I finally had the time to write something about the facebook-actionscript-api we used in one of our last projects. It’s a very interesting API when you want to add Facebook support (user management) to your site/project. There are different things you can do with this API: i.e. access user information, post on the user’s wall, get user’s photos and much much more.
Keith Peters was right, when he said, that Flash has a lack of UI component frameworks. The Flex components has a quasi monopoly on that. Besides his minimal components there is another alternative: AsWing.
Last year Neue Digitale / Razorfish gave me the chance to dive into AsWing. The task was to build a form manager that can not only run in Flex projects but also in straight AS3 projects where no flex runtime is available.
Undoubtedly Flash put the web to another level. With Flash there was finally the ability to create content with user experience not dictated by a markup language (HTML) but freeform, whatever the user liked, whatever the best usability was, whatever the IA / designer / programmer thought was best. This made the web big, this made Flash big.
However, times have changed. Flash is no longer the only technology to achieve all this. HTML5 can do some of it, JavaScript can do some of it, other proprietary platform like the iPhone and iPad can do some of it.
We all agree that Apple keeping back a hole bunch of cool content from the users by not putting Flash on their devices. On one hand they are doing it for “evil” business interests. They want to push their own gaming platform and don’t want all online Flash games on the web to be playable on their device. On the other hand they have good reasons: The iPhone was not powerful enough to render and display demanding Flash content.
Just before christmas – as a little gift under the tree – we released the new version of our AS3 open-source VideoPlayer.
Hi there … it’s been a bit quiet here over the last month, but only because we had loads of work to do before christmas.
I just wanted to let you know, that we built our first real life Flash/Indexhibit website a few weeks ago – for a good friend who’s a photographer.
Finally we finished the “super simple” Flash example of our frontend for Indexhibit.
You can read more about the whole Flash / Indexhibit story here, here and here or just grab the new files and try for yourself …
Finally I had the time to add the missing features to our Spellchecker class v01.
You can now right-click the misspelled words and get suggestions from the loaded dictionary in the context-menu.
Hi there.
After some inquiries we finally added the possibility to customize the Apdev VideoPlayer – only changing colors at this time but it’s a first step in the right direction …
You can now change any color of any object/control that is used within the videoplayer – but check the ApdevVideoPlayerDefaultStyle.as for all the attributes that can be manipulated. And it’s up to you whether you change the attributes using pure ActionScript (1) or our html-version of the videoplayer and pass the values in via flashvars (2). With approach 2 you don’t even have to know ActionScript or open a flash-file – just embed the videoplayer-swf into your website and customize it via flashvars.
For further information, see the upcoming examples.
This is just a small update to the sources of our Flash / Indexhibit example we posted earlier.
I added a FLA file for all of you that never used the Flex-compiler before :)
Just download the sources and open the ndxz.fla in (at least) Flash CS3. Hit cmd-return and enjoy.
When I have the time, I still want to build another very simple example that only uses assets from the library so that you can just change colors and forms on the timeline and re-compile the whole project with some great new looks.
Have fun. Cheers
