Promethe’s Blog

A new milestone version of the Flex SDK has just been released and is available on:

• the Adobe Open Source website
• the Adobe Flex SVN 3.5 branch

Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0 beta have been released yesterday. They are available for the Windows, Linux and MacOS X platform for now but mobile versions should be released before the end of the year.

You can find more info and downloads on Adobe Labs:

• Flash 10.1 prerelease on Adobe Labs
• AIR 2.0 prerelease on Adobe Labs

This is what you can read on the Flash Platform issue tracker on the “Unacceptable CPU Use on Idle” thread:

Rick Winscot: “[...] is this fix going to make it into the up-and-coming 10.1 release?”

Charles Liss: “This will be fixed in our Beta release here in November.”

Not only a major bug is now fixed, but we also get a beta release date more precise than just the “before the end of the year” Adobe gave us during Max. It is now as short as before the end of the month!

You can read more about Flash 10.1 on the Adobe Labs Flash 10.1 page.

rSoul is my very first public AIR application. It is an open-source NetSoul client.  Since NetSoul is not a commonly used protocol it won’t be useful for many people. Still, the NetSoul protocol is mandatory when you want to have access to the PIE (Parc Informatique de l’EPITA). And the source might help anyone willing to build his very first AIR application. The user interface is very light and I tried to keep it as simple and as intuitive as possible.

Like any other AIR application, rSoul is cross-platform and works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You can install it and get the sources from the rSoul website:

http://rsoul.promethe.net

Here are a few screenshots:

Features

This first release includes the following features:

• Online/Away/Busy status
• Location configuration
• “Remember Password” option
• Auto-connect option
• Contacts list
• Add/Remove contacts
• Tabbed chat
• Auto-update
• Connection errors handling

Known issues

• Some special characters are not handled correctly
• The application does not (yet) minimize itself to the system tray
• Contacts status is not updated

If you found any bug or have any suggestion please feel free to add a comment…

It might be one of the most demanded features by both the Flash Platform and the iPhone users communities. Just a few seconds ago, Adobe announced that it is now possible to create iPhone applications using Flash!

You can find a detailed article on Mike Chambers’ blog. Basically, Adobe is using the might and mighty LLVM (already used by Pixel Bender and Alchemy) project to create native iPhone applications from a SWF file.

Here are some additional resources targeting the iPhone using the Flash Platform:

• Aditya’s Article
• Developer FAQ
• iPhone forum

Flash inside Safari Mobile is not there yet but it is still something Adobe “continues to work on”…

The Quake-series is really awesome. Not only in terms of gameplay but also technically. Quake 1, 2 and 3 are especially impressive. No wonder why Quake’s graphics engine, maps or models file formats have been reused in many many games such as Half Life, Call of Duty or Medal of Honnor! So why not in your own Flash 10 game?

There are so many reasons why loading Quake 2 files inside the Flash player would be considered as just “impossible”. Performance would be the first and main one. One would just consider that Flash is not fast enough to display complex 3D graphics, not even those of a game as old as Quake 2 (published in 1996!). But using Flash 10 latests features such as the Vector and GraphicsTrianglePath classes, it is actually quite doable!

Details, pictures and a demo application right after the jump!

Read more…

My blog is now available on FlashBookmarks in the “blogs” category.

Thank you FlashBookmarks!

The Flex-Ajax Bridge (or FABridge) is a very cool features. It enables you to automagicaly create a “bridge” between your Flex application and the JavaScript code embed in your web page. This way you can call methods of your Flex application directly in your JavaScript code, and the other way around.

There are several solutions to use the FABridge in your Flex project. Those are the most common:

• In Flex Builder 3, right click on your project, select “Create Ajax Bridge..” and follow the wizard.
• Follow the Flex 3 documentation: Integrating with the Flex Ajax Bridge.

Both solutions have issues. The first one is the fastest, no doubt, but it creates a LOT of JavaScript code that you might not need at all. But you will still have to deploy and maintain that JavaScript code in order to get the FABridge working properly. The second one is a bit more complicated and create no useless JavaScript code. Nonetheless, you’ll have to add an external source directory to your Flex project and this reference might come to be broken (if someone else download the sources for example).

After the jump, discover the ONE solution that has it all…

Read more…

Here is my latest DirectFlex experiment: a cubic panorama, also called a “skybox”.

Cubic Panorama on DirectFlex Labs

I was inspired by makc, who first did this experiment using Alternativa3D.

Full code after the jump…

Read more…