Tag: Flash

Open letter to @Adobe and @Adobe Air: the hidden part…

I don’t know if you had already read the open letter that Gary wrote recently discussing about the arguable marketing choice made by Adobe on Adobe AIR but also previously about the Flash Platform in general, but I suggest you to start from there before read this post.

If you know me personally or you are following me in the social networks or reading this blog you should know that I’m a big fan of Flash Platform, in particular of Adobe AIR.
I’m very committed to deliver amazing and cutting edge projects made with this fantastic technology and I’m involved in the community to spread the word about AIR.
From a developer perspective I’m 110% with Gary and the community; an amazing technology like Adobe AIR with really a lots of success behind in terms of developers and companies that adopted this technology and in terms of numbers of apps in released during the past few years in different platform.
AIR, in my opinion, should have a better commitment from the company that create it (partially).
Obviously I agree also that there isn’t any competition between Actionscript 3 and HTML5 (read Javascript), what you can really do with HTML5 is what a flash developer could do 5 years ago more or less.
But you can’t approach a discussion like this talking only from a developer perspective, you and we should see it from different angles also.
What I’m asking you is to follow me until to the end of this post then you can send me an email and ask me if I became totally crazy or insult me with a comment, no worries 😀

I usually goes to Adobe Max since 2006, first MAX organised by Adobe, and I remember quite clearly that few MAX ago during both keynotes nobody said anything related to new Flash Platform improvements or plan for the future of the platform.
At the beginning I was so hungry and I spent literally hours on the phone to talk with Adobe people because the 100% of my business was based on this technology and they can’t really think that HTML5 could be better that Flash Platform, in particular in 2011/2012 where the most coolest websites, RIAs and desktop applications were realised with Flash.
But have you ever tried to think from a different point of view this situation? Let’s assume for few minutes that we are inside the meeting room of the Adobe.
You have an amazing technology that millions of people is using to innovate and create the best software in the world but you are not earning what you expect from it, don’t you believe me? Take a look at this chart (ADBE):

ADBE stock 2011/2012

 

This is the graph of Adobe stock (ADBE) from January 2011 to December 2012, the value of the stock was for few months (close to October when usually Adobe Max takes place) lower than $28 and never greater of $35.
Great, obviously our white collars friends, aren’t so interested about which is the best technology in the market or how many people is using it; they care about numbers, how to increase the profit of the company and make happy the analyst to have a better position in the stocks market and with the shareholders.
These results weren’t so good for Adobe in fact, if you remember well, a lots of people started to leave the company, a lots of team was closed in USA or Europe to move the development side in India or in places where the developers are cheaper and Adobe started his commitment on the big new trend of new web technologies products like the Edge family for instance.
Everybody now knows very well the following story about the new products and how they are trying to improve the way to create websites and apps, and I guess the majority of us it’s not so happy about that.
But let’s take a look again to some numbers, the next graph will show you the Adobe stock value from 2012 to March 2014 basically in the period where Adobe left to push the Flash Platform and started to increase the investment on designers products:

ADBE stock 2012/2014

I think is quite explicit that the politic to start selling their products on Cloud (first big mover in the IT panorama), the decision to try to improve a new technology like HTML5 with new tools and so on, create around the Adobe what the management was looking for!
I agree with you that there are many ways to make money but from the metrics perspective they are going in the right direction and they did the right choices for now.
I’m not an economist and I can’t say if this strategy will pay in the long term but for sure in the short term they arrived where they wanted to be.

With this post I’m not trying to defend Adobe, but after many years where the Flash Platform is in this status I started to leave my angry mood and to interrogate myself on why they took this decision, honestly I can’t say if that it’s the only reason that drives Adobe in these big changes but excluding the technical side that’s the only way I can see this thing and now most part of their decision make finally sense.
All the comments I’ve read in the past and also in these days after the Gary’s letter to Adobe is completely true but often, as developers, we forget that it’s not just a design pattern or a performance optimisation that could save the world, the marketing and the market are the real drivers, in front of them also a big corporation like Adobe could defeated.

ADBE stock 2009/2014

 

UPDATE FROM ADOBE

Chris, the new product manager of Adobe AIR, replied to Gary’s open letter, you can read the answer in the official blog

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Comparison of colours in Actionscript 3

In this post I’d like to highlight a topic that is not the classic tip to use everyday but when it needs probably this “recipe” could help.

