I’ve updated Alcon (ActionScript Logging Console) to v1.0.8! The only thing that has been added in this version is a Debug Class for use with ActionScript 3.0, everything else hasn’t been changed. The AS3.0 Debug Class can be found in the com.hexagonstar.util.debug package.
Note that you must use Debug.trace() since I’m not even sure if it’s somehow possible with the MXMLC to redirect to a custom trace method (like it is possible with MTASC). If you got any hints on this, please let me know! The new version can be found as always on it’s page at the Flash Game Programming Wiki! Enjoy!
The creator over at e-phonic.com seemingly has created the first realtime synth in Flash with AS3.0. Realtime in the meaning that it creates the produced sound completely by itself and not relying on predefined samples. He used the ByteArray and the Loader class (Loader.loadBytes) based on an idea and first experiment from David at Robots /w Lasers.
The synth consists of a simple, white emptyness in where you have to click with the mouse and it plays generated sounds depending on the coordinates. The sounds might be still a bit awkward but hey, it’s a milestone in Flash history, isn’t it?! 
A Developer’s Guide to Surviving Meetings … an invaluable guide for those long and boring meetings! Be sure to also read the comments as there are some nice tips as well! 
ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9.0 brought a big leap of speed and all kinds of changes and optimizations with it. But these mainly happen under the hood only. While Flash 8 came up with the bitmap level manipulation stuff, Flash 9 doesn’t come with any groundbreaking new features that are visible to the surface (except for the speed improvement).
[ad#ad_content_small]Yesterday on a meeting I was asked if I could use a rotatable 3D mesh in Flash for the clients presentation project and I could only tell them that the lack of native 3D support is the big weakness of Flash. Eventually we will end up with a single frame animation to fake the rotation. However this was one example that there must be quite a demand for 3D support in Flash, not only for experimentation but even more for commercial use. In fact native 3D is already overdue since a while but I accept that implementing such a thing is not an easy challange.
So native graphics acceleration for Flash has to come one way or the other, not only because everybody wants it but also for Flash to stay competitive (think about WinFX). There is still Director one could argue. But somehow I get the feeling that Director will either continue it’s shadow existence or it will disappear sooner or later. 3D for Flash has to come, there is no way or excuse around it! Maybe the next version? Too early! Maybe Flash 10? Who knows! We might however see some sweet audio improvements in a near future!
Thy Dungeonman 3: Behold Thy Graphics, a text/graphics adventure from Homestarrunner in the style of the very early days of computing. Complete with fake floppy load delay and amber screen display! You find yourself in a dungeon cell with doom lurking all around you. The texts are intentionally exaggerated old ‘english’ and once you got out of the first area you’ll notice that this game plays quite smooth. It’s a short but funny and while you’re there, you find several other oldschool imitations on Homestarrunner and videlectrix.com.
mdm is working on a new tool named Rebus that can turn AS3 (and Flex2) files into .NET2 executables. It’s still in beta but registered users can download and test it. I’ve did a quick test and compiled my SWNameGen with Rebus and it went surprisingly smooth and flawless. It will offer some new and interesting extensions, to quote from the mdm support forums …
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MainType is a relatively new font managing tool (for Win only) that puts Extensis Suitcase to shame! I’ve been trying Suitcase for a while but finding and activating fonts with it was a major pain in the butt. You had to dig around in the preview list on the right and then to activate the font you once again had to search for the same font in the left side list (all with no mousewheel support).
After I was fed up with Suitcase I went with OT1 fontmanager for quite a while but this manager, while a crapload better than Suitcase, runs a bit unstable and doesn’t support some important formats. It also can only install/uninstall fonts but not activate them temporarily. There are also a ton of other font managing tools out there but almost all I’ve came across so far didn’t fulfill my requirements.
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Mike Morearty of Adobe wrote in his blog how to change the syntax colors in Flex Builder 2.0. This is useful stuff since I loathe the default blue and green colors of Flex’s syntax colors. Think about it! If you code the whole day long you have to look at your source all day long and you will look all the time at these colors! Sooner or later you start wearing blue shirts and green pants with pink socks!
To know this is even more important since Mike states in one of the comments that Flex 2.0 will not have any preferences to change these colors and that such a feature might be part of a later version. Another thing about the default syntax style that confuses me is that strings in quotes are in bold while keywords are not. I usually have it vice versa.
… I’m not talking about fun with playing the NGE mind you … when the NGE came live there was a lot of derision and mockery on the official forums. Among all this down pour of anger, hate and dismay about the NGE there were a handful cynical postings of how scenes in the Star Wars movies would look if the NGE had affected them. Because they were so utterly hilarious I decided to save them for later and what better opportunity do I have than to post them here for people who have missed them. In this sense read on and enjoy!
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I’m chased by bad luck since a while when it comes to getting this blog onto the Macromedia XML News Aggregator! First when I used Nucleus CMS it stopped fetching my feeds automatically after a while. Nobody, not me and not the admin at MXNA had any clue what was the cause. Now I’ve switched to Word Press in the hope that this would change but it now seems that I’m stuck forever with this problem. The feed URL for Word Press is very different and there seems to be no working redirection plugin for Word Press 2+. Also I cannot re-subscribe at MXNA with the same domain and any mail to the admin so far stood unanswered. Only workaround would be to change to another sub domain but I don’t want to go that far!
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