Today's Bit of Flash Player Trivia

So, here’s something I’ve never thought about until stumbling across this entry in Lee Brimelow’s blog: Flash Player is written in C++ and as such…can be edited in Visual Studio!

“For those that don’t know Tinic Uro, he is one of the masterminds behind the Flash Player. His blog is a must-read for anyone developing in Flash as it is chock-full of inside information directly from the Flash team. Tinic actually fixed a Flash Player bug live on stage. He started out in Visual Studio and showed the actual C++ source code for Flash Player 10. This was very cool to all the developers in the audience. He then proceeded to show Flash Player 10 running on FreeBSD and also a 64-bit version running on Linux. I can’t say anything more on this so please don’t ask when they will be released :). After his session was done he took questions from the audience for a little while.”

Flash Player Downloads, Installs, and Number Crunching

I’m always checking the Adobe Flash Player version penetration table. Emmy Huang, one of the product managers for Flash Player, posted this interesting article on her blog on how Adobe reaches those numbers and what they mean.

“We have an internal dashboard application to track the general ‘health’ of Flash Player downloads and installs, and it can chart the data daily, weekly, monthly, etc. It uses XML feeds of our server log data from Akamai, our current CDN. The dashboard is useful in helping us 1) to understand our traffic so we can try to optimize things like install success rate, and catch problems with our installers or CDN delivery in a matter of days, and 2) get a sense of where our penetration might be in the penetration study in the next wave. The penetration study is only run once a quarter, and it’s hard to wait three months to know where we’re at. “

Slow int, slower uint

I was just reading a weird bit of ActionScript 3 trivia at Grant Skinner’s blog: apparently both ints and units are slow in operations such as for loops. And that uints are particularly slow. I won’t pretend to fully grasp all of the entry and the article on kuwamoto.org that inspired it, but I definitely noticed an improvement when I changed from uint to int in a script I was working on.

“… I had believed that as in other languages, there were large performance benefits to using ints and uints appropriately in AS3. Turns out that isn't the case…I did a simple test that ran through 16777215 iterations of a for loop, using int, Number, and uint types as the iterator variable. It did 50 passes, and calculated an average time per pass. This should be ideal conditions for using ints and uints. The results were really interesting:

int: 24-26ms

Number: 31-36ms

uint: 105-225ms

“So as Sho said, int is not much faster than Number, but it probably still makes sense for use as an iterator and in other obvious cases. But uint is ridiculously slow, and very erratic!”

*

Adobe sort of seems to say this, too: “The int class lets you work with the data type representing a 32-bit signed integer….The int data type is useful for loop counters and other situations where a floating point number is not needed, and is similar to the int data type in Java and C++. “

Adobe says of uint: “The uint class provides methods for working with a data type representing a 32-bit unsigned integer. Because an unsigned integer can only be positive, its maximum value is twice that of the int class.”

JDisk Report

Cool!

“JDisk Report enables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders. The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and details tables.”

SWFAddress - Deep linking for Flash and Ajax

SWFAddress seems like an extremely useful utility for any Flash applications/presentations that include navigation.

“SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It's a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state.”

I thought this linking structure looked familiar – it looks like Adobe’s Acrobat.com uses SWFAddress for their links! For example:

https://www.acrobat.com/#/bw/BuzzwordBegin

Performing a View > Source of the above confirms this theory.

More:

“SWFAddress enables a number of important capabilities which are missing in today's rich web technologies including:

• Bookmarking in a browser or social website
• Sending links via email or instant messenger
• Finding specific content with the major search engines
• Utilizing browser history and reload buttons”

*

The mindnoise.blog has a nice article on using SWFAddress to enable the browser’s Back button.

Parchment and the Z-Machine

If you’re old enough to remember Zork, or perhaps have just heard of this ancient ancestor of today’s gaming scene, this site might be amusing to you:
http://parchment.toolness.com
The brilliant fellow over at toolness.com has created an interface called Parchment that allows you to relive old text-based adventure games.
“A few weeks ago, I started a small project to create a user interface for something called a Z-Machine: a virtual machine created by Infocom in the late 1970’s to run their text adventure games—the most famous among them being Zork, which is apparently what the ‘Z’ in Z-Machine stands for. These games, as their name suggests, are completely text-based; Infocom’s 1984 masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance for instance, opens with this passage: You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't. It is pitch black.”
He even recently made modifications to make sure it runs on the iPhone!

AS3 Printing Basics?

I keep meaning to try printing in Flash. This snippet at snipplr seems like just the ticket.