In last few weeks I had the opportunity to study how to compare 2 or more images and find similar colors between them.
Sincerely when I started I really don’t know how to do that, so I tried to read on the web the best way to accomplish this task.
There are many different way to compare colours, the easiest way that I found it’s working with RGB color space but a lots of experts  advice against this technique and they suggest to run away from RGB color space and work with different color spaces, in particular with which one work in 3D space.
The most complete is for sure the CIELAB so if you need to create an algorithm that compare in the best way colours I really suggest to work with this color space and read this post on this topic, in my case I need something in the middle so a colour space that could guarantee the perfect trade off between complexity and accuracy.
In fact I worked in this example with a 3D space like HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value), before go ahead with the post I warmly suggest to read more about HSV directly on wikipedia.

Hue, Saturation, Value

And now let’s go ahead!!!

I prepare a class that you don’t need to change if the idea behind it fit your needs, so this is the code to compare 2 images with my ColorComparision object:

var util:ColorComparision = new ColorComparision();
var finalDiffArr:Array = util.getSimilars(bmp1.bitmapData, bmp2.bitmapData);

As you can see, in the second line you will receive an Array of colors in RGB that you can use if you want in the UI or only as data if you want to add more complexity to this algorithm.

This comparison is made in this way:

1. I retrieve 64 average colors inside each image (inside the class ColorComparision I set a constant if you need to change this value)
2. I convert each colour from RGB to HSV
3. I calculate the distance between each colour of the first image compared with each colour of the second image

To be more complete as possible I expose also the capability to set the tolerance of the comparison in this way:

util.tollerance = Math.round(slider.value);

Finally I made a quick example where you can play with your images and see what happens, basically in this basic sample when you’ll click “compare” button you will find the color similar between 2 images you will compare.

As3 Color Comparison

Last but not least I leave you also this quick method to translate RGB color to HEX  and use them in your Flash application:

function createRect(_obj:Object):Sprite{
 // the obj has 3 properties: r -> red, g -> green, b -> blue
 var intVal:int = _obj.r << 16 | _obj.g << 8 | _obj.b;
 var hex:String = "0x" + intVal.toString(16);

 var s:Sprite = new Sprite();
 s.graphics.beginFill(uint(hex));
 s.graphics.drawRect(0,0, 20, 20);
 s.graphics.endFill();

 return s;

}

On my github space you can find the source to use this algorithm, enjoy!

Adobe AIR 3.8 introduces Socket Server on Android and iOS

Hi All,

after long time I’m back for all the developers are working with the Flash Platform right now!
Sorry for that but it was a really intensive period for me with the organization of “Having fun with Adobe AIR” so I haven’t a lot of time to share with you my new experiments.
Yesterday Adobe MAX is finished with a lots of design news, great and inspire case histories for designers and a lot of amusement during the Sneak Peek where they have shown the real power of Adobe labs with tons of really cool features that we could see in next releases of Adobe’s softwares.
For a developer perspective there weren’t big announces so, as usual, we can do it by ourselves…. and here we are!

During last few days Adobe release the Adobe AIR 3.8 and Flash Player 11.8, both in BETA but you can download and start to play with them.
When Adobe releases a new AIR SDK I always take a look to the release notes to see the new features of my favorite platform, this time I’m glad to announce that they add the opportunity to create TCP/IP and UDP socket server directly on iOS and Android.
This is a very cool feature because you can really create amazing things in particular for applications and games, for example local multiplayer, chat and so on.
I worked a lots with sockets during last years in several projects and my big concern was that I can’t create a socket server on smartphone and tablet with AIR, I could do that only with native code but I was pretty sure to see this feature will be implemented in next releases of AIR!

Today I had few time to spend experimenting new stuff so I decided to try AIR 3.8 BETA on mobile and create something cool to share with you.
As you can see in this short video I create a socket server on my iPhone 4 that interact with a client made on my iPad mini (I tried also with my Android smartphone and it works as well):


To create this sample you needn’t to learn something new, you can use the same APIs you will use on a desktop application, so to create a socket server you write those few lines of code:

//creation of a TCP/IP Socket server
private function createServer():void{
server = new ServerSocket();
server.addEventListener(Event.CONNECT, onConnect);
server.bind(7934); // this is the number of the port where your socket communicate
server.listen();
}

Then, when a client socket will join in the same network and it listens the same port of the server, the magic happens and you can start to comunicate:

