Weber Design Labs » Flex

Flash Cheat Sheet

Stephen — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:58:23 +0000

So if you know Flash pretty well ignore this post. This is for the people just starting out who are trying to get started in Actionscript 2 or Actionscript 3. Its a simple tool, but hopefully it helps some people out and they use it every once in awhile when they need some quick code. Basically its a cheat sheet that gives quick code on how to do some common things that we all do in Flash everyday. Leave a comment if you use it.

View Cheat Sheet

Also if you want to know how I did it, right click and select “View Source”.

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Flash Friday – 3D, Flex and Video Tutorials

Stephen — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:02:57 +0000

Papervision 3D Roundup
http://flashenabledblog.com/2009/02/19/tutorials-papervision-3d-roundup/

Creating PicLens with Flex and Away3D
http://flashenabledblog.com/2009/02/17/tutorials-creating-a-piclens-web-application-with-flex-and-away-3d/

Car simulation with Maya & Papervision3d
http://www.everydayflash.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/13/car-simulation-with-maya-papervision3d/

Google Calendar Lib
http://sujitreddyg.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/documentation-for-as3googlecalendarlib/

Flex OpenID Login Component
http://anirudhs.chaosnet.org/blog/2009.02.17.html

Making Things Walk in Flash 3D
http://www.everydayflash.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/09/making-things-walk-in-flash-3d/

Adobe Flaw Heightens Risk of Malicious PDFs
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/20/1525233&from=rss

What is the F4V Format For?
http://theflashblog.com/?p=748

Some Fantastic Video Tutorials
http://tv.adobe.com/#ch+MAX

Google Maps API for Flex
http://codeofdoom.com/wordpress/2009/02/18/intro-to-google-maps-api-for-flex/

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Free MP3 Search Engine – Flex Seeqpod

Stephen — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:29:27 +0000

This is just a quick and dirty example of a MP3 search engine. This searches Seeqpod and then brings the results back. Most of all it lets you download the MP3 straight from page. I tried to get some other search engines like Mooza, but they were way too slow. I would love some suggestions of sources and any other functionality you guys can think of. Anyways download the source and check out the demo and enjoy.

Download MP3 Search Engine (1178)

Enjoy!

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Free MP3 XML Playlist Player

Stephen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:05:56 +0000

If you haven’t seen Viewzi, go check it out right now. Its a great way to view your search results. My favorite view is the “song view” made by Joshua Sterns. Well I saw this and thought everyone should have a beautiful and easy to use interface like that for their own content. So I made one and am now releasing it to you. Its very simple and it resizes to fit almost any size. Make it full screen or make it part of a page. All you have to do is make a playlist that is structed like this:

And pass it in through the Flashvars through the HTML. Here is an example of that code:

<param name="flashvars" value="xmlpath=mp3_playlist.xml" />

Still not sure how to do it then check out the example and view the source of the page. You can also download the source below and change it as much as you want.

MP3 Playlist (2419)

Enjoy!

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BrainStormr – Flex Meet YouTube, Twitter and Blogger

Stephen — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:12:39 +0000

BrainStormr Screenshot

http://brainstormr.weberlabs.com

As a warning this application is in Alpha stages, but I love to show people the capabilities of Flex and Weber Design Labs. This application searches YouTube, Twitter and Blogger then shows the data in a brain storming visualization. It started off as an experiment and grew to an application that is useful for research, opinions, finding what is the buzz, etc. So enjoy this free service.

Here are a few features I plan to rollout in the future:

Search Digg Data
Enable History management
Save Content to Lists and Then Email Lists To Anyone

If you have any suggestions please make a comment. I would love feedback. And yes, I know the name is stupid and as soon as I have a name I will work on the logo.

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Company Directory – Flex/AIR/XML

Stephen — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:03:04 +0000

So during my lunch couple of days ago I made an application that would let you search for any part of a person’s first name and last name and then display them and their data. My first one was built off of a DB and some PHP with an admin section, but I thought this was too much for everyone – so here is an XML based one. You can download it and if you want the source, just right click and goto View Source.

This is a very customizable application, so get into it and have fun. All it does is read from an XML file and search based off of your input.

