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As you may know through my previous blog post, last year I created a feature request on the Adobe bugbase. It had some minor success. Only 87 people voted for now. I know this is due to the URL located on the Adobe bugbase website, the way that votes are displayed and pretty much because users need to subscribe before seeing the vote numbers and even be able to vote.

So I decided to buy the openplayer.net domain name and to create a website entirely dedicated to a petition to ask Adobe to open source Flash Player.

If you like the idea, please lets spread the information and sign the petition!

Today, I chosen to take the time to have a deeper look into Robotlegs micro-architecture, an ActionScript project initiated by Shaun Smith and Joel Hooks. From what I tested and as Robotlegs supports MVC, is inspired by PureMVC and that it is really well thought by its author, I'm convinced that it is a good project to look into during my spare time.

As you may know Robotlegs uses Dependency Injection. And it also uses Dependency Injection using metadata tags. In Robotlegs this is done with SwiftSuspenders a lightweight Dependency Injection library for ActionScript developed and maintained by Till Schneidereit. This means that when you want Robotlegs to automatically inject a dependency at runtime you just have to write something like :

 
public class MyClass
{
    [Inject]
    public var userProxy:UserProxy;
}
 

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As I promised on the PureMVC forums, I ported the Flex PureMVC EmployeeAdmin demo to Silverlight using PureMVC Standard for C#.

When I'll get some sufficient code review and Cliff has time to, I'm pretty sure that he'll add it to the PureMVC C# port for Silverlight as a demo.

This was my first real Silverlight application. I learned a lot from this work. I now have a better understanding of Silverlight, its pros and cons. As you may know, I'm specialized in Flex/Flash development, so you'll probably be interested in my opinion regarding Silverlight compared to Flex.

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I twitted this earlier in the afternoon. It seems that Adobe did not announce it for now, but some versions of the Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 can already be downloaded.

Links on the page from Adobe Labs related to Flash Player 10.1 are still pointing to Flash Player 10.1 beta 1 files at the moment. But I read a news on PCInpact.com (a French tech news website) which was untitled "Flash 10.1 Beta 2 est de sortie : NVIDIA sort de nouveaux pilotes" which means "Flash 10.1 Beta 2 is out : NVIDIA publish new drivers" in English language.

The news announce better performances, less bugs for the player, support of DLP projectors for 3D Vision and of course that new NVIDIA drivers seems to better handle Flash Player 10.1 now. Surprisingly, I found links in the news pointing to a new beta of the Flash Player 10.1. As Adobe did not announce it officially, I suppose that PCINpact had the links directly from NVIDIA.

So, while the official Flash Player 10.1 page on the Adobe Labs is not updated, you can download the new Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 version from :

• Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 for Windows plugin
• Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 for Windows ActiveX
• Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 for Mac
• Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 for Linux

Update 1 (12/15/2009): Tom Barclay (Flash Player Product Marketing at Adobe) told us in the
comments that those versions aren't final release and must not be used for testing.

Update 2 (12/16/2009): It seems that Nvidia was a bit premature on announcing those links
to their commercial partners and Adobe deactivated them. So, they don't work anymore, sorry.

Update 3 (12/18/2009): Official now, Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 final releases are available
on Adobe Labs, more infos from Tom Barclay on the Flash Platform blog (including debug releases). I reactivated the links above but you can preferably go to Adobe Labs now.

The Loadup library is a PureMVC utility intended to add support for Lazy Loading in PureMVC applications. It can also be used to load assets and report progress during loading.

I recently had to use the assetloader package of the PureMVC Loadup utility in a pure ActionScript project. When I finished to integrate it in my project, I realized that my application took an unwanted 120KB file size. After a little exploration, I found some direct references to mx.core.UIComponent or mx.controls.Image in the AssetOfTypeImage, AssetOfTypeSwf and AssetOfTypetext classes of the PureMVC Loadup utility.

As you may know, UIComponent is the base class for all Flex SDK components and is required when you compile a Flex project. As it requires a lot of dependencies and take something like 120KB, when file size is critical, a good choice is not to use the Flex SDK UI components in your project. Another side effect of using it is that it prevents to compile the project from the Flash IDE as Flash IDE currently can't compile most of the Flex SDK dependencies which is quite frustrating as PureMVC is intended to be fully Flash/Flex compatible.

When I reported this problem on the PureMVC forums some users asked for a solution, I promised to blog mine. So here it is.

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You probably not have missed the news. It was announced in the first keynote of the Adobe MAX 2009 that it would be possible to export applications for iPhone from Flash CS5.

What I missed first is that it would be possible to export Flash applications for iPhone from Flash Builder and even using some parts of the AIR SDK. You can find this written in the Flash applications for iPhone Developer FAQ.

If you miss the first announce on Flash for iPhone, here the main links:

• Adobe Labs - Adobe Flash Professional CS5- Applications for iPhone
• Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash - Adobe Developer Connection
• Flash Applications for iPhone Developer FAQ

In a first article I posted an example of a PureMVC multicore application for ActionScript 3 with Pipes and Modules using Flex SDK.

Some people here and in the PureMVC forums asked for examples of multicore apps done with Flash only (pure ActionScript projects without Flex SDK at least). This is why, I created a new version on my Flex app that uses Flash components instead of the Flex SDK to be able to compile it with a Flash IDE only.

If you compare the Flex and Flash app, you will see that the PureMVC parts are near the same in the two apps. This is the PureMVC magic. Only views converted from Flex to Flash need to be different, business logic, pipes and model stay the same.

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I'm not specifically what you can call an "open-source evangelist" nor a specialist of the problem, but as a user and Flash developer, I think it's now time to open-source Flash Player.

Adobe already have made great moves to open source their technologies. Just have a look at the official Adobe websites like opensource.adobe.com, www.openscreenproject.org, www.opensourcemediaframework.com They now have a good knowledge on developing open source softwares destinate to a community.

A lot of things are currently moving around Flash technology, like the W3C hardly looking for royalty-free, open source solutions for HTML5. Open video player initiative. Silverlight 3 becoming now mature on Windows, Mac, and soon Linux. Google buying On2 video solution (the same video codec still in use by Flash Player). And many other things that some of you even better know than me.

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Ok I didn't really found the love formula, but I recently have fun reading this so called Romantic Mathematics webpage which gives dozen of formulas to draw heart with mathematics only. Thanks to @codinghorror who let me discover this.

I know that it will not be a great programming challenge, but I couldn't resist to implement one of those formulas in ActionScript. It was funny to show the result to some of my coworkers last friday afternoon. One of them even asked me "And what is that intended for?" ... what a lack of romanticism!

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I recently posted on this blog a French printable translation of the Agile manifesto. With the same idea in mind, I wanted to create my own set of Printable Agile Planning Poker cards. So it's why I have taken some time to release one, all made in the Flash IDE.

The whole card set is published as an A3 format PDF (your printer will scale it to A4 format if needed). There's a page to print for face and another for back. You only need to print the back of the page if you want to better hide the number written on the face of the card. Remember that's important to hide each team member choice upon the card is returned not to influence the choice of any other team member.

If you first need to know or learn what Agile Planning Poker is, you can read the Planning Poker article on Wikipedia.

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