//on the server socket application
protected function onConnect(event:ServerSocketConnectEvent):void {
incomingSocket = event.socket;
incomingSocket.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA, onData);}

protected function onData(event:ProgressEvent):void {
if (incomingSocket.bytesAvailable > 0){
//here you can pass data to the client using writeBytes, writeUTFBytes and many other methods
/*an example could be:
incomingSocket.writeUTFBytes(String("HELLO!");
incomingSocket.flush();*/
}
}

// on the client socket application you have to create the connection and then manage (send and receive) data from the server
private function createSocketConnection():void{
socket = new Socket()
socket.addEventListener(Event.CONNECT, connectedToServer);
socket.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA, receiveData);
socket.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioErrorHandler);
socket.addEventListener(Event.CLOSE, closeSocket});
//pass to connect method the server IP and the port to comunicate
socket.connect("127.0.0.1", 7934); 
}
protected function receiveData(event:ProgressEvent):void {
// here you can read all the packets sent from the server
}
protected function ioErrorHandler(event:IOErrorEvent):void {
trace("ioErrorHandler: " + event);
}
private function connectedToServer(e:Event):void{
//yes! you are connected to the socket server
}
private function closeSocket(e:Event):void{
//your socket connection is closed
}

After that you can start to experiments with this new feature as I’ve just done.
Last but not least, as you can see on the release notes, Adobe adds another great feature, that is the capability to stop all movieclips are running on the stage calling a new method “stopAllChildren()” directly from the stage instance.
Simple, easy and useful!

Flash Platform Galaxy: why choose Flash Platform

In those days I’m reading a lots of mailing lists, forums, blogs and so on where Flash Platform supporters are so disappointed about the latest marketing movement of Adobe.

In fact yesterday Adobe announced that they stop the development of Flash Player on Mobile devices (on Desktop they are going ahead).
The road is clear HTML 5 inside the browser and Flash Platform for RIAs, Games and out of browser in combination with Adobe AIR.

For me Adobe for the second time (the first one was during Adobe MAX) has totally mistaken how to communicate this news and obviously tech blogs bring this announcement like the end of Flash…
Personally I don’t think that is the end of Flash but I think that Flash is moving on a new position in multimedia world probably out of browser.
I’m an Adobe addicted, like you know, and in particular I’m a Flash Platform supporter, so I think that we have to move on and make something to spread the word about this foggy situation, guys, Flash Platform is ALIVE!
To do this, I start making a pdf file called Flash Platform Galaxy that could help people to have an idea of what is Flash Platform and why choose it ( I know, I’m not a graphic designer but I think it could be useful), if you want to add more informations or change something feel free to leave a comment at this post or drop me a line via email.
Let’s go guys, we have a platform to save 😉

Flash Camp Milan review

Yesterday in Milan we had the Flash Camp about Mobile topics and then we had the Flash Camp Party at NH Hotel… really wonderful time.
Like you know, in Italy it’s not so easy to organize those kind of events because usually people don’t move to another city like other foreign countries but Flash Camp had a great success.
This camp was organized in the same place of WhyMCA the mobile revolution, an italian conference focused on mobile topics.
We had 50/60 people per session and I’m glad to say that my session had 80 people so I’m happy about this little success.
All the sessions surfed in deep about CG, design patterns, video optimization for mobile, flex on mobile and so on, so I was really excited to take part in this event.
My session was about Design Pattern for Mobile, I talked about 3 design patterns: Singleton, Observer and Presentation Model.
With a couple of samples (that you can download from this link) and few slides I made an application that run with the same base code on tablet and smartphone; this is an hot topic now on mobile world in particular on Flash Platform side.


In next few weeks I’ll make a post about Presentation Model to share my thoughts about this argument and how to use it in your project , but if you want to start with this topic, take a look at this great post on RIArockstars.

Finally I’d like to thanks the Flash Mind, Adobe Flash Platform User Group Italy, to give me this opportunity, WhyMCA staff for the amazing organization, other speakers of Flash Camp for great time spent together and people that came to talk with us during the Flash Camp and to the beer party too.
I leave also a link to some photos took during Flash Camp in Milan.

