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I just ran across this method of how to be able to apply "normal" effects like transparency to dynamic text in flash 9. Of course using flash 10 this isn't an issue but for those of us that have to use flash 9 for some cases this really is a life saver.

http://www.rabidgadfly.com/index.php/2008/10/14/making-alpha-work-on-as3-dynamic-text-fields/

The meat of it is essentially setting the BlendMode of the textField to something other than NORMAL.

A little late on this post but hey.. better late than never!

So I was asked this year to speak at Max! I was pretty excited. The process to get ready for speaking felt much like a college course from getting outlines together, turning in rough drafts, etc. All in all it went well and because of that I think it improved the quality of the presentation.. (go figure :) )

I was asked to speak on.. ready for this? "User-Generated Content and Social Media APIs"

Just like everyone else on tech side of the web I too was waiting the availability of chrome, Googles new browser. I did install it and it worked wonderfully like they had touted. From the minimalistic approach to design to the new way tabs are handled in their own process.. it was great. I was pretty excited about it and planned to use it on my mac and linux boxes when it came available.

I just stumbled across these today.. and after reading over them find them quite insightful.. I thought I'd post them here. You can also find them on his blog here: http://bp.bobparsons.com/gdshop/bp/gear.asp?ci=8283

1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone.
I believe that not much happens of any significance when we're in our comfort zone. I hear people say, "But I'm concerned about security." My response to that is simple: "Security is for cadavers."

2. Never give up.

Just recently I have been playing with Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS and have really started liking it. Yes I have been an openSuse guy but as of late the tiny footprint and package manager have really intrigued me. So I stated to play on it.. and of course installed FMS2 and FMS3. So I thought I'd put yet another place on the web where the search bots would find it. Now.. to the meat!

Here are a few "how-to's" for running FMS2 and FMS3 on Ubuntu.. and I can verify they work:

FMS3

http://www.bluetwanger.de/blog/2008/02/11/flash-media-server-3-on-ubuntu...

This is great news! Not only does it have a lot of big players involved.. but it also loosens things up for using swfs and flvs in a way previous prohibited.. very good for the industry and great to see Adobe making yet another good gesture to open source..( see flex opensource)

Read from the links below for the full scoop!

http://www.adobe.com/go/openscreenproject
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

I have had a lot of people asking for the code to my port tester located on flashcomguru.com.. well I have decided to post it here. It's a zip that contains a fla and I plan to port it to AS3 and an external AS2 file as well.. This is just an old pet project and so I haven't updated it for a bit.

Click here to download as2 fla.

*UPDATE

For the past few days I have been trying to find out how to use the FMS http admin call broadcastMsg. In the Adobe docs it states:

Command: broadcastMsg
Required Arguments: scope, method

Optional Arguments: arg0, arg1, arg2 ...

Sample URL: /admin/broadcastMsg?scope="App:myApp"&method="myMethod"&arg0="foo"&arg1="bar"

Well that's all fine and dandy.. but there is no other documentation. Working with a friend of mine, Fernando Flórez, we were able to get it working.. more him than me.. :-)

So the secret? Well I kept trying something like so:

I just spent some time researching the best way to do a batch convert of flv files to another type. After searching I ended up writing this bash script.

#!/bin/sh
for f in *.flv;
do
echo "Processing $f"
ffmpeg -i "$f" -target ntsc-dvd "${f%.flv}.mpg"
done

This converts all files with extension flv to a ntsc dvd format with file extension mpg. You can tweak it for your needs.

Happy flashing!

With the huge performance gains on windows and linux for FMS3 we see a lot of other new features that have shown up for us developers to use. With that said.. FMS 3 is now available for purchase/use.

The Adobe team worked really hard on this release and it shows.. it's a great product.

Check it out.