Mike Chambers

Video after the break:
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I am in Brighton for Flash on the Beach 2009 (amazing conference as usual). I gave a presentation on Adobe AIR yesterday, titled “Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR“, which went well. I covered how to accomplish and approach a number of development tasks when working with AIR, and also talked about a couple of new features that we are working on.

I have posted the slides for the session, which you can grab from here.

You can find most of the libraries and code I discussed on the as3corelib library page (look in the com.adobe.air package).

Marc Hibbins has notes on the session here.

I dont have a formal computer science training / education, so I never got the chance to learn about working with low level data structures (bits and bytes). I have wanted to learn this for some time, but had difficulty finding resources for it which didnt assume I had a computer science degree.

Well, yesterday, FITC posted all of the video sessions from FITC Toronto, and I spent some time watching Lee Brimelow’s presentation on working with ByteArrays. It is a really great session, that provides a clear and solid foundation and understanding of working with ByteArrays and bits and bytes.

Anyways, after watching Lee’s session, it all finally clicked for me, and I spent some time last night putting together a simple parser that would dynamically load and display a 24Bit BMP image file within Flash.
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Just a quick note, but we have updated the Flash Player 10 System requirements page. The update adds support for various browsers on Microsoft Windows 7 and Mac 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

You can view the Flash Player 10 system requirements here.

Below is a matrix that shows supported runtimes for Rich Runtime browser plugins. The matrix compares the latest versions of runtimes, which are supported by the companies that create them.

The runtimes covered include:

• Adobe Flash Player 10
• Microsoft Silverlight 3.0
• Java FX 1.2

Information is obtained from the runtime’s websites (linked below).
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For the past month or two, I have been spending time building a game (something I havent done since my Flash 4 days). This has really been a lot of fun, as it has allowed me to use some of the Flash Player APIs which I really haven’t had a chance or need to use before.

One thing which I have been (slowly) learning about are using Matrix transformations on DisplayObjects. I made a post earlier showing how (with much, much help from Senocular), I was able to use Matrix to do hit tests using BitmapData.hitTest on DisplayObjects which have had transformations applied to them (in this case, rotation).

Well, I recently had the need to convert some of my DisplayObjects to use the 2.5D APIs (by setting the z property to a value). Unfortunately, this ended up breaking a lot of my code, mostly because of how it changes how transformations are applied to a DisplayObject. Specifically, when you set the DisplayObject.z property to any value, DisplayObject.transform.matrix will return null, and you must use DisplayObject.transform.matrix3D instead. Where this causes problems is when you are using APIs that expect to use a Matrix instance, as opposed to Matrix3D instance, such as BitmapData.draw.
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I recently bought my first DSLR, the Nikon D90, which I have been having a blast with. One of the cool features of the camera, is that it supports creating HD video clips (of up to 5 minutes) (view an example here). However, the way the clips are created seems to confuse Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, which won’t open or import the clips without a little work on your part.
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I am fortunate to have been invited to speak again at Flash on the Beach in Brighton this fall. The event is September 20th – 23rd, in Brighton, England, and is hands down the top Flash Conference in Europe (and a contender for top worldwide).

I will be doing a session titled “Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR” which will cover some useful tricks and techniques when developing AIR Applications. I will also be going over some next generation Adobe AIR features and APIs.

If you are a Flash developer / designer and are in Europe, you CANNOT miss this conference. As usual, the speaker list is pretty amazing, and this is really shaping up to be a great conference.

Hurry and grab your tickets before they sell out.

Just a quick note, but I have updated my “fyi” Firefox Ubiquity command to work with the latest version of Ubiquity (0.5).

You can find more information on the command, as well as install it from here.

If you have read my blog any this week, you have probably noticed that I have been doing some basic research on collision detection within the Flash Player. As part of this, I have put together a simple test suite, showing the performance of a couple of different techniques for checking for collision. This is by no means meant to be exhaustive (and currently tilts towards boundary collision). However, I wanted to post the results as the current information is useful (if nothing more than to confirm existing assumptions), and perhaps generate more tests an ideas around collision detection.
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