Adobe® Flash® Player 10, code-named “Astro,” introduces new expressive features and visual performance improvements that allow interactive designers and developers to build the richest and most immersive Web experiences. These new capabilities also empower the community to extend Flash Player and to take creativity and interactivity to a new level.

Wow, this is great news. The features list is very impressive. I am especially excited GPU acceleration support. That means greatly improved performance since on previous versions, everything was handled by the CPU alone.

• 3D Effects - Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.
• Custom Filters and Effects - Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe® Pixel Bender™, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
• Advanced Text Layout - A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
• Enhanced Drawing API - Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
• Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

And this of course means that Flash CS4/10 will soon follow. And that’s what I will be waiting for like a child on Christmas Eve.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Demos. The Flash demo is not much, but the videos at the bottom of the page are well worth a watch. You need to download and install the beta player, and I have no idea how stable it is.

It’s been a while since my last post. My connection has been down for a few days, so I haven’t got the chance to post. But during this downtime, I found some time to create some experiments in Flash/AS3.0 (maybe I’ll post it soon). I needed to call a method at timed intervals in this one experiment, and I thought I was in trouble. I never got around to getting how AS2.0 handled timers, if I did manage to do timers, they end up dirty.

AS3.0 has a much much better Timer class to handle just such events. Now, I’m not going to bother comparing the AS3 Timer class with AS2’s timer handling, I’m just going to give a quick intro to the class.

First, you need to create a new Timer object. The constructor has 2 parameters, delay and repeatCount. delay is the time in milliseconds the intervals will be. repeatCount is the number of times the Timer will run, assigning it 0 will set it to run infinitely.

var myTimer:Timer = new Timer(1000, 5);

Now, we want to write a function that will get called when an interval is passed (every 1 second), and when the whole timer finishes counting (after 5 seconds). The Timer class dispatches two events, TimerEvent.TIMER is dispatched when an interval is passed, TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE is dispatched when the timer is finished (I love how simple that is).

stage.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, everySecond);
stage.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, onComplete);

function everySecond(e:TimerEvent):void{
    trace("tick tock!");
}
function onComplete(e:TimerEvent):void{
    trace("Timer finished!");
}

Now, we just need to start the timer. The Timer class has 3 methods, start, stop, and reset. Those are fairly self-explanatory. We could now add the following lines:

myTimer.start();
//modify the onComplete function
function onComplete(e:TimerEvent):void{
    trace("Timer finished!");
    myTimer.reset();
    myTimer.start();
}

So now, when our timer finishes, it will automatically start all over again. This will trace

tick tock!
tick tock!
tick tock!
tick tock!
tick tock!
Timer finished!
tick tock!
tick tock!
...

This was just a really quick intro to the Timer class, I just felt like sharing this because I was so relieved at how easy it was to handle timed events now.

I’ll be out for a few days on vacation again, so here’s something that might keep things interesting around here.

Have you ever wondered how those O’Reilly books got their covers? How did they choose the animal for a specific book? Why did they even choose animals in the first place?

Their website posted an article answering those questions, with a step-by-step image on creating one of the animals (a pelican).

Read the article.

This must be the coolest thing I have seen. An R2-D2 projector with iPod dock, next-gen console connectivity, CD/DVD player, and a whole lot more. It comes with a Millennium Falcon remote control, and it is fully mobile. I WANT! But it costs  $2,995. *sigh*

Check out the video and prepare to wipe your drool off your keyboard.

May 1st just went by, and all the participants now have their rebooted sites up. There must be at least a hundred participants for this. I registered on the site last month, just for kicks, but I never really got around to making my site.

Head on over to the site and have a look at all the new sites that went up at the same time, and cast your votes for your favorite.

http://www.may1reboot.com/2008/