You may have noticed that over the past year we have really begun to leverage RSS through weblogs, content on the DevNet Resource Kits and the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA). This string of resources and projects utilizing and focusing on RSS has not been a coincidence, but rather the product of the realization of the power of RSS. This realization began over a year ago when we began publishing weblogs. Initially, we saw weblogs primarily as a way to quickly publish news, information and content (i.e. a better way to communicate with our communities). However, I believe that the real power of weblogs is not that they allow you to easily publish content, but rather that they make it so simple to syndicate that content (via RSS). You can see some of the power of that syndication through the multitude of Macromedia community focused RSS aggregates, including MXNA, Flog, Flogspot and Goog.
One of the big hassles of developing with ActionScript is that when trying to access properties and functions that do not exist, the Flash IDE does not throw an error. This can make it very difficult to debug code that is not working due to something as simple as a misspelled variable name.
Below is some simple code that shows how to trace errors when your code tries to access properties / functions that do not exist.
What is your dream ActionScript editor? What features would it have? Do you use Flash’s ActionScript editor or an external one? If you use an external one, which one do you use and why?
Post your replies in the comments section. Make sure to post URLs to the editors if you have them so everyone can check them out.
Have a question about Flash or ActionScript? Below are some places you should check before you post the question on forums or mailing lists. Chances are someone has already answered your question.
You can also check out John Dowdell’s article which has some more information on searching for information.
Just a quick note that we have done a mini update to the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA). The main change is that we have added a ranking system, which ranks items in relative to other items in the same category over the past 24 hours.
Basically, the stars represent the number of clicks an item has received relative to other items in the same category over the past 24 hours. This allows you to quickly see what the most popular items have been over the last 24 hours.
Does anyone have any experience with integrating Flash applications / content within C# based windows applications?
If so, what was your experience like? How hard was it to get started?
Post your comments in the comments section.
The Macromedia Central Forum has moved. The new location is:
NewsGroup
macromedia.central.prerelease_discussion
This was done do to the number of people who were confused about the purpose of the forum (thinking it was a central place to bring all issues / questions).
Daniel Dura has just posted a great tip on how to get code hinting to work within the Flash IDE without having to use suffixes or prefixes on your variable names. It involves declaring the variable type in the comments before the variable.
Update : Greg Burch just told me that the hinting will be global, and not scoped to the specific variable. Just something to watch out for.
You can read the tip at Daniel’s site.
As some of you have noticed, we have launched an XML / RSS news aggregator. The site aggregates RSS and other feeds from sites which might be useful / interesting to developers and designers who use Macromedia products.
We have created a comprehensive FAQ which has information on the aggregator, how to integrate your feed / weblog with MXNA, and how the elements of the aggregator work.
Some of the features of MXNA include:
