This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language that dramatically simplifies the ability to track Flash, Flex and AS3 content. This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.
Developers have the choice of using a Flash Component or a AnalyticsLibrary Component, for complete control over tracking objects directly in AS3.
The Digital Pictures Interactive team has done it again. This week they released a new video demoing what they’re calling Augmented Reality. The process inserts a Papervision 3D object/character into the video stream from a webcam. Yeah, it’s as crazy as it sounds:
Related: DPI were part of the team behind the Save Your Sensible website.
At MAX this week, Adobe officially pulled Thermo out of Adobe Labs obscurity, gave it an icon and renamed it to Adobe Flash Catalyst. The official spiel from Adobe:
Adobe® Flash® Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. These can range from interactive Ads, product guides and design portfolios to user interfaces for applications. Flash Catalyst enables designers to start from static compositions created in Adobe Photoshop® CS4, Illustrator® CS4, or Adobe Fireworks® CS4 and convert the artwork into applications and interactive content.
Despite the activity, the project is “many moons” away from a public beta. However, you can follow the development over on the Flash Catalyst Team Blog.
Adobe MAX 2008 North America took place earlier this week in San Francisco. As expected, with the congregation of Flash heads in the Bay Area the blogosphere is active with Flash-related posts.
Dion Almaer talks about how the Flash platform could join the Open Web. He suggests:
Adobe has an opportunity here. They can move to the right and Flash could become strongly in the Open Web camp. Then we would all be stronger as we come up against Silverlight.
Following Almaer’s post, Brad Neuberg wrote up an exhaustive look at how Adobe could actually go about bringing Flash into the Open Web. He outlines six points:
Cross-Platform Standards
No Vendor Lock-in
Anyone Can Innovate
Powerful, Universal Clients
Open Source Implementations
Mashable, Searchable, and Integrated
I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the aftermath of Adobe MAX, but these posts are sparking conservation on the idea of open-sourcing Flash (or aspects of the Flash platform) to the development community.
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.
Earlier this month, Peter Elst posted on his blog about the FlaCC Project. In a nutshell, FlaCC is a way to compile C and C++ libraries to ActionScript bytecode, making code written in the C/C++ languages accessible to Flash. Interpreters for various scripting languages are actually written in C/C++ so this could allow you to port Ruby, PHP or Python into your AIR applications.
This video from 2007’s Adobe MAX Chicago is enough to spark your imagination:
The official release of Flash Player 10 is now available. According to the press release:
Adobe Flash Player 10 builds on the capabilities of the world’s most pervasive application runtime with new support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration.
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.
We could go on and on linking up reviews and demos of Flash CS4 over the next few weeks, so we’ll just keep adding links of minor importance to this post. Check back from time to time for updates.
Lee Brimelow posted up a 19-minute feature tour on gotoAndLearn() — you’ll definitely want to head over there and check it out. As he says, it’s just enough to whet our collective appetities until Flash CS4 is officially released. However, it will probably blow your mind.
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.