Category Archives: Uncategorized

May 25 2009

Flash CS4 update now available

Adobe Flash® CS4 Professional (10.0.2) addresses a number of performance issues. Some key fixes are:

  • Fixed a performance issues when dragging objects on stage, scrubbing the timeline, or entering symbol edit mode in large AS 2.0 and AS 3.0 files.
  • Fixed a performance issues when opening large files or files with many nested symbols.
  • Fixed a performance issues when working in the library such as scrolling, selecting items in the library, dragging item to stage, or editing symbol from library.

Bugs fixed in this release:

  • AS2 Doc Crashes CS4 when buttons not rendered correctly
  • Auto Format beaks the code if encounters ++ or — with an array inside if statement
  • Clicking through movie clip with large preview takes long to select in the Library in AS 3.0 file
  • Scrubbing and pressing Enter to play timeline is not smooth, slower in AS3 documents
  • W and H of instance incorrect after frame 2 if apply tween to instance with filter
  • 3D tools appear incorrectly to a child movie clip when applying skew and rotation to the parent 2d movie clip.
  • Changing W/H for nested 2d>3d movie clip from PI does not work. After scrubbing the hot text, it snaps back to the original size.
  • Dragging from Library to Stage is slow in some files in CS4
  • Selecting items in the library is slow in CS4
  • Scrolling the library (vertical scroll bar) is slow compared to CS3
  • In a FLA with lots of library items, double clicking a symbol “in the edit mode” hangs Flash on Mac.
  • Library contents explode CS4 memory (CS3 sits at 75M)
  • Performance issue with Stagecore (AS 3.0 fla) – scrubbing, moving, altering objects.
  • Object visibility is compromised when created inside empty groups in AS 3.0 fla files.
  • Double clicking symbol or symbol name in library hangs Flash; library contains a lot of items
  • Text with device font disappears when it is selectable
  • Component parameters don’t work for scenes greater than scene 1
  • Selecting frames with textfields is a lot slower if the Components Inspector panel is opened
  • Empty maskee incorrectly renders mask invisible rather than visible
  • Crash when opening a  fla that uses a font symbol whose name was identical to the Postscript name of the underlying font and the font is missing
  • Optimize a section within a shape leaves gaps in the shape
  • Optimize opening and closing FLA files, frame manipulation for FLAs with many frames
  • Win only: Crash on exit when the text field is in edit mode and clicking X button to quit without save
  • Compiler errors when opening “Air Settings” while adl still running.
  • (screens) timeline playhead can’t scrub and jitters when playing anything that spans frames
  • gotoAndPlay(“framelabel”) compiles differently in CS3 versus CS4
  • Scrubbing the timeline and selecting frames is much slower in CS4 than in CS3
  • Crash when creating a text object on stage when there are corrupted fonts
  • Graphic symbol looping setting changes when apply color effect to instance in PI
  • Files with lots of nested clips suffer from performance issue (file open) in Flash CS4
  • Edit in Place of 2d objects which has 3d movieclips nested inside is not functioning correctly.
  • Edit in place is slow for complex instances in FP10 documents
  • Breaking apart a nested movie clip erases instance name of child movie clip
  • Efficient calculation between keyframes so dragging is faster and generally makes people happier if spans are long and complex.
  • AS3 Components not compiling correctly when using the Component Definition dialog
  • Window Only: Flash crashes when double clicking a fla to open while a current fla is opened with text block selected
  • Can’t interact with Flash because modal dialog is up, but hidden behind the workspace when switching between applications
  • From crash reporter: crash on Mac when double click to enter symbol edit mode (when the black dotted rectangle is drawn)
  • Mac IDE flashes when right-clicking on Library after doing Test Movie
  • Performance is slow after double clicking movie clip to enter edit mode and exit
  • Setting an instance’s width and/or height to 1 makes W and H hot text unusable in the vertical PI.
  • Hot text in the Vertical PI for X, Y, W, H displays only 1 decimal point while edit field displays 2
  • Export image: Dimension values in Export dialog and Vertical PI do not match which is misleading to user.
  • Crash when selecting text field on stage with many fonts on user’s system.
  • Text PI is stuck and some controls on the PI are not drawn with certain fonts on user’s system
  • The JSAPI that allows users to publish FLA files without opening them was inadvertently removed when the Project Panel was deprecated.  fl.publishDocument( flaURI [, publishProfile] ) is added. 
  • “Export classes in frame” behavior is different in CS3 than in CS4
  • Drag and drop large nested symbol from library to stage hangs Flash
  • Dragging from Library to Stage slow on subsequent drag or after scrubbing the timeline
  • Scrubbing and pressing Enter to play timeline is not smooth, slower in AS3 documents
  • W and H of instance incorrect after frame 2 if apply tween to instance with filter
  • Large amounts of text nested in a symbol causes performance problems in non-AS3 documents
  • Playback in authoring is not smooth (playhead skips frames), cannot stop it when hitting enter, eventually hangs and takes long to respond (both AS 2.0 and AS 3.0)
  • Performance Creating Exported Symbol when the classpath contains lots of files and folder
  • Create ease, undo after first edit removes ease
  • Selecting and deselecting raw shape after convert to symbol spikes memory and/or crashes
  • FLA crash on open when fonts loaded
  • Mac only: User input resets to previous setting when attempting to change any value in Vertical PI input area
  • Accessing a Windows SWF after it has been moved or deleted crashes Flash
  • Crashing when re-opening FLA after canceling publish
  • Crash in test movie when running a file with video and filters
Mar 17 2008

Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0 Ground Up Tour comes to Bangalore, India

Coming next month to India is ActionScript Expert Colin Moock for an extensive 1 day training workshop of ActionScript 3.0.

This full day workshop will include

  • exposure to all major concepts of object programming
  • understanding of classes and objects
  • understanding of how to structure and write an ActionScript 3.0 Program
  • to the Flex Builder 2 development environment
  • pamphlet reviewing the days major concepts

This event is sponsored by Adobe and is completely free, but its best to register because it is a one day event so they might have a cutoff limit.

Date: 29th April 2008
Location: Bangalore
Website: http://www.adobeas3tour.com/

Feb 8 2008

Understanding The Architecture of a Rich Internet Application

This article i found on devnet. The same i am posting here.

Whether you are using Flex, Ajax, Silverlight, JavaFx, or some other RIA technology, the basic architecture is going to be pretty similar… In most cases you will typically have have a stateful client application and a separate services layer on the backend. It is important to understand this differentiation, and to understand that this plays a huge role in how you design and build your applications.
Architecture.jpg

RIA lends itself more to client-server development, rather than tradition web development where state is maintained on the server in application or session scope. The client thus knows about itself, and types of data it is requesting. It will request only the data it needs from the server, and no extra markup. This often leads to a cleaner services layer and less-complicated server requests, even in some cases a reduced overall load on the server.

It is also important to understand the sub-architectures within the overall architecture of the application. In the big picture, you have the client communicating with the server through a services layer. Whether you are using AMF remoting, XML over HTTP, JSON, or SOAP does not necessarily matter. There are pros and cons to each, which I may discuss at length in the future, but for now I’m focusing on the architecture itself.

Each component of the larger architecture has an architecture of its own. You may hear people discussing the use of MVC in their applications, but the interpretation of MVC depends on who is doing the talking.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a software architectural pattern where an application is broken into separate layers for the data model, the user interface (view), and the business logic. The logic, model, and views are decoupled, and communicate through an intermediary controller. This pattern enables both abstraction of logic, and reuse of code/components throughout the application. You can read more about MVC here.

In traditional web development, there was basically a singular MVC. Where the page requests were handled by a controller, which delegates how a page is processed and how the how the data is inserted into the view (or how data is pushed into the model).

In the RIA world, you really have two layers of MVC. There is an MVC inside of the client application itself, and an MVC in the backend services as well. Not every application uses a formal MVC or a full blown framework for handling the client and services, but each side typically has at least a rudimentary MVC-type of functionality.

The MVC on the client manages the interaction between you and the user interface. You invoke commands, update views, load data, etc… The client MVC maintains the state of the application, handles all requests to the server for data, and controls how the data is presented in the view.

The MVC on the server handles requests from the client. The services-layer MVC processes the requests from the client application, and delegates actions on the server. This could be saving data in a database, updating the file system, some kind of analytical processing, or returning chunks of data to the server. The big differentiation here is that there is no user interface. Instead of a user interface, the view would be the format of the data the is being returned to the client application. In this case the view would determine the result format (JSON, XML, etc…). Another benefit of a differentiated service layer is that you can already have the infrastructure built to create a public API on top of you services logic, if you have the need (or desire) to maintain one.

There is no definitive choice of technology for RIA. You can do lots of cool things with lots of different technologies. Back ends can be written in Java, ColdFusion, PHP, Rails, .NET, etc… On the client side, there are established MVC frameworks for Flex/Actionscript and AJAX, some emerging ones for Silverlight, and adapted Java frameworks for JavaFX. The determination of both the back-end and the front-end should be determined by the needs and capabilities of your application, and also your existing infrastructure.