I was finally able to purchase and download Flash CS3 CS4 yesterday after a couple of days of trying. The adobe store just wouldn’t let me purchase a download. Anyways all is good now. I have been going through all of the new features in order to do a lunch and learn at our offices showing off what’s new. I’ll be posting stuff as I get my examples together as well as some changes that I have found in the Authoring Environment as well.

But the thing that drove me crazy all day today was trying to find the Pixel Bender Toolkit. I searched the docs and everything, but for whatever reason I couldn’t find anything that referenced the location. And Quicksilver didn’t find it either when I tried to open it using that.

Finally I found it by going to the labs page.

/Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities/Pixel Bender

There should be like a short cut or something from within the IDE. I guess that’s what JSFL is for.

I have been patiently waiting for the last 6 months to write this post. Back in April of 07 we started on what I think is the coolest project I have ever had the pleasure to work on. Today we launched www.fairiesanddragons.com. This is the accompanying site for the very first Interactive Digital Happy Meal Toy that we created for McDonald’s. The toy launched this month in some markets in Europe, and will continue to roll out from now until June. It is so great to finally see our idea and characters come to life online, on tv, and in stores after working on it for over a year now.

While the developing the toys, our talent and knowledge was tested on a daily basis. It was an emotional roller coaster at times, but we came away learning a lot. I have never been so proud of our Flash team, and entire production team for that matter. I will be giving a talk at FiTC next week on the development process of creating the interactive toy and some of the things we learned along the way. I will be posting some of the content from the presentation here afterwards, so if you can’t make it be sure to come back and check it out.
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If you want to read more about the overall process and see screen shots and videos, check out the case study on our site.

If you are having problems installing any of the characters off of the CD you can contact support { at } fairiesanddragons.com. Please include what Operating System you are using and the issue that you are having.

All Girl Arcade (www.allgirlarcade.com) is a brand new gaming portal for girls aged 8 – 10 developed by Fuel Industries. It’s a completely free site with the goal of helping to fill the void of great kids content online. The site is based around the adventures of Fuel’s own original characters, the All Girl Star Squad, a trio of video game champions who, thanks to their gaming skills, become the unlikely heroes to a group of wacky space creatures trying to stop the evil Raveena from turning the universe into her own personal playground.

In addition to a collection of games based on this story, the site also features console and handheld reviews, a friends network, webisodes, and a ‘mall’ where players can spend the gems they win playing games. The more you play, the more additional content and gifts you can unlock! In a sea of make-up and shopping games for girls, All Girl Arcade stands out with a great story and unique characters which give girls a chance to carve their own space in the gaming world.

Multimedia released Zinc 3.0, their next generation SWF2Exe application, this week. I played around with it a couple of weeks ago when it was released to current users, and I have to say the improvements are amazing. My favorite improvements are the new UI and the ability to only include the libraries that you are using in your application. Last year we did a lot of work with the 3 major players in this area, Zinc, mProjector, and SWFStudio, and for me my preference is Zinc. I am really looking forward to porting over some of our applications to version 3 to see if there is a substantial performance difference.

Last night was the first Ottawa Flex user group meeting and the Flex 3 road tour night, and I have to say a user group meeting in Ottawa was long overdue. I want to thank Mike Potter from Adobe and Peter McKinnon for putting on the event. At Fuel we don’t do a lot of Flex or AIR work, but our Flash team went out just to be social and learn about what’s coming up. I am hoping that we can get more people out to the next event, which sounds like it’s going to be February 25th. There was also talk about making it a Flex/Flash user group as well in hopes of getting more people out to the events. Because at the end of the day Flex and Flash developers are all face with the same problems. I really want to make this user group a success again. So if you leave in Ottawa and are interested in coming out please do. You can keep up to date on what’s going on the Ottawa Flex website, and remember that the night doesn’t end at the event. There is always an after event drink or two.

I have been busy re-writing our AS2 libraries to AS3 this week and encountered something that will easily trip up most people. And of course I didn’t see it in any documentation anywhere. Basically the issue is that in AS2 when you navigated to a frame using mc.gotoAndStop() you would have access to all the elements on that frame. But now in AS3 they aren’t available right away. I found a great post by Senocular that explains this and shows the solution. Check out the post here.

Well I have had a couple of days to play with Flash CS3 and I have to say it’s awesome. Just the UI is worth the upgrade in my opinion. But I found it pretty funny that the first file I ever opened or compiled with it was for FP6 and AS1. I had to laugh a little. Trying to go back and find code and classes in those files was an absolute nightmare. It’s really amazing we ever coded like that. The one thing I wish it had though was the Flex Builder script editor, with code hinting on custom classes and real-time error checking.

One thing to take note of is the target .fla dropdown in the script editor. I have had it default to the wrong file a couple of times without me knowing and having a bunch of errors happen that I couldn’t figure out. The other thing that I have forgotten to do is put “public” in front of “class” when creating classes. If you don’t declare what type of class it is, the compiler will throw an error saying it can’t find it.

I am really looking forward to doing some client projects with it and working with our designers once they get their upgrades.  It’s a great update and kudos to everyone at Adobe.

If you are running Vista and have the Flash 8 IDE installed on your machine it takes forever when you click on a movieclip to edit it. Here is how to fix it.

Right click on the shortcut to Flash (or the Flash exe file itself should do the same), click Properties, go to the Compatibility tab, and check the box next to “Disable desktop composition” — this helped a lot for me.

It took me a while to find that online so I hope it helps.