Company Directory (1205)

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20 Flash Resources and Tools You’ll Want

Stephen — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:20:34 +0000

TweenLite – The fastest tweening engine available – see this test. Only 3K in size and is available for AS3 and AS2. For filters see the TweenFilterLite engine.
Papervision3D – A 3D engine for displaying simple elements from cubes to complex models and interactive materials. The most popular 3D engine available for Flash. Still in beta, but used a lot already in the commercial industry.
Away3D – Another 3D engine for Flash. This one is less popular, but has production ready code, regular code releases and is based on Papervision. See this demo and be amazed.
WOW Engine – AS3 3D Physics Engine. Great for use with Papervision3D or Away3D.
FIVe3D – 3D Animation engine in AS2 and AS3.
Ribbit – An amazing technology that lets Flash call a phone and use the microphone on your computer. Enables Flash pieces to receive phone calls. Visual voice mail, with speech to text capabilities. Very easy component-based implementation.
WiiFlash – Takes the revolutionary Wii controller and takes it to Flash. Using WiiFlash you can create entirely new and very fun experiences for users.
APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) – The biggest physics engine available for Flash. Its fantastic for 2D animations, but beyond that it needs more.
AMFPHP - Want to get data from your database into Flash? Well this is the one I would recommend. It uses very easy PHP gateway architecture. Also very fast and easy to test services.
Flickr Library – Want to get at the very popular and fun to use Flickr service? Use this to make it easier on yourself.
RSS Library – Love those RSS feeds? Want to bring them in your code and rip them apart? Use this to really handle those RSS feeds. Even though its a standard format there are a lot of little details to them.
YouTube – Everyone loves youtube. Everyone wants to take video and present it in a unique and useful way, so make your own fun interface with it and use this to make it easier for ya.
FZip - It used to be hard to make those zip files. Used to have to use a server-side script to help you out, but now just use this library and your good to go.
AS3SoundEditorLib – Application displays a spectrum of the mp3 file, displays cue points from a file, and allows navigation and playback of mp3 and navigation between cue points.
Facebook-AS3 – Implementation of Facebook’s REST API in Actionscript 3.
AS3Crypto – A cryptography library written in Actionscript 3 that provides several common algorithms.
AlivePDF – AlivePDF is an open-source ActionScript 3 (Flash, Flex, AIR) PDF generation library.
It allows you to generate PDF’s client-side.
ASSQL – Get actionscript to talk directly to MySQL.
Yahoo! Maps Communication Kit – The Maps API allows incorporation of GeoRSS feeds, custom marker creation, and many other features.
AS3CoreLib – The corelib project is an ActionScript 3 Library that contains a number of classes and utilities for working with ActionScript 3. These include classes for MD5 and SHA 1 hashing, Image encoders, and JSON serialization as well as general String, Number and Date APIs.

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Free RSS Reader with Search (Flex/AIR with PHP Proxy) Open Source

Stephen — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:40:23 +0000

So I made this awhile ago as an experiment. It seemed to me that Flex was perfect for an interactive RSS Reader. A lot of people have problems with getting remote RSS feeds (and my solution I am sure is not perfect). If anyone finds a better solution please pass it on in the comments. This piece of code is AIR, but I also have a web-based Flex version available (see demo link below). This RSS Reader uses PHP to get the RSS feed from the remote site. I have included all the code and assets for the AIR version and the Flex version. Please use it and learn from it and then make it better.

Please post links to anywhere you use it and tell me if you like it. I love to hear that some of these Flex projects are appreciated!

Features:

Retrieves multiple RSS Feeds
Searches for multiple keywords in each post’s title and description then ranks them by how many keywords matched
Re-arrangeable Search Keywords with Drag and Drop Easy of Use
Run from Web or Desktop
Uses purely Open Source Software and Open Source Code
Free (Just Like All Weber Design Labs Products)

View Demo

(Just Add A Feed In The Demo)

Install FlexibleRSS Now
(Installs App And AIR If You Dont Have It)

Download FlexibleRSS AIR Application (1252)

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Free FLV Player – Drag n’ Drop

Stephen — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:50:15 +0000

So anyone who knows me knows I LOVE Flex. I also found I love AIR. If you don’t know about these two technologies then you must check them out and give them a fair chance. I know new things are scary, but some you just see are going to change how quickly we can make an application. For example I made this simple application in about 45 minutes (and I know I am slow compared to the good programmers).

AIR Web Installer and FLV Player Installer

If the AIR Installer Badge doesn’t work, then you can directly download the air file here

Download the Code[ad#co-1]

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Tracking Flex/Flash With Google Analytics

Stephen — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:48:55 +0000

Recently I have found been working on a project that I need to track. The problem is, its a Flex project. Since its a new technology and its gaining speed I thought this post might be helpful to you.

