What it does mean is that if you’re a Flash / ActionScript developer you can develop applications, games etc for the iPhone and iPod Touch without the need to learn Objective-C. Before we get ahead of ourselves this doesn’t mean that the iPhone supports Flash content – that “issue” hasn’t be resolved at this point.

Adobe Labs has a section on developing applications for the iPhone – you can even sign up for a future public beta. Below are links to the current apps built with Flash CS5 prerelease – including a person favourite of mine “Just Letters” by my good Friend Stefan Richter

Who knows, this could be the dawn of even greater games and applications on the App Store now that the Flashers are coming to the party :p

The whole thing kicks off at 12:30 with coffee and registration, then the keynote with Andrew Shorten (fingers crossed he’ll do it in his “Holmes” costume). I have the luxury of going on quite early (14:45 – 15:45) after Andrew. I’ve decided to present an overview of Flex Builder, the Flex framework and provide some productivity and development tips on bending Flex Builder to your will. Below is a synopsis of my talk.

The Flex framework can appear slightly at odds for those approaching it from a more creative background. While it shares the same lineage as Flash the process by which you create and develop within Flex may initially appear difficult to grasp. In this session Mike will gently ease you into what the Flex framework actually is as well as giving an overview of the Flex Builder IDE, warts and all.

If you want to know what’s happening when here is the whole schedule

It looks like this years Flash on the Beach is going to be awesome. I can’t wait to be honest, plus with MAX in Barcelona next week. Autumn is shaping up to be very cool indeed.

Congrats to John and the team over at Flash on the Beach – keep up the great work m8 :)

So all in all a pretty comprehensive line-up of products. To find out more and register head over to the Creative License Tour site.

…of particular interest may be the Web Development track where we’ll cover Flex, Flash, ColdFusion and AIR. We also have a number of other tracks around Web Design, Video, Photoshop and Print.

So what are you waiting for get over to the Creative License Tour site and get registered :D. I’ll probably pop along to the London one on the 17th September. So if anyone is about and wants to meet up let me know :). This could be the perfect excuse to get into the MAX Europe conference vibe.

This isn’t a definitive guide, but might prove useful for some :D

The first part can be found here.

I’ve included an examples just to illustrate what I mean if you are still a bit uncertain. Anyway you can access the second part below.

Sizing in the IDE pt.2

The points they both hit upon were:

• Documentation or lack of it
• Having to add the class to both the linkage identifier as well as the component definition
• Placing the assets inside the component clip
• Uncompiled or compiled components inside your component clip

So I thought I’d add my experiences…

Documentation or lack of it
Documentation is a million times better than it was when MX2004 was first released but it is still lacking in a lot of places and some of the help files are just plain confusing for the budding component developer – Then again I shouldn’t carp on too much otherwise I’d have nothing to write about if it was better 8). The examples are far better now though so it’s not all doom and gloom.

Having to add the class to both the linkage identifier as well as the component definition
As far as I can tell, the class binding issue is symptomatic of the fact that the linkage identifier and the component definitions are reference by different processes – Linkage is for the actual compile to test the SWF or SWC whereas the component definition is for the actual component itself to operate. I personally think the fact that you have to compile the SWF / SWC via the library to be a bigger oversight though :P

Placing the assets inside the component clip
This again appears to be down to the issue of ‘compiling for distribution’, by this I mean the compiler doesn’t form any association with the linked items beyond adding a pointer to them inside the component SWF / SWC – if you use or have used a shared library you’ll know what I mean. So when you drag the file into a clean file it looks for the linked items in that files symbol library on export, and if it doesn’t find them it just silently fails. A hack is to add these linked symbols to the new file’s library and set the linkages, then they are accessible when that particular file is exported, not really a helpful solution in either case, but most hacks aren’t.

I have to say I don’t really see this as a real problem, after all it stops the distribution of component SWC missing linked assets – if you always test your SWF / SWC in a new FLA. I can assure you you’ll only do it once :P and then it sticks. Again this is more a symptom of a poorly implemented system for creating components overall as opposed to an awkward process for coding and testing them.

Uncompiled or compiled components inside your component clip
You may also want to watch out for the recompile issue – if you haven’t hit it already. If you have a load of SWC’s that share the same class(es) and you update said class(es) it is not automatically reflected in components compiled prior to this, (obvious I know but this becomes a real headache if you’re using shared libraries as well). This is due to the fact that Flash only initializes a class once at run time – so if two components have the same base class it initializes the first one and the second component just uses the one that is already there. Hence the recompile issue if you inadvertantly add in an old component that contains an old copy of a class that hasn’t been updated and it initializes first.

This can be alleviated in your component development files by only using the uncompiled versions of any components you extending from or as part of a composition component this way when you compile it to an SWC it pulls in the latest classes for all the components included on that enigmatic frame 2 of the component clip. This doesn’t, however, solve the shared library SWC problem. This can also stop erratic behave in compiled components that for the basis of a component extended from them.

If we are lucky Blaze will address these issues. I certainly hope so as the current component system is laboured compared to the rest of the Flash IDE – I would expect an entry in the New Document dialog for component development, (I’ve actually got a set of component templates I use that I’ve been meaning to post up – I just need to comment them up as they are still ‘in the rough’ so to speak :P

To this end I’m going to attempt to put some AS2 component files up that show how the basic framework hangs together and how you can make your own components using these guides.

If you want to access them directly I have stored them under Articles in the sidebar – or you can just click ‘more…’ below.

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Well the answer is fairly simple to give, but does open up a plethora of questions… Flash components are formed of two distinct parts:

• The Class file
• The Component clip

The Class file must have the same name as the component clip. Therefore if we were making a component called ExampleBox, our component clip would be called ExampleBox as would our class. This does not mean that there can only be one class per component, as with all classes we can instantiate instances of other imported classes within our component class to do specific tasks. As we move further into component development you’ll see that it makes design sense to use specific classes to deal with specific requirements.

To read the first part in a series of articles read on…

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