Flex Challenge Academic Tour is s series of lectures and workshops about RIA (Rich Internet Applications) which will take place in seven main academic centers in Poland including: Warsaw, Toruń, Lublin, Wrocław, Cracow, Lódź and Poznań. Tour is organized by Adobe and Janmedia. It will start on November 10th at Warsaw University of Technology. The main goal of those events is to make people more familiar with Adobe Flex and AIR technology.

At the end of the tour special contest will take place where you can win Apple products. I’m glad to announce that I was chosen to be a member of jury for this contest. We strongly encourage all students to take part in this.

Have fun!

Related links:
Flex Challenge Academic Tour
Akademia Pana Fleksa

Hello Guys! How many times while using Flash have you been dreaming about tool which could convert multiple bitmaps into Movie Clips or change their properties? We are happy to say that your dream just came true ;-) We prepared an extension for Flash (*.mxp file) which allows you to do these things pretty easily. By choosing options in this nice Flash panel you are able to:

- Change quality of multiple bitmaps in library (lossless / 0-100% JPEG)
- Allow smoothing for multiple bitmaps
- Convert multiple library items into Movie Clips
- Set Movie Clip registration point

Instructions:

1. Download Adobe Extension Manager, install it and click on AT Assets Panel.mxp file.

2. In Flash from the main menu choose: Window -> Other Panels -> AT Assets Panel

3. Open Library (Ctrl+L), mark as many objects as you want and click Convert to MC.
If you want to change bitmap properties e.g. image quality set right option and click Apply.

Simple and useful. In the future we are planning to expand this extension more. Enjoy! ;-)
Thanks to Tomek & Peter.

Related links:
AT Assets Panel -> Download
Adobe Extension Manager

Box2DFlashAS3 is an open source port of Erin Catto’s powerful C++ physics library Box2D. Performance of the engine is pretty good. Change examples with Left and Right arrow. I can especially recommend “Ragdols” and “Example”. Enjoy.

Related links:
Box2DFlashAS3
Box2D.org

Impressive demo of flash 3D engine which is developed for MMORPG game called Alternativa.

Related links:
Alternativa Game blog

There were many speculations about next 10th major release of Flash Player, called “Astro”, especially related to 3D. Some people had said about hardware support and/or API based on Papervision3D. At last at Adobe Max 2007 there were shown some of 3D features (rotation of the plain, interactive object) of next gen Flash Player. It seems not so powerful as many excepted but this is very good direction, Adobe implements 3D techniques into Flash Player. Other new capabilities are related to better support for text rendering e.g. layouts (multiple text columns), bidirectional languages and new technology called AIF enabling custom filters and graphics effects written in special language - Hydra.

Related links:
About Flash Player 10, hydra and AIF on draw.logic blog
Astro at MAX 2007 on Justin’s Flash Blog
Astro on Adobe Labs
Astro presentation on Adobe MAX 2007

On the 1st of October at Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago, new version of flash player for mobile devices - Flash Player Lite 3 was launched. It is based on Flash Player 8 desktop so it’s not huge leap compared to previous 2.x version. There is added support for FLV video format using both codecs Sorenson and On2 but without alpha channel. Now it can play streaming video from FMS but doesn’t support camera and recording. There were some performance aspects improved but it still lacks bitmaps, filters and focal gradients. Developer Edition will be available to download in November but you can submit an email to Adobe to get it earlier. There were also released Flash Lite 3 updates for Adobe Flash CS3 and Device Central CS3.

Related links:
Adobe Flash Player Lite
Adobe Launches Flash Lite 3
Flash Lite on ForumNokia
Gary Kovacs about Flash Lite 3

One more example of AIR application - AirPress 0.3 beta. It’s an interesting client for WordPress and much less popular - DotClear. You might wonder why do I need a desktop client for my blog? Problems with internet connection - have to work off-line sometimes. Is it just administration panel or something different? AirPress has only a part of WordPress’s panel functionality, what makes current version of AirPress rather something worth to check to satisfy your curiosity, rather than a useful application. One thing that seems to be an advantage is how quickly it is possible to publish multimedia files. You can just drag files to editor or record something from camera and make it all done in a seconds. Maybe it will be quite good solution for someone who has video or photo blog and just want to quickly share his “memories” with friends…

Related links:
AirPress
Adobe AIR

Everything what concerns Adobe AIR, formerly known as Apollo, is in beta but despite this amount of applications already done or announced using AIR amazingly increasing. So now it seems that AIR will compete successfully with Dekoh or WPF and at least not share sad end of it’s precursor Macromedia Central.
Recently I have found on Rayan Taylor’s blog an article about nice application for mixing sounds made in AIR and Flex. In DigiMix you can put some sounds loaded from your disc on different tracks, trim beginning or the end, add some effects and finally save your project or even compile one wave file on disc.DigiMix has some limitations eg number of loaded files and it accepts only 16bit 44,1kHz wave format, but this is beta, and what is essential - it works with wave files natively not supported by Flash. This application truly shows capabilities of Action Script 3 and AIR.
For those who know almost nothing about AIR this is a technology which allows you to develop cross platform desktop applications. To run the application, which has .air extension, first you need to download and install AIR runtime environment. For now AIR is accessible only for Windows and Macintosh. There is also beta update to Flash CS3 which allows to package and preview AIR. I think that final release will much more popularize this technology. At last, remember everything is in beta ;)

Related links:
List of AIR applications
Adobe AIR Showcase
Download Adobe AIR
DigiMix

Moses Gunesch is an author of a very popular animation system for Action Script 2 (The Fuse Kit) and has just posted on his blog some information about new project called Go. This is not Action Script 3 Fuse implementation, it is something completely new - light framework for creating your own animation tools. Go is a very extensible so it allows you to use “tweening, physics and 3D together”. Public beta very soon, for now you can become familiar with the whole idea.

Related links:
The Fuse Kit
Moses blog

On August 21th Adobe released beta version of a new Flash Player 9, codename “Moviestar”. That name is not a coincidence. Besides many things that give you probably 1 FPS more in your animations (and I’m sure 99% of people never notice any difference ;) new FP is able to display video in HD format and many new file formats like MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp etc. All this thanks to new H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs. Isn’t that great? ;)

For more information visit Aral Balkan blog.