FWA Hall of Fame

The dev team here at Big Spaceship would like to thank the FWA for making us the first non-swedish member of the FWA Hall of Fame.

Big Updates for Flash (Player and IDE)

For the Player, look no further than support for H.264.

For the IDE, check out the update beta for Flash CS3 which will allow you to export and test in AIR without need of the command line.

Migrating from AS2 to AS3

Before we get into the nitty gritty of my post, let’s answer the age old question:

Why choose AS3 over AS2?

The player has made a dent in the market already. It helps that MySpace and YouTube both require Flash 9. It’s far faster. The error messaging is much better, meaning when something breaks you’ll actually be able to diagnose why (as opposed to the old guess and check method).

XML is natively integrated — it’s so easy to work with XML now, it’s unbelievable. Loading actually makes sense. You can read any kind of byte you want.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The only downside — and it’s a steep downside at first glance — is that ActionScript developers need to get comfortable with a new, strict, *true* programming language. The learning curve seems scary… until you dive in.

Most of the designers here are pretty familiar with AS. Some of them have a basic understanding of AS2, grasping the concepts and uses of OOP even if they don’t entirely get how to write code. All of them are a little terrified of ActionScript 3. This presents a bit of a problem — sometimes designers will want to create a simple example for a coder to rebuild better/stronger/faster for the final deployment of a site.

To empower our team to learn a little about the basics of AS3, I wrote this doc up for them. Now, I share with you. Click on to read my rant.

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3D Painting w/ Papervision

We’re a little behind (like a month) our friends @ The Flash Blog in posting this, but it’s too cool not to share. Interactive 3D Painting in Flash using Papervision. Absolutely amazing.

Check it out.

TweenLite&TweenFilterLite

Nice AS3 packages to add to your utilities.

“TweenFilterLite extends the extremely lightweight (2k), powerful TweenLite “core” class, adding the ability to tween filters (like blurs, glows, drop shadows, bevels, etc.) as well as image effects like contrast, colorization, brightness, saturation, hue, and threshold (combined size: 5k).”

link