Flash Coder

The Logic Bureau just posted on this user group. It’s not a new user group and though it has more than 350 members it is still relatively under the radar. I know I didn’t know about this group until a couple of months ago. They are an excellent group for beginners and intermediates, with incredible on site facilities like fully equipped developer/designer labs and lecture rooms available for the members, enabling them to not only hear great speakers but also to get their hands dirty in a work lab environment. There’s lots more but I won’t repeat what’s on the Logic Bureau site. Have a read and get along.

Roll up, roll up. No not you sir. The excellent Flash and Flex Developer magazine that I semi regularly bang on about is now releasing back issues free on line. Their content is truly great, covering less for the beginner and instead catering for the more experienced developers amongst us. Take a look at the content synopsis on the cover or any issue and you’ll definitely find something more advanced that you wanted to learn.

June issue Free for Download now
http://www.ffdmag.com/prt/view/back-issues/issue/1015.html

Well you’re probably thinking “Hey, my MBP is cool sukka”, especially if you’re in a timewarp from the 70’s and Starsky and Hutch is your best thing (I mean ‘best thaing’), or you’re a huge BA Baracus fan. But I digress. My Mac Book Pro was over heating (as I previously mentioned in my last post). Well the nice men at AKQA London said “hey sukka”….well ok, so they actually said “I say old man. Anyone for tea and muffins?” followed by possibly one of the most usefull string of non random verbs, nouns and adjectives I’ve heard for a very long time “Why don’t you install SMC Fan Control? Don’t you know. Anyone for Tennis?”

SMC Fan Control, for those who don’t know, is a simple, free fan controller app which reduced the core temperature of my MBP by 25 degrees C in 2 minutes (it also works in degrees F). I can now actually touch my MBP. Marvelous! It allows you to set the fan speed in increments of single rpms, as well as telling you what speed they’re running at when you set them. It has a nice friendly temperature bar with the temperature displayed on it. Couple this with the iStat Pro widget (the latest version of which finally asks you if you’d like to install the additional fan and heat monitors - and about bloody time to) and you have a nice heat monitoring and control system.

If, like me, you use video quite a bit in your projects, and I don’t just mean FLVs, (perhaps you use media directly, passing it to the devices native codecs or perhaps you need original codec footage to transcode to FLV) then a really useful resource would be an online library of all video and audio codecs with example files for each. This would allow you not only to test out the codecs and your code but also save you a LOT of time trying to resource media files in the right format or trying to encode or transcode existing ones for testing. It would also give you insight to other available codecs you’d never heard of and it might summarise their strengths, uses and weakneses, thus allowing you to advise your clients better on their codec choices.

Ahhhh, that would be nice. Well, Wikipedia have just such a section. It also has a section for audio codecs (in the left hand menu). So if you do any broadcast, media agency, Flash Media Server or IPTV work, this is a definate Bookmarker. In fairness, there probably are a few codecs missing, but it’s extremely unlikely they’ll be codecs any of us have ever heard about or will use. A big thank you to Richard Leggett for pointing me (and all the attendees of the LFPUG) to this excellent resource on Thursday night. I WILL be using this a lot.

I posted an eralier article about the new Flash vp6.2 video codec and it got me thinking that a codec resource might be useful for all you crazy cats, so check out Free-Codecs.com

Recently a friend asked me for 4 tips for using video in Flash. Not streamed via FCS, but straight use of the Flash player 7 video codecs. So here they are. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting one. I had a set of tabbed movies and components. In the IDE they would tab incorrectly. When I published them however, they would tab perfectly. It turns out that my Keyboard Shortcuts needed to be turned off, even though I hadn’t defined any keyboard shortcuts. To do this, preview your movie in the IDE live preview and then make sure control > Disable Keyboard Shorcuts is enabled. Now the tabbing index will work fine in the IDE as well.

Vocalise TTS is the new character animation extension for Macromedia Flash mx 2004 that uses text to speech to create talking characters. The speech is a bit Stephen Hawkings but I expect that’s because it’s a text to speech generator.

If you want to check your RSS or Atom feeds are producing valid output try this little baby. Feed Validator for Atom and RSS

Christian Giordano has made some of his very nice work source files available to us all - try and reply. CGWS Downloads