Learn Actionscript 3 and FDT for free. Limited time!
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Inspiration, Video Tutorials on February 5th, 2010
The Rich Media Institute rocked my February by providing these excellent online training for *FREE*! Response fast though; this is a limited time offer!
If you have been wanted to get started with Actionscript 3 or need a refresh the jump right in. Also FDT is a great coding enviroment for Actionscript and Flex development. The are offering an intro to using FDT for your development.
I recommend that no matter who you are you check out both of these video tutorials.
Introduction to ActionScript Development with FDT
Free through February!
http://www.richmediainstitute.com/catalog.php?item=70
Comprehensive ActionScript 3
Free till February 15th!
http://www.richmediainstitute.com/catalog.php?item=72
Setting up Flash Media Server on OS X with VirtualBox
Posted by Matthew Wallace in Flash Media Server on September 13th, 2009
After doing some Red5 development over the last year I am have recently started working with Flash Media Server 3.5. One of the unfortunate things about Adobe’s product is that they do not have an OS X version of the server. Not to worry. If you are on a Mac (Intel Only) then just do the following.
1. Download VirtualBox (free from Sun) and install Windows or Linux. If you go with Windows I would suggest XP. It runs really fast even for running in VirtualBox and it does not seam to hit the processor quit as hard. If you go with Linux then I would suggest CentOS. We are not going to cover getting the OS installed.
![Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 8.56.41 PM [ September 13 ]](http://mswallace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Screen-shot-2009-09-13-at-8.56.41-PM-September-13-.png "Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 8.56.41 PM [ September 13 ]")
2. After you get your new OS up and running you need to open a web browser in the OS that you installed and download and install the latest version of Flash Media Server.
3. Finally you need to allow OS X to see the IP address of the VirtualBox so that you can access FMS Server. By default VB’s network adapter is set to NAT so basically it keeps OS X from being able to see it. Close down your OS so that you can make some changes. Make sure you choose power off. Now right click on the OS in VB and choose settings > network icon > under Attached To drop down change it to “Bridged Adapter” and then click OK and restart your OS.
![Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 9.12.52 PM [ September 13 ]](http://mswallace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Screen-shot-2009-09-13-at-9.12.52-PM-September-13-.png "Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 9.12.52 PM [ September 13 ]")
4. Now all you need is the IP address to the VB guest OS. If you go with running windows then that is as easy as opening a command prompt window and typing ipconfig.
![Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 8.56.41 PM [ September 13 ]](http://mswallace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Screen-shot-2009-09-13-at-8.56.41-PM-September-13-2.png "Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 8.56.41 PM [ September 13 ]")
5. Now you should be able to launch the FMS Admin swf and use it to connect to your newly running FMS server.
![Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 9.21.40 PM [ September 13 ]](http://mswallace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Screen-shot-2009-09-13-at-9.21.40-PM-September-13-.png "Screen shot 2009-09-13 at 9.21.40 PM [ September 13 ]")
Speaking of Recruiters
Posted by Matthew Wallace in Speaking on August 28th, 2009
As a Developer and a User Group manager I have encountered my share of “pimps” AKA recruiters. Now to be fair all recruiters aren’t douchbags. To name a couple Scott Gordon and Tiffany Jennings are two excellent examples of recruiters that do there job well and know how to work with someone to find them the best development position they can.
What’s this all about?
In the next week or two Sept 23rd, I have been given the opportunity to speak at a recruiter “lunch and learn”. Now I am not one to speak at something like that unless it is a Flash or Flex event but one thing that I have been trying to do is help bring the talented developers and talented recruiters together so I am taking it for what it is. It’s a great opertunity to layout “our” thoughts as developers and bridge the gap. I have been given up too a 30min spot to speak. Not sure I can fill that much time but there will be some Q/A that should be cool.
Where do you come in?
What I would like to do is get your honest comments below, of things you would like recruiters to know that would make the relationship better. Also feel free to share the good, bad and ugly experiences that you have had. This is all about laying it out there so that everyone can learn and hopefully help each other out.
