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). Among other things, we will be speaking about some of the current and future stuff going on around the Flash Platform, including Flex 4, Flash Player 10, Adobe AIR 1.5, Thermo, and more.

If you check out the Flex SDK nightly builds, then you may have noticed that there are now Adobe AIR 1.5 bits included in the SDK. This is part of the AIR teams ongoing effort to continue to integrate closer into the Flex SDKs build process, and in general to provide more visibility into what is going on with AIR. As the version number indicates, the Adobe AIR 1.5 release (code-named “Cosmo”) is a dot / incremental release.

Ok. Last post on Pixel Bender for today (I promise). This one is simple, but ties together my previous posts. Now, that we know how to load and use Pixel Bender filters in Flex, and know how encapsulte Pixel Bender filters in an ActionScript class, lets combine the two to leverage custom Pixel Bender filters in MXML. First, again, we need our custom Pixel Bender class: Filter Class : TestFilter.as

If you read my blog regularly (or just today) you should have noticed that I have been playing around with some Pixel Bender filters and ActionScript / Flex (all inspired by Lee Brimelow`s video screencast on creating and using Pixel Bender filters in Flash Player 10.) Previously, I posted some code showing how to embed a custom Pixel Bender filter within a SWF and then apply the filter to an image.

Following up on my earlier post on how to embed Pixel Bender filters within a SWF, here is a super simple example that show how to use a Pixel Bender filter within a Flex application. Compiled using the Flex 3.1.0.2710 SDK, and requires Flash Player 10. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" applicationComplete="onApplicationComplete()"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ import flash.filters.*; import flash.utils.ByteArray; //the file that contains the binary bytes of the PixelBender filter [Embed("testfilter.

I was just watching Lee Brimelow’s excellent video introductions to creating and using Pixel Bender filters in Flash Player 10. In his second video, he shows how to use a custom Pixel Bender filter within Flash Player 10. One issue that Lee had was that you have to load the filter at runtime in order to use it. I have modified Lee’s example to allow the filter to be embedded within the SWF, and not require it to be dynamically loaded at runtime.

I spent the afternoon playing around with Google Gears in order to get a basic feel for how it works. Specifically, I wanted to see how much work it would take to add support for offline viewing for tostring.org (an online book site). I used the Gears LocalServer API which “allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally, without a network connection”. The implementation can be though of as a small web server that intercepts requests for remote resources and serves them (seamlessly) from a local cache.

I have been playing around with the jQuery Autocomplete plugin to get it working with the ActionScript 3 documentation API that I posted about earlier today. The Autocomplete API is really nice, and pretty flexible, but one issue I ran into is that the query argument containing the user input that is passed to the server is hard coded to “q”. For my api, I needed this argument to be “api”.

I have just uploaded a new ActionScript 3 reference / online documentation API to Google App Engine. Basically, the service takes an ActionScript 3 class name (or a fragment of a class name) and returns the URL for the online documentation for the specified class. For example: http://as3reference.appspot.com/getapi?version=flex3&api=String returns: { "items": [ { "path": "String.html", "name": "String" }, { "path": "mx/utils/StringUtil.html", "name": "StringUtil" }, { "path": "mx/validators/StringValidator.html", "name": "StringValidator" } ], "version": "flex3", "base_path": "http://livedocs.

I have just created a new Firefox Ubiquity plugin command named “fyi”. The command makes it super simple to email info about a web page to anyone. I wrote the command because I am often finding myself forwarding URLs to friends and co-workers. This is normally much more tedious than it needs to be, involving the following steps: Copy the URL from the browser Switch to mail client Create new Email Paste URL into the email body Switch back to the browser Copy the post title Switch back to email Paste the title as the subject Switch back to the browser Copy a snippet from the page Switch back to the email Paste in the snippet Enter the TO email address Finally send the email Phew…