In my original post on the new Flash Player 10 Vector class, I did a simple example that showed Vectors being slightly faster than Array when just populating and looping through collections. Below is another example that shows a more significant performance increase when using Vectors. In this example, I populate an Array and Vector with 5 million random numbers, and then loop through them and average all of the numbers.

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 haven’t 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).

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. Right now, the only way to get these is to attend one of the developer events on Ryan’s and my tour through Asia. We will be printing more after that though and its a good bet that we will have some at Max.

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. Here is the filter: <languageVersion : 1.0;> kernel GrayScale < namespace : "mesh"; vendor : "Mike Chambers"; version : 1; description : "Gray scale filter"; > { input image4 src; output pixel4 dst; void evaluatePixel() { dst = sampleNearest(src,outCoord()); //algorithm from ITU-R Recommendation BT.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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 tweeted 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.