News travel pretty slow, for few of us who were unable to attend all those brilliant flash events around the world. Just until recently I was completely unaware of new codename for Flash CS4 - Diesel. Not Vin Diesel, not bio diesel, just plain diesel. I guess somebody at Adobe must had owned Citroen ZX. See for your self. :)

I remember that Daemon talked what he saw something like that on the MAX, and If I understood him correctly, CS4 will completely change how timeline works, After Effects look-a-like tweening? They also managed to get video preview into the IDE, advanced tweening engine and Inverse Kinematics tween animation. Wohoo! Except, I don't care about the timeline tweening. :) I am eager to hear more about Flash Player 10, ECMAScript 4, typed arrays and all that strange stuff that designers ignore by default. :)

Check out this pirate video of CS4 Diesel tweening in action:

New 2.0 beta version of SWFObject is out (previously known as flashobject, then swfobject, then SWFFix project). Over the years, it become the de-facto standard for embedding Flash/Flex content in xhtml friendly cross browser compliant valid way.

The new version is a complete rewrite from SWFObject 1.5, so it needs to be tested like hell before officially launch because it will replace the older SWFObject and UFO scripts. And since they have Adobe involved, they will be including this embed system in the Adobe authoring tools in the future. GREAT NEWS! Meanwhile, grab the beta from google code.

Strict deadlines and gazillion other distractions completely distanced me from writing about important things... like Papervision3D for example! :) So, you probably already heard that Papervision3D got the award for the 3D category on the 17th Flashforward Film Festival. HELL YEAH! But, have you seen the awesome Spaceship Demo by C4RL05 from his FlashForward presentation? Mmmm! Sooo fineee!

Also, you have to checkout Tim Knips incredible BVH mocap importer! Motion capturing is one of those things that allays impressed me, and seeing it work so good in Papervision, just blows my mind.

Attaching movieclips to the stage in AS3 is easy. But what if we need to attach a movieclip with dynamically created name?
var page:MovieClip = new ["page"+i]; // won't work :)

But this will:

    var dynamicClass:String = "page" + i;
    var classRef:Class = getDefinitionByName(dynamicClass) as Class;
    var page:MovieClip = new classRef();
    addChild(page);

Today Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Flash Lite 3 software. You can download Flash Lite 3 Update for Flash CS3 Professional and Flash Lite 3.0 update for Device Central CS3 but no Flash Lite 3 Player it self. They say Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition will be available for download in early November 2007 and if somebody is interested in testing Flash Lite 3 content before the availability of the Developer Edition, it should send them an email. This interim build of Adobe Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition has been certified only on the Nokia N95 device. Isn't that cute? But it's WRONG!

I sent them an email anyways because I have to check if it will work on my N80 (which also supports s60 3rd gen as N95). I am really interested what this baby can do. By specs, compared to FL2.1, FL3 brings increased performance by 15-20% in ActionScript, improved rendering performance by 20-30%, better memory management and support for Flash Video (FLV) with Sorensen & On2 codecs and RTMP Streaming. You can check full version comparison here.

Both those new Flash CS3 updates take *AGES* to install (and I have really fast workstation) and they both are infected with no-text-in-installer virus. Just click your way man, click your way... This first happened to me with AIR CS3 update, but I thought "Oh, it's my crazy XP playing tricks on me!". Adobe - WTF?! This reminds me on crazy ATI driver uninstaller but. Left button - empty, right button - empty. Which one will you click? Right one! :)

My main man C4RL05 just got back from the Adobe's MAX keynote in rainy Chicago. He reports that they announced "Astro" aka Flash Player 10 and demonstrated it's top 3 new features: better text handling, custom filters and something they call "simple 3D". The custom filters allow people to create their own using a language called Hydra. Runtime execution seemed similar to the predefined filters. I think this could be really useful for shading and special effects. C4RL05 is disappointed by 3D features, and lack of 3D hardware support. I just want to see how they bettered font embedding in text components. :)

Update: 03.10.2007. - checkout sneak peak video from youtube

While working on my last AS3 project, I wanted to cut my self some slack (spare some time), and instead of building TextField + scroller - use CS3 prebuilt TextArea component. Off course, not only that I didn't achieve what I intended, I also spent 3 hours trying to figure that shit out.

I figured out that:

• you STILL have to embed fonts if you masked TextArea (TextField too),
• Online Flash CS3 Documentation is not what it should be.

Just, please take a look at the following link (Flash CS3 Documentation > Programming ActionScript 3.0 > Working with text > Advanced text rendering). There is absurd line that says: "The exact method of embedding a font file into your application's SWF file varies according to your development environment.". Well, HELLO? What is that page I am looking at then? Adobe's help site is pretty awful (not as bad as ATI/AMD merged support sites - they are the worst), advanced searching is impossible and ordinary search gives you results that have no meaning. If you are looking for something on Adobe's site related to Flash9 - my bet is you won't find it.

Woot, Moses finally announced what he's been cooking - Go animation system aka Fuse3. It was a bloody time. :) Go won't be a kit solution like Fuse or Tweener, but a lightweight set of base classes highly extensible architecture for creating own AS3 animation tools. His primary goal is to to encourage developers to use tweening, physics and 3D together. Beta will be opening very soon so stay tuned for more details. In meantime check out what Moses is up to!

Ive been pretty busy last couple of days and I completely missed new public beta released of Flash Player 9 (codenamed “Moviestar”) which is available now on labs. I suspected something like this could happen,when Adobe introduced video hardware acceleration and dual core support in last beta update. Well, together with the bunch of fixes, component caching and full screen improvements, new beta 3 of Flash Player now supports HD capable H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs - or in other words very limited sub set of MPEG-4, 3GP and QuickTime movie support. You can load and play .mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.mov and .3gp files using the same NetStream API you use to load FLV files. Anyways Tinic Uro has a great post on his blog covering all the technical details of this new update.