All you have to do is open a GIF file in Flash CS4 and it’ll automatically pull it apart and convert it to frames, which can then be converted to a SWF file

Hope it helps you at some point!

Here’s what I ordered… There are some great books here which i hope you’ll consider looking at:

• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C Dennett
• The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
• Consciousness Explained by Daniel C Dennett
• Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer
• God is not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
• Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
• Phantoms in the Brain – Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran

Introducing Adobe WeatherLab Beta

Adobe WeatherLab Beta

This latest release from Adobe will surely change the way we see the world around us and how we interact with it. Adobe WeatherLab Beta is a the latest addition to Adobe’s impressive line of Adobe AIR-based tools, and it boasts some pretty innovative features!

Adobe WeatherLab Beta allows you to communicate directly with whichever skygod(s) you please via RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) in either XML, AMF or JSON. Adobe WeatherLab Beta boasts an expansive, extensible API for changing the weather in realtime and – most importantly – it integrates with all of the CS4 and upcoming CS5 products.

Finally, you can adjust your environment to suit your specific needs. If you’re more of a sunshine and beer kind of person, simply call the Weather singleton and change it to sunny by using the constant Weather.SUNNY (code samples to follow).

Insiders at Adobe have revealed that they have been working on improving the feature-sets of applications such as Illustrator, Flash Professional, Flash Builder & Flex SDK and Photoshop, but found that these applications were just getting to the stage where no more work could be done on them

“We wanted a new challenge. We had reached a point where we realised that our applications were near perfect, aside from a few bugs, and we needed something to throw at our engineers. Luckily, one of our engineers knew how to rain-dance and this set off a chain reaction of events, all leading up to Adobe WeatherLab Beta“.

Much work has still to be done on this application, but engineers over at Adobe have assured me that any bugs in the system will not cause any universal constants to go out of whack.

When I first heard of this innovative and – let’s face it – ingenious application, I was skeptical. My skepticism was soon lifted when I used the mapping API from Google to pinpoint a parade which I subsequently used Adobe WeatherLab Beta to rain on.

Here’s the code I used:

// Code snippet for changing the weather
 
import com.adobe.weatherlab.Weather;
import com.adobe.weatherlab.Geography;
 
public function changeWeather():void
{
        var weather:Weather = Weather.getInstance();     // get weather singleton
        weather.change(Weather.SUNNY, new Geography(37.433868, -121.884155));      // target weather change
}

To download Adobe WeatherLab Beta, click here.

It’s been quite a fascinating year thus far; Adobe has really started getting serious about Flash, Flex and the developers involved. This year, we have seen two amazing additions to Adobe’s web-dominating arsenal – Adobe Flash Catalyst (now in beta 2) and Adobe Flash Builder 4 (now in beta 2). After some preliminary buggering around in both of these, I came to the conclusion that working with a beta version of any software to create enterprise applications is putting yourself on the edge of the cliff, and working on a version 1.0 beta is hiring somebody to push you over the edge.

This raises an interesting catch-22:
When a massive piece of software is released, the community has the onus to test it and give feedback on any bugs, requested features and expedience tips – however, if your beta software tends to be very buggy (and how could it not be? The SDK is huge) then how are you going to get developers to test your software on real, enterprise projects?

In any case, Adobe has really been playing the part this year. This year we have seen the release of the Flex 4 SDK, major advancements in the Open Screen Project, Flash Player 10′s penetration rate to 93.5%, AIR surpassing 100 million installations and the introduction of Flash Player 10.1 most recently. Other great things i’ve seen are WorkflowLab, BrowserLab, Project Squiggly, Slider previews, Flash CS5 sneak previews and Community Help.

For all of those unlucky and miserable enough to miss Adobe Max this year (myself included), there’s an entire channel dedicated to Max 2009 Developer talks… Go check them out!

Oh, and if you have any luck getting these videos to play in Adobe Media Player, let me know. That app is more full of bugs than a salad in Nigeria.

Check out the Adobe Labs website and http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/videos/ for more information and downloads. Happy Flashing!

Personally i can’t think why developing a version of Flex Builder for Linux would be so difficult. Flex Builder is built on top of (and as a plugin for) Eclipse, which is Java-based and therefore cross-platform. I’d imagine that it does have something to do with the Flash Player as Tom of rachaelandtom.info says. Can anyone shed some light on the situation?

The reason for Adobe’s suspension of development is:

“The project is currently on hold. There is not enough requisition for the product to continue its development” – Ben Forta (Adobe Senior Technical Evangelist)

Please show your support and vote for the continuation of this amazing project! Go to http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053 and vote!!

The tools mentioned below many not all help directly with development, but they all play a major part in my development lifecycle.

1. Prevent Duplicate Tabs – one of the simplest but insanely useful plugins for Firefox. Really, really useful when coding/testing with Flex!
2. Firebug – the ultimate HTML/CSS/JavaScript tweaking tool that integrates with Firefox
3. Web Developer – a great collection of nifty little tools that makes your web development go that much easier (I definitely recommend the Disable Cache feature when doing Flash/Flex work)
4. PowerMenu - a great little tool that allows you to minimize any window to the tray, amongst other things (Windows only)
5. Taskbar Shuffle – for when you’re forced to work on Windows (i’m extemely obsessive about the order of my windows for some reason…)

And just for good measure, check out DownThemAll – an amazing download manager for Firefox.

What tools do you use?

I will be updating the forum periodically – adding new howtos as often as i can. You are all more than welcome to add your own howtos as well, but please respect the open nature of the forum.

I hope that this forum will help you all.

I’m still trying to get my bloody jaw off the floor…

After several months of development, pixelock is now complete and live!

Pixelock is a cutting-edge password management system… that doesn’t store your passwords! Pixelock is a simple system built in Adobe Flex 3 whereby you can secure your online profiles by using pictures as your password. By doing so, you are greatly improving the quality of your passwords because we generate random numbers and characters according to where you click on an image; this means that there are no algorithms involved that can be broken.

A typical human password will look something like this: john74
A typical pixelock password will look something like this: xwCFumwDfvj7

Pixelock allows you to create passwords with such immense mathematic strength that nobody – but you – can ever break it. If you were to use 5 images in a password, the mathematical likelihood of someone guessing your click locations would be 14,693,280,768 to 1.

The site is also secured by a 256-bit encrypted SSL connection, so all your actions willl be safe from prying eyes.

If you are interested in using pixelock on your own site – or within your own company, drop me a mail at danny@pixelock.com. Any suggestions, comments or queries can be addressed to support@pixelock.com.