HODGEDEV FLASH BLOG

I haven’t blogged in some time because many things have been going on. I am no longer working at Streetwise and I am freelancing at home. So far the journey has been pleasant. I now have much more time to work on personal projects and once such project is Photo Shoot Builder. PSB is still alpha quality, but we will be going beta with is soon.

Bram Timmer, a long time friend and very strong designer/photographer, suggested that photographers needed a more elegant method of creating these set lists. Bram soon handed off the creative to me in the form of a PSD, as we usually do, and after a lot of cutting, codeing and compiling, we find ourselves at v0.2.3. Click the link below.

Photo Shoot Builder is merely a drag and drop enabled tool for building a typical set diagram that is rather common in photography. It utilizes many different design patterns, all within context, and the site is very extensible, easy to update, and performs very well. When the end-user is ready, he or she may choose to save as jpg or png. We are close to enabling the Flickr upload mechanism as well. Go play with the application, but remember it isn’t even beta yet. If you are going to leave feedback, please be constructive.

Click here to use Photo Shoot Builder v0.2.3a

Click here to watch FlashDevelop3 R2 and the Flex 3.3 SDK video tutorial Part 04: How to create an AIR application.

This short video shows you how to create an AIR project.

First, the Descriptor file (setting the namespace to 1.5) and changing any other settings you wish.
Second, edit the CreateCertificate.bat and create a certificate.
Third, edit the PackageApplication.bat, compile your application to create a swf, then run PackageApplication.bat, provide the password set in CreateCertificate.bat and the AIR application is created in the air folder.

Stay tuned for a run-through of the AIR Update Framework, which allows users to check for updates which is dictated by a UpdateDescriptor file on your server somewhere.

Click here to watch FlashDevelop3 R2 and the Flex 3.3 SDK FlashDevelop3 R2 and the Flex 3.3 SDK video tutorial Part 03: Events, Interactivity, and Timer: the new setInterval.

In part 03, first we talk about why the document class extends Sprite or MovieClip, which FlashDevelop automatically imports Sprite into your project and extends your document class with it.

Second, we talk about waiting for the document class to be added to the stage, so that we make access properties of the stage.

Third, import the required event MouseEvent, to handle mouse interactivity. We setup an event listener for when the end-user has pressed the mouse down while over “_sprite”, the square we created in part 02 of this series. We handled the mouse event with a nice TweenLite driven animation of the “_sprite” object.

Fourth, we imported the two classes for handling keyboard interaction. KeyboardEvent is used to listen for for the key-based events, and the Keyboard class maintains a list of static constants representing unsigned integers used to compare against the keyCode available to the method listener for the KeyboardEvent dispatch.

Fifth, and finally, we talk about the Timer object, which is the new setInterval. Although you can still use setInterval in Actionscript3, I prefer the Timer object. Maybe I prefer Timer because of its use of the new event flow, im not sure; although I can say, that I like that you can stop and start it with built in methods. In this example, we instantiate a Timer object, set it to fire every 1000ms (1 second) and then we listen for that event to be dispatched every second, and have a function fire each time. The function that fires has a simple trace, that when tested, loops over and over in the console.

Stay tuned for part 04, coming soon!