There seems to be two ways to track Flex/Flash (AS3) actions in Google Analytics:

1. URLRequest
2. ExternalInterface

Here is some of my code that does my tracking for videos:

//Strip Out Spaces and Replace with Underscores

var pattern:RegExp = / /gi;

var formattedVideoTitle:String = _videoTitle.replace(pattern, “_”); //Formulate Tracking String

var trackingStr:String = “/” + _trackingPath + “/” + formattedVideoTitle;

//Two Methods Of Tracking
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//URL Request Send Method
sendToURL(new URLRequest(“javascript:urchinTracker(‘”+trackingStr+”‘);”);

//ExternalInterface Send Method
ExternalInterface.call(“urchinTracker”,trackingStr);

Now of course if you look at the code this means that I am tracking a video twice, so make sure you comment out one of the methods. You get to choose, although the ExternaIInterface method is new and faster, the URLRequest method is probably more legacy and will most likely work on other tracking systems.
Google Analytics Help On The Subject
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55520

Great Posting On The Subject
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1088

Some other interesting things happening with Google Analytics and Flex are these two Flex apps:

Flex Interface to Google Analytics (Flex/AIR)
http://www.aboutnico.be/index.php/google-analytics-air-beta-sign-up/

Flex Widget for Google Analytics:
http://labs.thesedays.com/2007/05/26/apollo-google-analytics-widget-available/

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More Adobe Flash MAX Awsomeness

Stephen — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:38:12 +0000

I just wanted to share a couple of videos with you that I found on the awsomeness of Flash to come:

Flash from C/C++:
(Quake in Flash)

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FlexibleTasks – Free Open Source Flex Task and Project Management System

Stephen — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:48:44 +0000

Hey Everyone,

So I have done several Flex projects, but I want to put up one that is my own Flex project that anyone can see how I program it.

Click Here For Demo

*Note* – Some features are disabled for demo purposes, but code is complete.

I use a combination of Flex/AMFPHP/MySQL. As you know I try to stick to open source and an open architecture. I know that Flex isn’t exactly open source yet (although its getting pretty close and in many respects is open source), but I know that it is the future. I have seen a lot of new jobs for Flex people popping up. Hope this helps some of you to get started. Please comment on it and tell me what features you would like to see and I will be working on documentation, easy installation and customization functionality. Thanks and enjoy!

Download FlexibleTasks (2058)

Installation Instructions:

1. Download All Code
2. Run the SQL Query in the “MySQL” directory on your SQL server.
3. Download and install AMFPHP on server
Download AMFPHP
Video Tutorial on Installing AMFPHP

4. Overwrite the “services” folder in the AMFPHP on your server with the “services” folder included in the AMFPHP folder of the code.

5. Edit the “connect.inc.php” file in the “services” folder to your database connection variables. (e.g.
define( “DATABASE_SERVER”, “http://www.your_server.com” );
define( “DATABASE_USERNAME”, “database_username” );
define( “DATABASE_PASSWORD”, “database_password” );
define( “DATABASE_NAME”, “database_name” );

6. Import Flex code into Flex Builder (trial is available) or Eclipse with the Flex SDK installed and change the variable named “AMFPHPCONNECTIONSTRING” in the”Connection.as” file to your AMFPHP server URL. (e.g. public var AMFPHPCONNECTIONSTRING:String = “http://www.your_domain.com/amfphp/gateway.php”;


7. Compile Flex code in your Flex Builder or Eclipse and enjoy.
I know these seem like a lot of steps, but they are generally not that hard (maybe the compile code in Flex if you have never used Flex). I would love to make this process very automated, but I am not sure how to make the compile with the proper AMFPHP Connection String in Flex automated in an way. Any suggestions would be great! Thanks and tell me what you think!
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Weber Design Labs » Flex

Flash Cheat Sheet

Flash Friday – 3D, Flex and Video Tutorials

Top Flash Links For This Week

Free MP3 Search Engine – Flex Seeqpod

Free MP3 XML Playlist Player

BrainStormr – Flex Meet YouTube, Twitter and Blogger

Company Directory – Flex/AIR/XML

20 Flash Resources and Tools You’ll Want

Free RSS Reader with Search (Flex/AIR with PHP Proxy) Open Source

Free FLV Player – Drag n’ Drop

Tracking Flex/Flash With Google Analytics

More Adobe Flash MAX Awsomeness

FlexibleTasks – Free Open Source Flex Task and Project Management System