So it’s up to you. Post your comments now. I will use them in my talk! I need your experiences, thoughts and suggestions from a developers perspective toward recruiting and what would make it better or even if you think it can’t be made better let me know your thoughts and I will do my best to make it heard.
Thoughts on Open Screen Project and iPhone
Posted by Matthew Wallace in Flash, Flash Player, iPhone on August 22nd, 2009
I was reading a blog post on Effective UI blog and I started to leave a comment and I relized my comment was pretty much turning into a blog post so figured I would just post my thoughts on the matter here.
Here is the Effective UI post that I was starting to comment on.
As a Flash Developer myself I would love to see the flash player come to iphone. Now the question remains to be seen if Apple should actually play nice and join the open screen project. Why have they not done this? I am guessing it has to do with the value of the App Store. If Flash developers could bring games to the phone the I guess it would be some loss in sales but I really don’t see that happening.
In regards to the App Store …. Apple could bring a tone of developers to the phone to sell more apps if they would some how work out a way for flash developers to build games that could be sold on the app store. Just a thought I had, as I myself start learning iphone development. I keep wishing I could just write AS3, a language that I have spent a tone of time learning and becoming really good at. Some of the other things that would be wonderful would be to just be able to view Flash content on a web page and not get the damn missing plugin icon in safari on the phone.
What I do know is a couple of things. Apple is a very innovative company, but sometimes we have to think “WTF” and scratch your head at things Apple does. “Why are they doing what they are doing?” Safari on the phone runs extreamly well and they built it to run web standard code like know other mobile browser. To not include support for a plugin that corners the market with an astonding 98.8% penetration for Flash Player 9 and 86.7% for Flash Player 10 seems pretty lame to me to leave that out for this long as they have. Expecially when you have a company like Adobe who is ready willing and able to work with Apple to make the improvemnts needed to the player to get it “iPhone worthy”.
I truly believe that Apple has the best intentions to supply their costumers with the best experience using both innovative hardware and software. I am sure Adobe is doing all they can too make mobile experiences better for everyone. Over the last few years we have seen there products become better and better when they have taken the lead to work with the community and other companies to make there technology better and has truly made platforms like Flash a world wide standard. I wish that apple would get on board. I guess we will just have to see.
I truly feel that iPhone and the SDK is taking mobile development by storm and it is a great way to go if you want to become a mobile developer and I also feel just as strong about Flash Player. It is installed and used on more devices than any other plugin technology in the world. My personal openion is that Flash Player will become more used and just as powerful if not more powerful than Sun Microsystems JVM. We are starting to see this with other technologies from Adobe. Namely Adobe AIR. I know we will continue to see great things from Adobe and Apple and as a Developer I am excited to see these things evolve. I only ask that companies like Apple and Adobe continue to do their best to listen to there customers and bring our thoughts and talent into the evolutions of there products as well.
SharedObjects are Awesome
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Flex on July 4th, 2009
SharedObject in your flash project can make for a much improved user experience, and can help you do things faster and more behind the sense so that your applications and web sites work the way users expect them to work. Recently I had to discover the power of SharedObject myself in a chat applications that I am building in Flex.
Because our application will live on each page of a web site I needed a way to keep the user from having to login to chat everytime they do a page load. The chat app will basically store the users login info locally so that I can easily get their login creds and log them back into the server as they navigate the site. I also went a step farther and store the last few messages that they have either sent or received and load them back into the view when the app loads.
In these examples I am going to go over a couple of fundamental things you can do to store user info locally with SharedObjects. Everything in this post was coded using the new Flash Builder Beta but SharedObject has been around for a long time and should work even back in AS2. For my examples we will of course be coding for AS3 and Flash 10.
Remembering User Cardinals
Here we have an example of storing user login information so when they return to our application we can remember there user name and password for them. Remember that all this data is stored local to the user’s hard drive so we are not transmitting anything over the internet at this point because flash player itself has the data we need.
