FP10 has problems with images that have width or height larger than 8191 pixels. This is still much better than the 2880x2880 pixels we had to work with in FP9 so that alone is a great reason to insist on FP10 for this kind of applications. There is also another limitation mentioned in the official documentation that says "the total number of pixels cannot exceed 16,777,215 pixels". I've found that this isn't a problem for this implementation, so users can easily upload 8000x8000 pixel images without causing problems. The class will take the uploaded image and scale it to whatever max size you want. If the uploaded image is smaller than the max, it'll leave the image unchanged.

Using the class is straightforward. Just make an instance and pass in what you want returned as the maximum width/height:

var bigImageHandler:BigImagehandler;
bigImageHandler = new BigImagehandler( 1500 );


and then add listeners to respond to what the user does:

bigImageHandler.addEventListener(Event.CANCEL, userFail);
bigImageHandler.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, userSuccess);
bigImageHandler.addEventListener(Event.CLOSE, userCancel);


Click here for example (Source code)

The project I did this for is also quite cool and I'll give a small presentation of it on the next FUGN meetup. It's a small app that'll allow you to make yourself old. Just upload an image (or use a WebCam), position facial features and you can turn on/off wrinkles, hair and more. Feel free to give it a spin! Click the image my old self to get started making your own. (Note: the app is in Norwegian, but I'm sure you'll figure it out by just clicking around)

If you make a multiline textfield with a border and autoSize set, you'll see the problem easily. Every time the .htmlText property is set, an extra line is appended. It is not a newline character (\n), but rather a return (\r). This is done by the Flash Player itself and I can't find a good reason? You can see the bug here (source). I've reported the bug in the Flash Player bugbase and initially I had no solution to the bug.

Then, my friend Fabrice found a solution. Adding this line after seting htmlText solves the issue:

tf.htmlText = tf.htmlText.substring(0,tf.htmlText.length-1);

1. Remember to set the target-player parameter in your Compiler Arguments for both the Debug and Run configuration (-target-player=10.0.0.0)


2. When using the Embed-tag in FDT, you can't use the "Pure" config. You have to use the ordinary one

		[Embed(source="/image.jpg")]
		private var img1:Class;

BTW: I've been really busy lately. Lot's to catch up on after summer holidays, FOTB, all the MAX announcements (as the iPhone one) and client work. I'll also go to Sydney to visit my brother next week so it's been a while since last post. Will probably be so a while ahead as well. So much to do and so much fun ahead!

Common for both of these sites is that they scale the content to the width of the browser. If you view any of these sites on a big screen such as the Apple 30", this looks extremely bad and all you need to fix it is one simple line of code:

video.smoothing = true;

That's it and your video will look much better on big screens. Doing this adds a little to the CPU usage, but this won't matter much on the average machine.

I've also uploaded an example FLA that you can have a look at to test this. Just run the file to load play video. Scale the SWF and click the video to toggle smoothing on/off.

PS: sorry about the lack of updates recently. I've been on holidays and been quite busy with client work lately. Finally having a little free time now to experiment and play! :)

For many years, I've used Blinksale for my billing purposes. It's a very basic service, but it does have one neat feature and that's tagging. By selecting invoices by tags, I can easily see what I spent my time on and Flash 3D is a BIG part of it. This chart shows what kind of projects I've billed the last 12 months:

This is just my commercial work and in addition I've also done many personal projects. Most of these include Away3D in some way so if anyone ever wondered if it's possible to make money from Open Source Flash - here's another little bit of proof. Thanks to the entire Away3D team for filling my days (and nights) with fun!

PS: The 6% training is also Away3D! :-D

PDF of presentation

I've done lots of presentations before, but this was the first time I presented at an international conference in English. I was super-nervous but the session went really well and I got some good feedback. It kind of surprised me how little feedback you get initially. Just a few mentions on Twitter that said my session was "nice" - not all that encouraging. Later I got the feedback from the Feedback forms as well as blog articles such as this one that said "Fantastischer Vortrag und super Redner". Really strange to not just give feedback like I usually do on Flashmagazine, but also receive it! :D

Photo by Marc Thiele/FFK

The day before the conference, I also did a full-day Away3D workshop. Renowned community expert Peter Elst was there and I'm glad he enjoyed it! I also did two reports from the event for Flashmagazine.

I have to congratulate Marc and Sascha - they really know how to pull off such an event! The mood was excellent. 500 attendees, 28 sessions, 10 workshops and not a glitch. Pretty neat and all served at a fraction of the cost of other conferences? Pretty impressive if you ask me! I had a great time!

There's two main ways you control the appearance of the main application window. One is by setting properties on the mx:WindowedApplication tag and the other is to set properties in the application.xml file that defines each AIR app.