Working with Adobe AIR FileSystem API on iPad

Recently I made some test on iPad to test how to update contents of my mobile applications.
I tried some new AIR 2 API like open default program with PDF or XLS files but I get error #3000 (privileges error).
My idea is to create a routine where I’ll be able to update all contents on my application without passing trough Apple store.
So I tried with URLStream and AIR filesystem API, everything works well.
Code is so easy, take a look here:

//RETRIEVING IMAGE FROM ANY WEBSERVER
var urlS:URLStream = new URLStream();
urlS.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, downloadComplete);
urlS.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, showPerc);
urlS.load(new URLRequest("http://192.168.1.9:8888/oliviaWilde.jpg"))

//DOWNLOADED IMAGE BYTEARRAY AND LOADING IN LOADER
function downloadComplete(e:Event):void {

  perc_txt.text = "";
  fileData = new ByteArray();
  urlS.readBytes(fileData,0,urlS.bytesAvailable);
  bytes = urlS.bytesAvailable;
  l.loadBytes(fileData);
  l.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, saveIt);

}
//SAVE IMAGE INTO APPLICATIONSTORAGEDIRECTORY
function saveIt(e:MouseEvent):void{

  f = File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath("a.jpg");
  var fs:FileStream = new FileStream();
  fs.open(f, FileMode.WRITE)
  fs.writeBytes(fileData);
  fs.close();

}

//LOAD IMAGE FROM APPLICATIONSTORAGEDIRECTORY 
function loadLocalImg(e:MouseEvent):void{

  var finalBA:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
  var fs:FileStream = new FileStream();
  fs.open(f, FileMode.READ);
  fs.readBytes(finalBA, 0, bytes);
  fs.close();
  l.loadBytes(finalBA);

}

Using applicationStorageDirectory, you can save data into your application and retrieve it with AIR API.
In the video below, you can see a little demo where I load an image from a server, I save it, I unload click on the black right button and finally I load again but from ApplicationStorageDirectory, with the black left one, instead of loading from webserver.

Android development with Flash Platform

First of all I’d like to say thank you to JUG Padova that give me opportunity to talk about Flash Platform in own Java User Group.
Saturday morning I got a talk about Android development with Flash Platform in a school in Padova.
There were 40/50 people more or less, students, Flash Platform devs and Java devs, so I’m glad about the final result.

I talked about my experience on working with Flash Platform on Android, suggested some tips & tricks to improve own applications made with AIR or web site for Flash Player on Android and finally I reported latest news from Flash on the Beach general session.

Adobe has just released Adobe AIR for Android so from last weekend you can download it and start to develop your own Flash Platform contents for Android devices.

You can download my presentation slides with some samples directly here, for now slides are in Italian but if someone is interesting in an English translation feel free to add a comment here.

UPDATE
Here you can watch the seminar: http://www.archive.org/details/AndroidDevelopmentWithFlashPlatform

How to switch from Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3… in September for FREE in Milan and Rome

During September I’ll take part of Arrivano i Guru Tour, an Italian event that allow designers, developers and photographers to learn new stuff for FREE about Adobe technologies!
In fact, the event starts in September until to the end of October and you can see it in 10 differents Italian cities.

In the last event you can find a special guest… Katrine Eismann, on of the most important person in creative digital retouch world!
I decide to talk about a big problem for a lot of developers: How to switch from Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3 during my sessions in Milan (27th September) and Rome (5ht September).

During my session we can see the power of new AS3 features,  architecture of new Flash Player and differences of both languages.
You can see a real mirror from AS2 scripts to AS3 scripts and how to porting your daily “Actionscript life” to a new step: more interesting and powerful!

If you’d like to have more information take a look at the site or feel free to contact me leaving a message on my blog or dropping me an email.

I hope to see you during this event and remember that is a great opportunity to learn more and for FREE!

See ya!

Create PDF in runtime with Actionscript 3 (AlivePDF, Zinc or AIR, Flex or Flash)

This morning I’ve a new target, create PDF in runtime with Actionscript 3.
Very cool project to accomplished this mission is AlivePDF, an opensource AS3 library that you can download from Google Code.
AlivePDF allow you to generate PDF in runtime with Actionscript 3 and you can add pages, draw in each pages or add images, it’s very powerful library.