If this is your first time viewing the the app what you need to do is fill in the info and check the box remember me. Then you will refresh the page and you will see that your info was stored. Unchecking the box will clear the data and if you refresh the page you will have to start all over. To show that your data was stored or cleared, click the check SO button. I have some code that will see if the sharedobject data matches what is in the text input controls or not and alert you if the data matches or does not match.
RIGHT CLICK SWF TO VIEW SOURCE AND DOWNLOAD SOURCE ZIP FILE
Remembering what the user did last
This next example will pretty much do the same thing with sharedobject. Remember all we are really doing is choosing what type of data we need from flash player at runtime.
What we are going to do is remember the last thing the user did so they can pickup where they left off. In this simple app we create a ball. The starting X and Y location of the ball is 50px. As you click on the stage the ball will move to the location of the ball to your mouseX and mouseY location. The next time you load the app the ball will move to the last location you clicked. We do this by storing the last mouseX and mouseY location in the sharedobject. Give it a try by clicking around a few times and refreshing the page.
If you don’t want the app to remember the location then check the box in the bottom of the app and it will not store the x and y by clearing out the data.
RIGHT CLICK SWF TO VIEW SOURCE AND DOWNLOAD SOURCE ZIP FILE
The ball example could let you do something like not skip a flash intro if the user has been to the site before or maybe you only want an animation to play on the home page so after the user goes past that point in the site you store a Boolean value to let you know if they have been there before.
Keep in mind that sharedobject data should remain simple. I have gone as far as storing my own value objects in an Array within sharedobjects but if the data grows beyond 100k flash player will warn the user and get their permission before allowing the data to be stored., so you want to keep the data storage small.
Hope some of you found this useful and please feel free to leave your comments, suggestions or questions.
Flex / Flash Camp and Adobe Tour June 19th
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Events, Flash, Flex on June 5th, 2009
Speaker List and Schedule
You must RSVP for 1 or both events http://615flex.eventbrite.com/
Half Day Flash / Flex Camp
When: June 19, 2009
Doors: 9:30am
Start: 10:00am
Where: Nashville, TN http://www.anthonybillups.com/
Speakers: Scot Clausing, Ben Stucki, Mike Orth, Deke Smith, Aaron West, Matthew Wallace
Matthew Wallace - Senior Flash Developer / RIA Architect
The mechanic behind all things Flash at RW and now Moontoast. Also under the hood, he also does some Java / Red5 development. “Tell me what you want it to do, and I will make it happen”, is basically Matthew’s goal on any project.
You can check out more and follow what Matthew Wallace is up to in a few places.
- Blog: http://flashalisious.com
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/mswallace
This session will cover the Flash IDE and Flex Builder as your code editor work flow. In this session Matthew will use Flash to set up the User interface of a comon web site layout and the show you how to set up Flex Builder to do all your actionscript coding, because we all know the Flash IDE code editor suck!
For getting your ass there early the first 15 seats will have a free book just for coming to my session. You will get and Actionscript 3 for Flash CS3 just for showing up!
Mike is a Senior Flex/AS3 Consultant & Music Industry veteran. Early in his career, he started his own record label and worked with Grammy award-winning artists. During the rise of the digital age, he quickly went from creating artist websites to creating cutting-edge interactive music applications. Mike now leads development teams around the globe and has authored code published in the Flex 3 Cookbook. Combining his creative talent and extensive RIA knowledge, Mike specializes in overall application design, architecture, user interaction, and other awesome buzzwords.Lunch brake – 1:15 – 2:15
Deke Smith started his career as an art director and graphic designer within the print world. He became enamored with the possibilities of electronic media and began a user interface design company in the early years of the Internet. That company later merged with another and he got bought out. His love of exploring how electronic media can be exploited to communicate has continued. With Flash, and later Flex, he saw the first tool that fulfilled the mission that Java and HTML never solved convincingly: to give developers the power to mesh the user’s desktop and the power and data of servers together as one application. Flash, as a tool, had the advantages of the Web without many of the user interface restrictions. Today he focuses on programming user experiences in Flash and Flex.Deke’s session will start at 2:20pm – 3:10pm – A Few Common Pitfalls in Flex.
