CU3ER v1 is released

What’s New?

Transitions Step away from common, boring & flat 2D experience and dive into endless possibilities of adding the third dimension to your slideshow with grid slicing, simple fade or slide, full or half-flip transitions, transition order, direction and much more. cManager Forget about XML! Let’s talk about the real joy – cManager! Create and manage your CU3ER like a PRO with our awesome, robust yet easy to use online application. Interactive workflow, rich GUI, timeline, live preview – set, create & export CU3ER within minutes. Shadows You are now able to simulate more natural environment for your 3D slideshow by deploying one of two available shadow types: static (image) or dynamic (live). Either way it’s an awesome practice to enhance CU3ER slideshow. Camera Push your CU3ER 3D look even further by setting 3D position and rotation of your slides. Additional gem is ‘lens’ option where you can simulate camera lens distortion like ‘fish-eye’. Thumbnails We like to call it ‘Advanced Thumbnails’. And they are indeed. Grid distribution, horizontal scrolling, vertical scrolling, custom scroll bar, thumb image, captions, numbering, round corners… Projects Considering yourself serious about your web design profession? We have provided you extensive control panel for creating, modifying and managing CU3ER projects across assigned domains. API Now you can sync or communicate with CU3ER and rest of your page elements with easy and simple functions. Play or pause slideshow, navigate trough slides or listen to CU3ER events. Playback Control Manage and control CU3ER playback with auto-play, slide duration, looping, starting slide, randomize and other options. Awesome for creating timely controlled animations like web banners. Layout You are allowed to configure almost every aspect of your slideshow layout. It’s so easy to manage perfect blend between CU3ER and your web page – is that what is this all about? Branding Management Custom positioning of CU3ER logo is available trough branding options. You can even turn off CU3ER branding if your boss finds us boring! Support Stack with something or looking for particular solution for your CU3ER problem? We have enabled you a couple of support channels you can use in order to solve your CU3ER problem.

and much, much more …

Code Snippets : Solving Flash loading problem with WMode and Firefox

I’ve recently experienced problems on few AS3 websites. If you embed your SWF file with different WMode, like opaque or transparent in Firefox your Flash won’t load. Actually the Flash loads first frame and then it seems like it stops. Well, it certainly loads but the problem is that loaderInfo Event.COMPLETE and PROGRESS are not fired in Firefox.

That is LAME! Firefox has this “advanced” feature with Flash, it doesn’t load it until that browser tab has focus. Seems like we’re getting problem from there. Anyway, a workaround is to set the Event.ENTER_FRAME function that will check loader

addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, _listenLoading);// on enter frame to check if it’s loaded
private function _listenLoading(e:Event):void {
  if (this.loaderInfo.bytesLoaded == this.loaderInfo.bytesTotal) {
    removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, _listenLoading);
    _onSiteLoaded();
  }
}


		
	
					

Webware 100 – c|net top 100 webware voting

Say No to boxed software! The future of applications is online delivery and access. Software is passé. Webware is the new way to get things done.

http://www.cnet.com/html/ww/100/2009/categories.html

This voting strikes to a most important thing that is now happening on internet and that’s switching from desktop based to web based enviroment. I really like how powerfull all categories look, with at least two or three strong players and good services to offer, but mostly it’s all offered webwares that are great.

Vote and enjoy the change! Real change!

Flash SEO video by Technoracle – How search indexing Flash Player works…

This is exactly how we imagined it works, as it was the only normal way… I am a bit worried about Flash apps without states, how the crawled goes through that stuff.
Anyway let’s see how much we’re going to wait for this to be implemented by Google and rest…

RIAction Singapore on Thursday 26th Feb

The Singapore Flex Usergroup is very proud to present Singapore’s very first RIA ( Rich Internet Applications) Event – RIAction! Taking place on the 26th February 2009, RIAction will see speakers from Google, Microsoft, Adobe, together with community leaders, coming together for a day of technological updates, roadmaps and application showcase!

Seems like this is going to be another nice event organized by FUG Singapore, with some interesting topics… Event is free, and requires registration. See you there !

http://riaction.sg/

Flash Structure Creator – Flash extension panel for automatic folder structure and file creation

Extension panel is driven by xml schema, which can be customized to fit specific project requirements. It automatically creates fla, html, css and javascript files defined in the schema. It also includes swfobject 2.1 and swfaddress 2.2 by default.

