just a bit more complex than in Boffswana’s demo. GE also provided a link to the FLARToolKit, which is used to “detect the marker from input image and calculate the camera position in the three dimension space.”

Flash ‘n’ SEO launched late last year in order to “[discover] how our favorite search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN index content in Adobe Flash.” Currently, the group is publishing experiments in attempts to reverse engineer Google’s Flash Search Player. If Flash and SEO is something you’re passionate about, they are looking for contributors.

When I first learned that Rob Ford from The FWA edited a book entitled Guidelines for Online Success, I immediately went out and purchased it. After all, I’m a Flash developer and I avidly check what’s on The FWA – naturally, I’m curious to know what they would recommend as “guidelines for online success.”

The chapters are arranged by subject (interface & design, marketing & communication, technology & programming, technical advice, content/content management and e-commerce), each with an introduction from an experienced member of the industry. For the most part these intros give you a nice bit of insight into the mindsets of some of the bigger names in web design. The intro by Martin Hughes and Jordan Stone of WEFAIL was particularly good.

After the introduction, each chapter then proceeds into a series of do/don’t type lists with examples of sites relating to each list’s topic. This is where they really dropped the ball. Most of the advice they give can pretty much be boiled down to common sense. You’re supposed to use good quality images on your sites? People don’t like annoying Flash intros? No kidding! And since the majority of the example sites in the book were launched between 2004 and 2006, the majority of examples given have already become outdated already.

If you’re looking for anything other than a common sense refresher, you’ll find yourself somewhat disappointed with Guidelines for Online Success. I wouldn’t recommend Guidelines for Online Success, unless you want an FWA link dump from the last eight years.

Everyone is talking about it, so we would be remiss if we didn’t mention Big Spaceship’s Pretty Loaded. Pretty Loaded is a collection of Flash preloaders packaged in a neat, sit back and watch format.

Initially, having already read the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook, I wasn’t planning on reading another book focusing on introductory ActionScript 3, but then I started to hear more and more about Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser. Lee Brimelow is quoted on the cover calling it “The best ActionScript book ever written.” How can you argue with that recommendation?

For beginners, the book does a good job explaining core language fundamentals (variables, conditionals, loops, functions, etc.) and each aspect you would control with the language (vectors, pixels, sound, video, xml, etc.). And throughout the book’s tutorials the reader is shown the steps involved in building an XML based website, giving a nice continuity to some of the later chapters and reinforcing the importance of understanding the material.

As an experienced Flash developer, I particularly liked Chapter 7 on motion. They did an excellent job explaining how to use basic geometry and trigonometry within your Flash Projects for positioning and animation. It was a welcomed refresher.

I would recommend Learning ActionScript 3.0 to anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with Flash development. Otherwise, you would be doing yourself a disservice.

Grant Skinner has been hard at work on gTween, a new tweening engine for AS3. In case you’re wondering why he would take the time to create another tweening engine:

There are a lot of great tweening engines out there. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Jack Doyle’s TweenLite (and he’s been incredibly productive adding new features lately). However, none of these libraries exactly fit the needs of me and my team. I wanted an engine that was small, fast, hugely flexible, and built from the ground up for AS3 and developers.

While I’m still sticking with TweenLite, Skinner’s feature overview showcases strong core functionality. The engine is still in a beta stage, but he just released Beta 3 on November 4th—work is progressing steadily. If you’re looking for a new tweening engine, gTween might be the answer.

Being a predominately self-taught web developer, I’ve slowly migrated towards object oriented programming and, to my credit, made some applications that work, but those apps definitely could have been made better and more efficiently.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson and found it quite helpful. Now knowing what the MVC, singleton, proxy, iterator, composite, decorator, command, memento and state patterns are I can better utilize them in my Flash projects and ultimately make better coded apps than I could before.

In addition to design patterns, the book also has a couple chapters on application design, programming interfaces, working with events, sending & loading data, E4X XML and regular expression, which offer more in-depth coverage than in other books.

In short, if you’re curious to learn more about classes and design patterns in ActionScript 3, I would recommend that you read Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns.

I recently discovered the Adobe, Make Some Noise campaign blog. Their mission:

We want you and the whole Flash community to be aware of the issue that the current and possible future versions of the Flash Player will lack dynamic audio capabilities. You may ask why this is important but currently a lot of companies are developing online applications for text, video and image processing. We see software moving into the internet daily. Only audio is missing at the moment.

Their site lists out current Flash audio projects and suggests a wishlist for Adobe to consider. I think their cause is a valid one and, being an advocate for music myself, I’d like to see these advancements included into the Flash Player. Audio in Flash has definitely come a long way, but these recommendations could further solidify its already substantial lead.

Joshua Davis basically stopped demoing new techniques and prototypes with the end of Praystation. So, it’s exciting to see him launch a new Lab section on joshuadavis.com. Apparently, he’s been “hiding prototypes for years” and now has decided to start getting them out in the open again. Some of the concepts there now are not all that new, but no one constructs Flash demos and prototypes with as much style and aesthetic consideration. It’s always nice to see what he’s up to.

Recently, I read a blog post on yewknee.com mentioning a Flash framework called Gaia, which is based on the idea of scaffolding made popular by Ruby on Rails. Here is what Gaia is all about:

Gaia is targeted at anyone who develops Flash sites. It provides solutions to the challenges and repeated tasks we all face with front-end Flash site development, such as navigation, transitions, preloading, asset management, site structure, deep linking and SEO. It provides speed and flexibility in your workflow and a simple API that gives you access to its powerful features.

Gaia’s revolutionary scaffolding engine generates all your Flash files and classes for you and gets you up and running with a fully functional site in less than 10 minutes without writing a single line of Actionscript!

Gaia enables you to develop feature-rich websites with significantly less code, and comes with built-in best practices including seamless integration with SWFObject and SWFAddress.

Gaia was created by Steven Sacks and you can download and/or read about it here. I’m in the process of building a site using Gaia and will update my opinions as they form. Hopefully, I’ll be vacationing in Maui in the coming weeks due to how much time this is going to save me. Mahalo!