The power of Flex is that it makes so many complex tasks easy. But problems can arise if the man behind the curtain is ignored. This session is about what Flex does to make a developer’s easier and how what goes on in the background can cause very hard to debug problems in that developer’s code.
Scot Clausing is a local Flex & Java developer with sincere interest in mobile development and 3D interactive design. While he has daily exposure to all areas of the development process, his true passions are application architecture, UI design and teaching. Since the introduction of Adobe Flex 2, RIA development has been an obsession and has provided a truly enjoyable and fulfilling career path. After three years, Flex & Flash Builder 4 re-ignite that obsession.This is the session to see if you’re interested in getting started with the Flash Builder 4 beta, now available on http://labs.adobe.com. The presentation will highlight some cool new features of the IDE, and then jump right into the goods. I may include such topics as: The Flash Player 10 Text Engine (which is awesome), Skinning components with FXG, Creating custom components, and the wonderful new syntax for States. If you have a topic you are especially interested in, please send me an email or drop me a line at http://blog.tsclausing.com.
Ben Stucki is an independent software developer in Nashville, TN. He might have had an average, every-day job selling retail electronics or installing cable, but he doesn’t. He designs and develops bleeding edge web applications using Flex, ActionScript 3, Java, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Apparently he’s pretty good at it. He speaks at events just to rub it in.From ByteArrays to Sound APIs the Flash Player has grown a lot in the last few years. In this talk Ben will take a look at Flash Platform features you may not even know existed and show you how to use them in the latest Flex 4 SDK.
Flex Tour Doors: 6:00pm – Start: 7:00pm
Where: Nashville, TN http://www.anthonybillups.com/
Speakers: Greg Wilson
Greg is an Adobe Enterprise Platform Evangelist – Flex, AIR, LiveCycle, ColdFusion, Acrobat. Photographer, Pilot and the combination of both http://www.tigeraerial.com
Greg will be speaking about some of the changes coming to the Flash and Flex Frameworks.
Beer and food will be provided before and after the Adobe event.
Prizes will be awarded during the evening. Currently some of the prizes consist of Adobe Flex and CS4 product licenses. We are also hopeful to have some sponsored swag.
Following the event will be a mixer with a live DJ. This will be an opportunity for you to get to know some of your colleagues and just hang. We will try to wrap up around 10:00pm.
Try out Moontoast and get some Flash / Flex advice or help
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Flex, Red5 on May 15th, 2009
Being that I actually work on Moontoast and develop tools for it I figured it would be a good idea to offers some services on the site. If you need to meet with an experianced Flex / Flash developer please check out my Moontoast page.
What do you know? Moontoast lets you sell that knowledge
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Flex, Red5, Remarkable Wit on March 25th, 2009
For almost 1 year I have been working as the senior flash developer for RW. We were working on this top secret project called “Moontoast“. Well, after a hectic first part of this year we launched Moontoast at SXSW.
Before I tell you my part in the project, let me first tell you what Moontoast is; why you would want to use it, and how to get started.
Moontoast democratizes information by
- Connecting those who know with those who want to know. Moontoast is making available everything anyone can think of, ever. Yeah, it’s big.
- Moontoast is the next step for the Internet, from information retrieval to knowledge transfer.
How to use Moontoast
- Search Moontoast profiles for an expert of any kind.
- Establish a live connection with that expert, link straight to calendars, send SMS or email too.
- Schedule a Moontoast session and determine price.
Who uses Moontoast
- Someone who wants to make there own beer.
- Someone who would like to know how to use there computer so you don’t have to bug a family member to help you.
- Someone who wants to take vocal lessons from Kip Winger.