Resizing

<!-- Whether the user can resize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<resizable>false</resizable>

<!-- The type of system chrome to use (either "standard" or "none"). Optional. Default standard. -->
<systemChrome>standard</systemChrome>
<!-- Whether the window is transparent. Only applicable when systemChrome is none. Optional. Default false. -->
<transparent>false</transparent>
<!-- Whether the window is initially visible. Optional. Default false. -->
<!-- <visible></visible> -->
<!-- Whether the user can minimize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<!-- <minimizable>false</minimizable> -->
<!-- Whether the user can maximize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<maximizable>false</maximizable>
<!-- Whether the user can resize the window. Optional. Default true. -->
<resizable>false</resizable>

The other option is to not use the operating system's windowing style, but rather the standard one that AIR provides.

<!-- The type of system chrome to use (either "standard" or "none"). Optional. Default standard. -->

<systemChrome>none</systemChrome>

<!-- Whether the window is transparent. Only applicable when systemChrome is none. Optional. Default false. -->

<transparent>true<transparent>

This is not how I use Twitter. I use Twitter to follow what my colleagues in the community and friends do and chat about. By removing this feature, the value of Twitter is now VERY reduced and I feel like quoting Eivind Ingebrigtsen that tweeted last week: "Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. If you assume, you'll make an ASS of U & ME". By ASSuMing things like this - Twitter could easily kill itself... You'll find some good commentary on this topic at the Ajax Blog as well.

The event is open to all, but registration is required. Seating is limited, so if you want to learn more about AIR 1.5, Flash Catalyst, Pixel Bender, Flex 4 (Gumbo) and LiveCycle, register at the proper link below.

- 31 Mars at Oslo Konserthus, Lille Sal, Oslo
- 1 April at Skandia in Stockholm
- 21 April at Finnkino, Tennispalatsi 2, Helsinki
- 22 April at CinemaxX in Copenhagen

Click here to play Bloody Rage 2!

Bare bones example - Actionscript class - FLA file

PS: if you use this, send me an URL so I can link to it?

I initially figured that I wanted all AS3 classes/datatypes to highlight as well, but that was a little too ambitious :) The AS3 core language with all AIR and Flex extensions amounts to more than 950 classes! Just the class names make up 14Kb so I rather settled for a lightweight version that only highlights the classes you'll use the most such as arrays, booleans, sprites and more.

If you want to add this to your own site, download the .js file (lightweight version/full API version) and here for the .css file. You'll also need to download the SyntaxHighlighter files.

Installing is just a matter of copying the files to the server and adding a few lines to your templates. Here's what I've added to the header on this site:

	<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/shCore.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/shBrushAScript.js"></script>
	<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/js/styles/shCore.css"/>
	<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/js/styles/shThemeActionscript.css"/>
	<script type="text/javascript">
		SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = '/js/clipboard.swf';
		SyntaxHighlighter.all();
	</script>

On Flashmag, I've also changed from using the default <pre> tag to <code> by adding this line:

SyntaxHighlighter.config.tagName = "code";

When I debugged I found that the Flash Player was indeed loading the XML but it apparently failed to parse it? After some Googling I found this article at MediaCatalyst that claimed that this had to do with the headers sent from the servers? Didn't really sound probable, but it was worth a shot. It worked...? Wow. Somebody should fix this bug, shouldn't they?

So - if you're having problems loading XML with only IE6, make sure you check that the server does not send the HTTP response header: Cache-Control: no-cache You can easily check this using a tool like Charles.

Luckily, IE6 is less and less popular and with some luck, web designers can stop worring about it in a year or two.

I showed 5 projects I've made that I think makes good use of 3D and I got lots of nice feedback. As promised, here's the link to my presentation. The presentation is in Norwegian, but I'll also do something similar for my session at the FlashForum Conference in Cologne in April and that session will be in English. At FFK09 I'll also do a full day workshop on Away3D so if you want to get started with 3D in Flash, this could be a good start.

Today also marks the beta launch of my first public facing 3D application, a 3D StreetView covering the Oslo area. Click the blue dots in the map to view a location. There's more than 120.000 panoramas in total, so you can see pretty much every part of Oslo. Go check it out!

The error I got was this:

TypeError: Error #2007: Parameter child must be non-null.

	at flash.display::DisplayObjectContainer/addChild()

I this case, it was me that had changed the Graphic symbol to a MovieClip, so I was able to figure out what caused the problem. If the change was done by the designer I got the FLA from, I'd have no clue at all. So, if you run into that error message for no reasonable reason, try copying the contents of the problematic symbol into an empty MovieClip, export the SWF, clean your Flex project and then re-export.

Update: I did a little more testing yesterday and it appears that it's Flash CS3 that is the culprit. As soon as you add more than one keyframe, the symbol will change from graphic to MovieClip in the SWF. Extending the timeline will not trigger the update since it can still be considered a Sprite.