In this sample I use Actionscript 3 (with FDT) and Multidmedia Zinc 3, but you can use Flex or Flash and AIR to make this sample.
So first of all I create a simple class that allow you to create a PDF file with multiple pages and to add content in each pages.
This is the code:

package org.mart3.pdfGeneration {
    import flash.events.Event;    
    import flash.utils.ByteArray;    
    
    import org.alivepdf.images.ImageFormat;    
    import org.alivepdf.saving.Method;    
    
    import flash.display.Loader;    
    import flash.events.IEventDispatcher;    
    import flash.events.EventDispatcher;
    
    import org.alivepdf.pdf.PDF;
    import org.alivepdf.layout.Orientation;
    import org.alivepdf.layout.Size;
    import org.alivepdf.layout.Unit;
    import org.alivepdf.display.Display;
    
    /**
     * @author lm
     */
    public class CreatePDF extends EventDispatcher {
        
        private var pdf:PDF;
        public var pdfBA:ByteArray;
        
        public function CreatePDF(target : IEventDispatcher = null) {
            super(target);
            
            pdf = new PDF(Orientation.LANDSCAPE, Unit.MM, Size.A4);
            pdf.setDisplayMode(Display.FULL_PAGE);
        }
        
        public function set totalPages(num:int):void{
                
            for(var i:int = 0; i < num; i++){
            
                pdf.addPage();    
                
            }
    
        }
         public function setData(_l : Loader, _numPage:int) : void {
            
            pdf.gotoPage(_numPage);
            pdf.addImage(_l, 15, 15, 0, 0, ImageFormat.JPG, 100);
        }
        
        public function savePDF():void{
            pdfBA = new ByteArray();
            pdfBA = pdf.save(Method.LOCAL);
            
            var evt : Event = new Event("baReadyEvent");
            dispatchEvent(evt);
        }
    }
}

Obviously if you want, you can create a custom event that pass to the document class the ByteArray but this is a quick sample to show how you can create PDF in runtime!

One of the amazing things that you should do with AlivePDF, it’s that you can decide to save PDF locally or on web! Read documentation because it’s very interesting what you can do with this library!

Ok now, go to document class where we use MDM swc that you can find when install Zinc on your computer (you can find 2 differents SWC, one for Flash and the other one for Flex. Remeber also that Flash SWC works with Flash CS4 also, not only with Flash CS3!).
In this class we do those simple steps:

  • create a PDF object using CreatePDF object
  • set our PDF document
  • pass an external image loaded with Loader object
  • save PDF bytearray with Zinc FileSystem class
package org.mart3.pdfGeneration {

    import flash.display.MovieClip;    
    import flash.net.URLRequest;    
    import flash.display.Loader;    
    import flash.display.Sprite;
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.events.MouseEvent;

    import mdm.*;

    import org.mart3.pdfGeneration.*;

    /**
     * @author lm
     */
    public class Main extends Sprite {
    
        private var pdfObj:CreatePDF;
        private var l : Loader;
    
        public function Main() {
            
            mdm.Application.init(this);            
            
            pdfObj = new CreatePDF();
            pdfObj.totalPages = 2;
            pdfObj.addEventListener("baReadyEvent", saveLocalPDF);
            
            l =  new Loader();
            l.name = "myImg";
            
            l.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, showImage);
            l.load(new URLRequest(mdm.Application.path+"assets/bg.jpg"));
        }
        
        private function saveLocalPDF(e:Event) : void {
        
            mdm.FileSystem.BinaryFile.setDataBA(pdfObj.pdfBA);
            mdm.FileSystem.BinaryFile.writeDataBA(mdm.System.Paths.desktop+"generate.pdf");
    
        }

        private function showImage(event : Event) : void {
            
            l.scaleX = l.scaleY = .4;
            var mc : MovieClip = new MovieClip();
            mc.buttonMode = true;
            mc.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, savePDF);
            mc.addChild(l);
            this.addChild(mc);
        }
        
        private function savePDF(event : MouseEvent) : void {
            event.currentTarget.alpha = .5;
            pdfObj.setData(l, 1);
            pdfObj.savePDF();

            
        }
    }
}

You can also download source files from their hosting service and test it on your computer.
Feel free to give me any comments about AlivePDF, it’s very interesting to know what you think about this AS3 library.

First images of Zinc 3.0

Zinc 3.0 codename Pandora will be release at Q1 of 2008, but now you can see first images for Macintosh and Windows directly from Jaspal Sohal blog.  You can also try to enter in Candidate BETA program if you are registered in multidmedia.comIn fact they said:“The Public Beta will be a Release Candidate Build with all functionality that will be in the final release. Registered Users will have an opportunity to download the Public Beta and test it over the Holiday period. The Zinc™ 3.0 Public Beta will be available for both Windows and Mac OSX.”