Mike Chambers

As you have surely already read, we announced Adobe Flash CS4 today. I am not going to go into all of the details about what is in this release as you can find that on the website. However, I havent really used the authoring tool in some time (I barely picked up CS3), but I have really been enjoying CS4. It just feels like the Flash team nailed it this time around (Keith Peters has similar sentiments).
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Here is a sneak peak of the new AIR t-shirts (with a shout out to Flex and Flash). These were created by eboy, who also created the AIR 1.0 launch t-shirts.
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Below is another simple Pixel Bender filter that I created last night. This one basically, converts an image to gray scale, using the ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 algorithm described here.

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After seeing all of the cool stuff people have been doing with Pixel Bender, I finally decided to spend a little time and start learning how to build them myself.

The learning curve isn’t too difficult, although you do have to learn some new concepts, and deal with some limitations (at least when creating filters for Flash). The most difficult part for me thus far, is just understanding color and pixel math and manipulation (something I need to read up on more).

Anyways, below if one of my first filters. I wanted to post it as it is a pretty simple example, while still potentially being useful. Basically, it creates a TV scanline effect by making every other row of pixels black.
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ActionScriptHero.org has just posted an interview that they did with me. This is part of a series of interviews that they are doing with members of the Flash community.

Make sure to check out some of the other interviews, which include chats with Keith Peters, Mario Klingemann, Andre Michelle, Branden Hall, Grant Skinner and Ralph Hauwert (and more).

You can read the entire interview here.

Last week I wrote a number of blog posts showing how to work with Pixel Bender filters in Flash, Flex and ActionScript. In particular, I wrote about how to embed pixel bender filters within a SWF and how to encapsulate custom Pixel Bender filters in an ActionScript 3 class. For this post, I am going to take the next step, and show how to create re-distributable SWC libraries of custom Pixel Bender filters that can be used in Flash Player 10 based projects (including Flex Builder, MXMLC and Flash Professional).
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Keith Peters nails it in his interview with ActionScriptHero.org:

The Flash community is seriously one of the best parts of being into Flash. I mean, the tools are cool, and what you can do with them is cool, but the openness and willing to help and share and teach each other is really incredible. I’ve dabbled in some other technology groups and have seen people appalled when I dared ask them how they did something, like I was trying to steal their precious secrets. But in the Flash community, you ask someone how they did something, they’ll sit you down, buy you a beer, explain it in detail and email you the source code the next day.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

We have just posted an update of the pre-release version of Adobe AIR for Linux. This version is a beta (previous version was an Alpha) and adds support for a ton of new AIR features (and fixes a lot of bugs). You can find all of the details in the release notes.

You can find more information, as well as download the bits from the Adobe AIR for Linux Beta labs page.

Chris Hayen twittered to me this morning expressing his wish that the ActionScript 3 URLLoader class had a refreshInterval property. I responded that this should be pretty simple to add by extending the class. Well, I had a little time while I download some internal software builds, so I put together a class that adds a refreshInterval property.

This has not been tested very much. In fact, I have only tested when the data loads successfully from the server. However, I wanted to post an early / rough version here with the hope that I get feedback on it. If the consensus is that this could be useful, then I will look at making it more solid, and adding it to the as3corelib library.

The class adds two new public APIs:
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Just a quick note, but Ryan Stewart and I will be doing a quick, mini speaking tour in Asia at the end of this month. We will be visiting Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Hong Kong (about 2 days each city).
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