Flash - Shared Objects

I’ve been learning about Shared Objects in Flash. Adobe offers this nice definition:
“The SharedObject class is used to read and store limited amounts of data on a user's computer or on a server. Shared objects offer real-time data sharing between multiple client SWF files and objects that are persistent on the local computer or remote server. Local shared objects are similar to browser cookies and remote shared objects are similar to real-time data transfer devices. To use remote shared objects, you need Adobe Flash Media Server.”
So, local shared objects are like cookies. Easy and useful. However, it’s a bummer that remote shared objects require Flash Media Server!
*
AdrianParr.com has a nice reference on the physical location of (Shared Object) SOL files for both Flash and AIR.

Outdoor Cinema Systems

Forget the water feature! This might be more fun.
“Welcome to Open Air Cinema, the world's largest outdoor cinema equipment supplier and event producer. We sell the highest quality inflatable movie screens and complete outdoor cinema systems engineered for private, commercial, and government use. We also specialize in producing large and small open air cinema events throughout the USA.”

Outdoor Cinema Systems

Forget the water feature! This might be more fun.

“Welcome to Open Air Cinema, the world's largest outdoor cinema equipment supplier and event producer. We sell the highest quality inflatable movie screens and complete outdoor cinema systems engineered for private, commercial, and government use. We also specialize in producing large and small open air cinema events throughout the USA.”

Parchment and the Z-Machine

If you’re old enough to remember Zork, or perhaps have just heard of this ancient ancestor of today’s gaming scene, this site might be amusing to you:

http://parchment.toolness.com

The brilliant fellow over at toolness.com has created an interface called Parchment that allows you to relive old text-based adventure games.

“A few weeks ago, I started a small project to create a user interface for something called a Z-Machine: a virtual machine created by Infocom in the late 1970’s to run their text adventure games—the most famous among them being Zork, which is apparently what the ‘Z’ in Z-Machine stands for. These games, as their name suggests, are completely text-based; Infocom’s 1984 masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance for instance, opens with this passage: You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't. It is pitch black.”

He even recently made modifications to make sure it runs on the iPhone!

Having problems a Word 2007 update with Vista?

I noticed this article in the “Microsoft Inside Office Newsletter.” I haven’t decided if I want to install Word 2007 on my Vista machine, but I probably will…and then, I’ll want this to find this again. J

Having problems a Word 2007 update with Vista?
If you have installed an automatic update for Word 2007 on a Windows Vista-based computer and are having issues, learn how to get a quick resolution.

Top Emailers Don't Lead on Best Practices

I thought this was interesting. I wonder if those who are more successful feel less pressure to create successful campaigns?

Top Emailers Don't Lead on Best Practices
If you're looking to top brands for email leadership and exemplification of best practices, you might be out of luck. A Return Path survey of 61 top brand marketers found many are missing the mark:

• 60% did not send any welcome message.
• 33% sent a message within 24 hours.
• 7% sent a message two days to three weeks later.
• 30% sent no mail in the first 30 days after opt-in.
• 70% asked for detailed information at opt-in.
• 75% of those marketers never used the information.

BugZap Game in the Flash IDE Panel

I thought this was amusing – Microsoft isn’t the only software (remember the hidden flight simulator in Excel?) that provides embedded game capability!

http://www.adrianparr.com/?p=70

Introducing Flash Player 10 beta

A cool article at the Adobe Developer Center! BH is going to be particularly intrigued, I think, by the 3D section.

Installing Adobe Air 1.1 Update for Flash CS3 Professional

Installing Adobe Air 1.1 Update for Flash CS3 Professional

Aurora Concept Video

I thought this was really interesting. Adaptive Path has created a “concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web” for Mozilla Labs.

http://adaptivepath.com/aurora/

“Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.”

BeFunky

BeFunky has several “funky” tools to create avatars.

For work: It’s also a very fast/easy way to create sketch effects!

Of course, it doesn’t actually focus on flattering characteristics…. J

MS Paint Contest 90 Visions of Future in MS Paint are Terrifying, Insane

Pretty funny/poignant! At Gizmodo.com.

SyntaxHighlighter

I keep meaning to start using this for posting online code examples. Morten Lyhr even has an example of modifying a Blogger template.

“SyntaxHighlighter is here to help a developer/coder to post code snippets online with ease and have it look pretty. It's 100% Java Script based and it doesn't care what you have on your server.”

Using Multiple JavaScript Onload Functions

An interesting article. I’m particularly intrigued by the “The addLoadEvent Function” discussed about halfway down the page.

"The way this works is relatively simple: if window.onload has not already been assigned a function, the function passed to addLoadEvent is simply assigned to window.onload. If window.onload has already been set, a brand new function is created which first calls the original onload handler, then calls the new handler afterwards."

Rounded Corners in CSS

There might be reasons not to do this (I haven’t really read the pros and cons), but it’s a neat idea. This fellow has come up with a method to create rounded corners entirely from CSS – no images needed!