Posts
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Flash 8 for Dummies
If you had asked me this morning which Flash book I might purchase next, it is highly unlikely that I would have answered Flash 8 for Dummies. Yet, I just walked out of Barnes and Noble with a freshly purchased copy in my hands.
Why? Well, several months ago, Ellen Finkelstein contacted me and asked me if I was interested in being in the book, and asked for a couple of educational FLAs. I said sure, sent the FLAs, and didn’t think much about it after that. So today I was in the book store and noticed the book there and remembered the earlier conversation. I flipped through the book, and there I was!
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Studio 8 Licenses
What is the deal with the licensing for Studio 8? I haven’t seen anyone talking about this, and a quick search around doesn’t bring up much, but obviously there is a change from Studio MX 2004. In particular, the whole “Transfer License” thing just seems to have disappeared.
I’ve read the EULA and understand that, but my question is more technical. We still do activation, but is there a limited number of activations we are allowed? If so, what happens if I want to install an app on another machine and take it off an existing one?
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FlashPaper 2 Bug and Fix
Since I installed Studio 8, I haven’t been able to convert any documents to FlashPaper. Finally, after some digging around, I found the following link:
I can’t say that it worked just right the first time, but after several iterations trying the various things recommended in the thread, and a few reboots, I finally have FlashPaper up and running. Took a bit to find the data, and as I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s run into this, I thought the link might be useful to others.
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Keeping Flash 8 Garbage Collection in mind while programming
A while back, Tinic Uro posted some info about Flash 8 garbage collection. Link here. It was cool info, but it left me wondering if there is something we should be doing to make the most of its advantages, and avoid its drawbacks. Here is his answer:
One example: Particle systems. If you have objects representing particles, reuse the objects when they die instead of allocating new ones. Allocating large amounts of objects in a short time can kill the GC since unlike with the referencing counter model object are not freed right away anymore. So when objects die, put them into a recycle container from which you create more particles.
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BIT-101 Forum back
I could live without the hassle, but people wanted it back, so I’m giving it one more shot…
Upgraded the forum software and took a few extra precautions to avert those with technical know-how but no creativity other than the ability to destroy.
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BIT-101 Sketch3D
A little something I started playing with last night and soon found myself up half the night turning it into an application.
https://www.bit-101.com/sketch3d/
This is all bitmapdata, not a single vector, so it’s pretty speedy. Still, it’ll start choking if you get too complex. I’m not sure where it’s heading, but my mind is filled with features to add to it, all of which will go in pretty easily. My general train of thought is to have this as an authoring swf, and allow people to save out their drawings, and play them in a separate player swf, which they could put on thier own site.
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Book Release Party
Party of four anyway. And more like lunch than party. But cool nevertheless!
Here is Chuck Freedman, Sam Robbins, and Colby Grenier getting their fresh-off-the-presses copies. (I’m the one without the book, duh.)
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The book has arrived
The doorbell rang. It was UPS. A box filled with 20 brand new copies of Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move!. Fresh from the printer, right on schedule. I assume they are also on their way to the stores, and to anyone who pre-ordered them. So I’m pretty pumped up right now.
I guess I gotta start thinking about an AS3 version…
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I kind of um…. "switched"
I’ve been a PC guy since, well, not the beginning, but since I had hacked my Amiga 500 into unworkability. Then a friend built me a pc from spare parts he had lying around, and I was up and running with PCDOS and Windows 3.0!
For the next many years I built or re-built every pc I owned. Up until the end of 2004, I always existed on a single desktop. Then I decided I laptop would be useful for conferences, so I bought a cheap Toshiba and fell in love. Even though it has about half the power of my desktop, it soon became my main machine.
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The Future of MTASC
From Nicolas Cannasse (creator of MTASC) on the OSFlash list:
As announced at OFLA today MTASC will unlikely support ActionScript3.
The reason is quite simple. MTASC supporting AS3 + AVM2 will be very comparable to Macromedia Compiler provided with FlexBuilder2. And only having the “opensource” difference is not enough.My proposal is then a new language (name still unknown) that will support several platform :
– the Flash platform of course, with in the beginning current FlashVM and later AVM2.
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the new language will try to make it easy to port your existing AS2 code to it (or at least as much difficult as porting your AS2 to AS3).