w3blog

Ever wanted to convert a bitmap to vector shapes, at runtime, in Flash? Look no further. Let me introduce you to as3potrace, an ActionScript 3 library to trace bitmaps. As the name suggests, this is a port of the well known C library potrace by Peter Selinger. To be more exact, it is a AS3 [...]

So, i was thinking.. the Flash Player version number in the “HTML 5 Did Not Kill Flash” comic strip (258.1) … PLAUSIBLE? It is obvious that we deal with Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Starship USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, which places the scene in the Star Trek TNG series. According to Wikipedia, Star Trek TNG is [...]

Here’s a little demo of a Flex 4 component i wrote that displays a Flash IDE-like timeline for any SWF you load into it. The timeline data is reconstructed by as3swf (i discuss how that works in a previous blog post, SWF Timeline Reconstruction with as3swf). The timeline is not interactive in this demo, and [...]

I’ve been quite busy lately on both client and personal projects (can’t talk about the former, other than it being a big ass Flex 4 enterprise application i’ve been working on for the fine folks at Powerflasher; and it’s too early to talk about the latter.. stay tuned). In the last few weeks i silently [...]

In case you havent heard of it yet, as3swf is an ActionScript 3 library to parse and publish SWF files. It does that rather well by now, providing full roundtrip publishing, plus some neat extra features like shape export to AS3 Drawing API, AS3 GraphicsObjects, FXG, and Objective-C. Whenever i find some free time i’m [...]

Lately, Adobe representatives and Flash fan boys alike became more vocal than usual about the alleged openness of Flash. This is probably spurred by the proposed feature set of HTML5, as well as the decisions of a certain vendor to ban Flash from some of their products, both potentially being threats to Adobe and the [...]

Open Flash CS4, create new AS3 FLA, add as3swf.swc and paste this on frame 1: import com.codeazur.as3swf.SWF; var swf:SWF = new SWF(root.loaderInfo.bytes); trace(swf); Trace output: [SWF] Header: Version: 10 FileLength: 149405 FileLengthCompressed: 149405 FrameSize: (550,400) FrameRate: 24 FrameCount: 1 Tags: [69:FileAttributes] AS3: true, HasMetadata: false, UseDirectBlit: false, UseGPU: false, UseNetwork: false [09:SetBackgroundColor] Color: #FFFFFF [86:DefineSceneAndFrameLabelData] [...]

I need a custom installer for an AIR application i’m currently developing. That’s because my AIR app needs additional functionality that the AIR runtime doesn’t provide (specifically: detecting USB storage devices, act as a TCP socket server, talk to Last.fm scrobbler plugins). For that purpose i wrote a local RPC socket server gateway in C [...]

FZip has been around for some time now, and people seem to like it. However one feature has been asked for repeatedly: In addition to reading ZIP archive, people want to be able to create new (and modify existing) archives. So i finally sat down this weekend and added that. The code is not tested [...]

Just a quick FYI: FZip and AIRRemoteUpdater upgrades for AIR Beta 2 are now available for download. FZip now uses ByteArray.uncompress(CompressionAlgorithm.DEFLATE) instead of the now deprecated ByteArray.inflate(). I also tweaked FZip to throw an exception when a parsing error occurs and no event listener is registered for FZipErrorEvent.PARSE_ERROR events. AIRRemoteUpdater now gets the local descriptor [...]