Using this extension can effectively streamline new project creation work flow. It only takes a few clicks to achieve which usually takes hours to recreate, duplicate or customize from previous projects.

http://code.google.com/p/flashstructurecreator/

guys from Another Flash User Group Singapore created this Extension panel for their needs but it can certainly be useful for other Flash people…

Insight into OpenScreen project

Thanks to the User Interface Resource Center, we can get an insight in what is happening with OpenScreen project directly from Adobe’s Anup Murarka, Director of Partner Development and Technology Strategy, Platform Business Unit who was interview by EffectiveUI senior developer Doug Schmidt.

Interview can be found here …

Adobe MAX Japan 2009 – pics preview

Until I get hold of a time to write proper article about MAX in Japan, I leave you with a bunch of pics… I’ve tried to comment as much as I could so you get a feel what was going on…

Flickr page

Flex in a Week – Adobe Training Course for Flex 3 [video]

Flex in a Week is a set of more then 40 tutorials from Adobe. Lessons cover complete Flex 3 training. I must say I am impressed with Flex in a Week because it’s just goes directly to the points leaving out any unnecessary talk behind. Great stuff, Adobe should release this kind of tutorials for every of their major products.

So, how to get Flex in a Week… I’ve taken a guide from Anand Vardhan blog

It is available through Adobe Media Player, which is a great product itself.

1. Install AMP
2. Click “My Favorites” menu at the top.
3. Click “Add RSS Feed” at the bottom.
4. Paste http://sessions.adobe.com/FlexInAWeek/feed.xml

Problem is that AMP can cache only 6 videos at a time, but you can always access cache folder of AMP and copy files to your own folder which I am doing now so I can have all 40 videos all the time 🙂

EDIT : thanks to jase another way is to open Feed and download flv movie directly 🙂

The Actionscript Conference Overview + slides from presentation

Weeks after The Actionscript Conference in Singapore I  can sum up all good things we’ve got and experienced there. TAC was event organized by Flex User Group Singapore. FUG Singapore is focus on Actionscript, Flex and Flash and other related services and server-side technologies.  This was a first conference I’ve attended and spoke at, so I surely cannot be objective enough, but I think that most of the speakers and attendees would agree TAC was a huge success.

At the start of the conference Hu Shunjie talked about Passion. Nice way to present actionscript community. It really relies on passion and inspiration from the very beginning and it feels strong even 10 years later.

In series of presentations of really great speaker line-up attendees could hear and see a lot of new Flash Player 10 features (Lee Brimelow), API references, Web Services, AIR developement (Marco Casario, Peter Elst).

PowerFlasher team had great presentation about their FDT Actionscript IDE. Micheal Plank demonstrated powerfull FDT features and speedcoding which gives you freedom. Micheal had great workshop also day before conference, demonstrating workflow that FDT makes possible using ANT compiling, SWC and SWF linking and a lot more…

Mohammed Khan had only presentation that was more design oriented. It was very good to hear a little introspective in designer developer workflow in Flex and where it should be in time that comes.

Prayank Swaroop presented BlazeDS, server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology. It is free solution and seems to me more and more used in Flex project because of it.

Most amazing presentation was given by Stefan Wessels, a Flash Lite guru. He presented Flash Lite from the perspective of the Darth Vader and the dark side. Seems like Flash Lite really inspires and through his inspirational talk he invited as to join the dark side, creating Flash Lite content, which is not so widespread…

I gave my presentation at the end of the day. I am not sure how it looked like but from my point of view I would be happy if people could remember few important things that connects Flash Platform and Socialnetworking. Flash is great platform for developing, present at more than 90% of internet enabled devices. It is fairly easy and cost-free platform. It support all socialnetworking interactions but lacks in SEO and semantic web which will mean a lot in future. My slides are available at SlideShare

Pictures from the conference at Flickr
Lee Brimelow video report
Interviews with some of the speakers

Great news is that preparation for next TAC has already started. Organisers should consider 2 days instead of one, so people can talk more, and focus more on speeches. Anyway, this was a boost I hope for Singapore Actionscript community which I am proud to be a part of.