- Anyone looking for any kind of knowledge. Again, it’s that big.
Who built Moontoast… funny you should ask? Well the kick ass development team from Remarkable Wit out of Nashville, TN.
Now the part I have been trying to get too… What role did I play in building Moontoast?
Enter the Moontoast live video chat application. This application is pretty much my baby, and I was blessed to be able to build this as my part of the RW development team. This application was built using the Flex Framework and an open source FMS (Flash Media Server) called Red5. This was my first application that would use FMS and Remote Shared Objects. Shared Objects are basically variables and functions that allow you to pass information and update each users application when something changes in one of the user’s applications. Basically updating user preferences, alerts, and so on, in real time. An example of this would be a text chat message in the Moontoast video chat app. One user types a chat message and when the user sends the message, both chat conversations are updated via the Shared Object.
The heart and soul of this application, of course, is the real time live video streaming. This Flash app looks at your computer’s hardware on launch to see what possible ports could have a web cam and microphone attached in order to send the video and audio data to the server. The result is a Video Stream that each user can see on their computer, so that you can have a live face to face conversation with the other user.
I am really proud of this application and I thank the whole RW team for giving me the opportunity to develop this application, and I look forward to seeing and building more innovative applications with you guys.
I personally would love feedback from users on features they would like to see improved in the application, or features they would like to see added. You can do so by leaving a comment on this blog post.
So… if you have some time today and knowledge that you feel is valuable to the world; or if you are looking for some knowledge on a particular subject, give Moontast a try.
Remove unwanted buttons form Eclipse / Flex Builder Toolbar
Posted by Matthew Wallace in Eclipse, Flex on February 11th, 2009
Something that has really been bugging me for a long time about Eclipse IDE / Flex Builder is the fact that I could not figure out how to remove items from the toolbar at the top after I install some needed plugins. Well all the plugins are needed but some of them don’t really get used all that much. A good example for me would be that I have the cfeclipse plugin but I really don’t use CF all that much and the cfeclipse plugin once installed puts a lot of extra stuff at the top in the toolbar.
Here is a screen grab of what kind of mess I was dealing with before I figured this out.
Now if you have been looking for this solution it is pretty easy once you know where to look. It is actually easier than changing your code editor font size. If you have ever had to figure that one out you know what I mean. Pretty damn difficult if you don’t know where to look.
Here are the steps
1. After Eclipse / Flex Builder is open you need to go to the Window menu and select Customize Perspective.
2. Once the Customize Perspective panel is open you need to select Commands tab.
3. In my case I clicked on CFEclipse in the left hand menu and to the right you will see all the buttons and short cuts displayed for that plugin. All I did was uncheck the box next to CFEclipse then then click OK. Now I have a toolbar that is not over loaded with buttons Yeah!
Let me know if this works for you guys as well cause for me it has been months of wondering how to do this.
Flasher Mag – Check it out
Posted by Matthew Wallace in ActionScript 3, Resources on January 5th, 2009
One of the things that I really like about the Flash community is that it always seems to have the coolness factor. Not that other development languages aren’t cool. I do program in more than just Flash and Flex. I guess the fact that design, animation and multi-media is a big part of what we do as Flash platform programmers, make for a cool development environment.
Well now enter what could be come the coolest Magazine / Show for Flash Player developers, programmers and animators. Flasher Magazine is all things flash player and multi-media related. Produced by Lee Brimelow of theflashblog.com, this Flash Magazine is shot in a style of the very cool Thrasher Mag. Lee has been very influential in my life as a programmer and always very helpful to the community. If you are a developer that programs too the Flash Player and you want to know the cool stuff that is going on I would check this out for sure. If you aren’t a Flex or Flash programmer and you want more info or reasons why you should become an Actionscript Ninja then this show is one more thing that may push you closer to taking the plung.
Sponsors
Flash / Flex / BlazeDS
Twibbon's I created to make your twitter avatar look even cooler.