by Grant Skinner

Apollo Time Tracking Application: Codenamed gTimer

Our development team is in a mixed environment of Mac OSX and PCs (mostly WinXP), and one of the challenges we’ve always faced is time tracking and reporting. There are plenty of decent, low-cost options on either platform, but we were never able to find a single time tracker that worked on both that met our needs. When I started playing with Apollo, I realized that it would be a great technology to build a cross platform time tracking application that did everything we needed. We’ve been working on it for awhile, and the result is a cool Apollo app we’ve code named gTimer (the name will change). If you’ve attended any Adobe keynotes or conference sessions about Apollo you may have seen it demoed.

I think it’s somewhat unique, in that it leverages Apollo’s potential in a different manner than the one Adobe is promoting. Rather than taking an existing web property, and moving it onto the desktop, we have created a new desktop application that takes advantage of the web, the Flash platform’s capabilities for rich UIs, and Apollo’s cross-platform support.

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by Grant Skinner

Using Flash Symbols with ActionScript in Flex

Normally Flex will strip all ActionScript from an embedded Flash symbol. We’ve developed a technique called Shake’n’Bake SWFs (yes, I did watch Talladega Nights before coming up with the name), which allows you to utilize Flash symbols in Flex projects with all AS intact. I mentioned this technique at 360Flex, but didn’t go into much detail because there are better options available when using Flash CS3. A couple of people mentioned that they would like to learn about the technique, so I thought I’d blog about it.
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by Lanny McNie

Extension Melee (Part 2)

To continue the extension goodness (see part 1), here is another handy extension that’s sure to boost your productivity.

Find In Library

One of the most common workflows when working in FLAs is the need to find the library item for a symbol on the stage. Simply select a symbol on stage, and run the Find in Library command, and the appropriate library symbol is selected. This command is most useful when bound to a keyboard shortcut, such as CTRL-E.

Download the FindInLibrary Extension

To add an extra bit of functionality, install the OpenBoundClasses extension as well: if a class is bound to the symbol, it will automatically open when you run the FindInLibrary command.

You must have your library open for this extension to work. Additionally, Flash will not scroll the library to the selected symbol.

If you’re looking for an opposite workflow, finding stage instances with a specific symbol or linkage, I recommend checking out gSearch, part of our first Panel Pack, which includes a powerful Timeline search tool.

by Grant Skinner

Bitmap Fonts in Flex (via Flash)

I’m not a big fan of working with fonts in Flex overall. Truetype font file embedding is hit or miss, and even embedding system fonts seems a little unreliable. Likewise, managing character sets (ie. the glyphs to embed) in Flex is quite rudimentary (unicode character codes? editing the global config XML? blech!). These features are manageable within Flex though, even if they are a little ugly.

One font related feature that’s completely missing from Flex though is support for creating bitmap fonts. This is a shame, because bitmap fonts are sharp and aliased, and look great at small sizes (ex. 9pt Arial is quite readable as a bitmap font).
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by Grant Skinner

We got Dugg.

Puki 3D made the front page of Digg…. cool! I think this is our first front page Digging, and I somehow missed it (it hit the front page 2 days ago). 50,000 visitors in one day, and as far as I can tell the server stayed up – kudos to Media Temple! Here’s a link to the Digg topic.

While I’m blogging about Puki, here’s a trick: Type “oldskool” before you start a game (make sure you’ve clicked to focus the game first), and you’ll get classic arcade graphics.

One day I’d like to revisit this game. Maybe with Papervision3D.

by Grant Skinner

DisplayObjectWrapper for Flex

One of the challenges in using rich assets like images or Flash symbols in Flex is making them compatible with the Flex layout managers. There are a few ways to do this (some of which will be topics of future posts), but one of the easiest is to wrap the asset in a UIComponent instance that translates between the Flex layout API, and the basic Flash Player transformation API shared by all DisplayObjects.

I built a simple example of such a class, called DisplayObjectWrapper, which you can download and use or extend freely. It does a good job of translating Flex layout into resizes for it’s content, and vice versa. It’s super simple to use via mxml:
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by Lanny McNie

Extension Melee (Part 1)

Since the advent of Flash MX 2004 and JSFL, we have invested a great deal of time into JSFL extensions, panels, and other time-saving utilities for use on internal projects. Some of them have evolved into products, such as gProject and Panel Pack 1, but very few have been released for public use. A couple months ago we updated our products site with selected extensions, classes and components intended for sharing with the community, but between client work and foosball, they never were given the final QA pass to be released.

Over the next few weeks, we hope to finally publish the extensions to our site, and invite anyone interested to download, share, and comment on them. None of them are as fancy as gProject, but all of them have saved us a ton of time.

I. GraphicButton

To kick off the extension exodus, we have made available one of our classes found in almost every AS2 project we have delivered. The GraphicButton class is a simple MovieClip extension that adds

  1. AS2 EventDispatcher, and events for click, over, down
  2. Frame-based state management: Add “up”, “over”, “down”, “disabled” frames to your timeline to easily create states, and the class does the rest.

Download the GraphicButton class

II. CreateGraphicButton

To supplement the GraphicButton class is a JSFL script that turns any MovieClip into a GraphicButton. Simply select a MovieClip in your library and run the script, and the necessary layers, frames, and stop actions are added to the symbol’s timeline. The class is then bound to the GraphicButton class, and the class file copied relative to your project.

Download the CreateGraphicButton MXP